Its dust jacket declares Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Measuring the World to be “this season’s The Name of the Rose“. I find a closer affinity between the German novel (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Kehlmann’s Measuring the World are both historical-ish fiction, both containing adventure, both written by Europeans about Europeans, to be sure. But The Name of the Rose is at base a murder mystery; Kehlmann only toys with conspiratorial intrigue in a short passage of his book. Like Jonathan Strange, Measuring the World is a novel using the trappings of revealed esoteric knowledge (magic to Clarke, science to Kehlmann) as reader-bait: the deeper purpose of both novels is to consider how the search for knowledge reflects and affects the quality of the relationships we have with one another.

Lowly, classless and forced to traffic with the world for his livelihood, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss considers humanity to be a burden and burdens others with his unrepressed id. His quest to understand the universe eschews direct observation as much as possible, retreating to an intellectual consideration of mathematics. Baron Alexander von Humboldt has all the material resource a man could wish for and uses it to satisfy his lust for empirical exploration of the world, making an encyclopedic recording of the particular characteristics his of biological and geographical specimens as he explores South America. Von Humboldt’s expeditions are put in heroic terms by trailing journalists but characterized by privation and suffering, suffering von Humboldt unwittingly or uncaringly sloughs off onto others.

Fire illuminates the dark but also burns; Gauss and von Humboldt pursue their versions of truth with a purity of vision that limits the range of their focus; they are blind to the consequences of their actions for others. As Clarke does in Jonathan Strange, Kehlmann in Measuring the World refuses to dilute the essence of his characters to make them more palatable, more digestible, more nice. Is the pursuit of knowledge and progress is above, beyond, fiercer than nice? In turn, neither of the two main characters is treated nicely by the politicians who seek to exploit them or by the universe itself which in its own progress shunts their discoveries in the past and reduces them to the status of footnote in the waning years of their lives.

Kehlmann’s prose trusts the intellect of the reader enough to suggest and to hint at the context of characters’ words and actions without bald declaration; what’s unstated between the written lines is important to attend to, and this makes for a longer reading of the short 259-page novel than you might expect. Take the time to pay attention and you’ll be rewarded. Measuring the World” has my strong recommendation.

I love the tinkering spirit of the internet. Dissatisfied with gaps in software capabilities, or dismayed by the extravagant costs of corporate software, self-regulating groups write and improve their own programs and make them available to the world for free, for the joy of it. Open source programmers are anti-authoritarian populists of our age, demolishing significant cost barriers to creative expression. If you can afford a computer (and really now, they cost far less than a television set these days), you can accomplish just about anything using free software; the only limitation is your mind.

I have two quick recommendations for you today: to extract zip, rar and other compressed files (or to zip them back up again), try Quick Zip. While WinZip has established dominance in compression and extraction due to its heavy advertising, it’ll run you $30. Quick Zip manages to accomplish the same tasks with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, at no cost. Quick Zip, although not strictly open source, is free.

We all have used “unzip” programs; graphics programs may be a bit more unfamiliar to you. Raster graphics programs like PaintShopPro and Photoshop and Windows Paint work by putting together individual pixels to create what can be very pretty pictures. Unfortunately, if you try to enlarge them you’ll get a blocky looking, jagged mess as those individual pixels just get bigger. Vector graphics programs create pictures as mathematical expressions of lines, curves, color gradients and so on, mathematical expressions that are independent of scale. With a vector graphics program you can create a two-inch image, enlarge it, and stick it on a sixty-foot-wide billboard without any loss of quality. Another advantage: because every element of a vector image is a mathematical expression, every element can be transformed with precision.

If you want to go with the leading corporate vector graphics software, Adobe Illustrator, get ready to shell out as much as $300. Yowch! Try Inkscape instead: it’s an open source vector graphics program with most of the features of Illustrator and none of the price. While it’s powerful, the vector graphics approach isn’t quite as intuitive as using a paintbrush in Photoshop, so if you want to give it a try be sure to supplement your experimentation with the also-free manual and spiffy video tutorials by heathenx.

By the way, as with all programs downloaded off the internet, you’ve got to be sure that these are legit programs, not containing any spyware. You could just take my word for it, but fortunately you can do better: trust CNET, which links to software downloads only after they first verify that the software is spyware-free. Download through links you find at CNET and you’ll be all right. Free downloads of both Quick Zip and Inkscape area available there.

Last night, I was on the move, and didn’t have the time to stop for a full dinner, so I dropped in on a Whole Foods store in the hopes of finding something both satisfying and nourishing. I picked up a Sambazon Acai, blueberry and pomegranate juice blend (also with agave, apple, grape and acerola juice) that was quite satisfying.

I also picked up an Organic Green SuperFood energy bar, from Amazing Grass, which was not. Was not amazing. Was not really organic. Was not superfood. It was green, in the worst sense - like the sense of the color that some bodily fluid left somewhere to fester for a month might be green.

This bar managed to be unsatisfyingly crunchy in some places and slimy in other places. Parts of it tasted like bad chocolate. Parts of it were bland. Other parts tasted like fruit that’s been sitting out for too long.

The promise of this energy bar is that it’s organic, but it contains pineapple, cane sugar, green tea, cocoa butter, chocolate, “natural vanilla flavor”, and raspberries that were not grown organically. This labeling is all legal, but it’s still nonsense. If a single crop is raised only partly organically, it can’t be labeled as “organic”, but a food made from many crops can be labeled as “organic” if only some of those crops are organic, see.

The Amazing Grass company promised that this energy bar would “satisfy your hunger and deliver nutrients to your body the way that Mother Nature intended”. If Mother Nature intended me to eat Organic Green SuperFood energy bars, 1) She would have made them growing on trees; and 2) She would have made them taste and feel less disgusting in the human mouth.

Oh, but it’s “gluten free”. Apparently, Mother Nature didn’t intend anyone to eat gluten, which is why, uh, it’s found in wheat grain. The aliens from Alpha Centauri must have transplanted wheat here on Earth when Mother Nature wasn’t looking. Damn GMO aliens!

I have enjoyed Facebook in the past because of the way that it enables me to keep an eye on what friends and associates are doing even when I’m not in the same place they are. Lately, however, the people I know who are on Facebook have begun to clutter their updates with reports that have nothing to do with their actual lives. I see small, undecipherable portions of conversations they’re having with other people on Twitter. I also see a lot of updates on how people are coming along with simple little games referred to as Facebook Apps.

Yesterday, someone introduced me to one of these apps I hadn’t heard about before. It’s called Farm Town.

The idea of Farm Town is to build a virtual farm. You plant seeds, and then you watch the seeds grow into crops then harvest the crops and sell them and plant seeds again.

What happens on the screen looks like a farm, a little bit, in a cartoon version. But everything’s in neat little rows, with no weeds, and no insects, and the crops grow in uniform, predictable ways. It’s like a child’s painting of a farm.

The farmwork is child’s play too. To plow a field, you just click a patch of grass. To plant seeds, you just click again. Harvesting and selling the crops at market takes just a few more clicks. Potatoes take 2 days from planting to be harvested. Grapes fully mature in just a few hours. No problems, no worries. No real farm.

Easy come, easy go. I don’t think I’ll be making a return visit to Farm Town. I’d much rather hear about someone’s wilting porch geranium than waste my time looking at the pretty green pixels of a app acre.

At intervals of about a year, I’ve made it an inadvertant habit to return to fiction by Charles De Lint, drawn by the idea of what the author is trying to do and repulsed by his execution. His novels Moonheart and Someplace to Be Flying start from the attractive notion that beneath, behind, orthogonal to or six inches in the fifth dimension from modern reality lurks some ancient and powerful parallel reality, one governed by bonds of feeling and connection rather than by strictures of law, resource exploitation and electric technology. What if the first, unrecognized world came slicing through the second world we take for granted with a sharpness that really cuts flesh, casting a darkness in visible shadow and shining a light that gives everything we’ve seen before a new hue?

Ever since I read A Wrinkle in Time as a boy I’ve had a soft spot for novels in which the face of reality is torn aside, only to reveal… well, something interesting and thought-provoking. Something like Philip Pullman’s varied iterations of Earth, or John Twelve Hawks’ pervasive surveillance. Not the shallow characters of Moonheart, who are differentiated by “Nom de Tout” or their “Jesus H. Christ!” and not much else. Not the utterly banal and adolescent revelation in Someplace to Be Flying that each and every ramshackle, countercultural character has a special and magic place of destiny in the universe. Not the foreshadowing with a hammer in both books, with characters “somehow just knowing” “it was as if” it were “quiet… too quiet!”

These features of Charles De Lint’s books are repulsive to me, but I’ve been pulled back to his books nonetheless because beneath that I’ve gotten hints of a richer vein of mythology that might be lying beneath the clumsy characterization. I’m also just plain curious about the fate of people (okay, fictional people) who get caught in the intersection of worlds.

And so I picked up De Lint’s short novel The Wild Wood, and this time I really enjoyed myself. Rather than being flashy and showy, the book is spare, and not just in its mere 200 pages. This book really just has one character, the artist Eithnie, with others only orbiting around her at a distance. De Lint has the courage here to place her in the wilderness, apart from other people physically and emotionally. After failing in her work, Eithnie is trying to reinvigorate her painting and in the process re-examining her own past and place in the world. When it becomes apparent (yep) that her place in the world and her source of artistic inspiration are not what she thought they might be, her main task is not to figure out what the implications are for the mana-goat-sucker-ankh-wearing-Manitou-chakra-love-force and the Fate of the Universe. Really, she has to figure out what this change means for herself. She has to figure out how this reorienting change in the world fits in with her past, with her idea of herself, and with her choices about what to do.

De Lint’s fantasy novel succeeds not because of its magical elements, veering into sappy self-referential “we create the world through our art” conception of Faerie, but in spite of it. The main character in The Wild Wood really isn’t the special savior of the universe, although at times she fancies herself to be. She is alone, in silence, reaching for others, but more than that reaching for a place in the world as a creator. When De Lint allows her to be alone, when Eithnie plucks up the courage to enter a place of silence, The Wild Wood takes on a glow.

It is not a writerly book, with the longing sighs or affected folskyisms of Garrison Keillor. It isn’t a book that makes the reader want to be A Writer, but rather, a book that makes the reader glad to have read. It isn’t a significant book, but it isn’t insignificant either. It isn’t difficult to read, but it is difficult to put down.

If you’re looking for a book that you can actually enjoy reading, pick up a copy of The Graveyard Book, a longer work by Neil Gaiman, the author of Coraline. Neither one of these books is really for children, by the way, at least not young children, though they’ve won awards for children’s literature. They have some really creepy elements in them, so that I wouldn’t recommend them for kids less mature than an emotionally sturdy eleven year-old.

On the other hand, these books also present psychological dangers to stuffy-minded adults.

tday i wenft ti te apple stre for tje forst tim adn trid tge iphone

altho i culd not read web pagws on it n it tok me 20 min to type tgis rticle on te tinny kybord it hsd apps n gamws

not a pkace fr wrds

We at Irregular Times are not at all opposed to criticism of President Barack Obama. We not only support criticism of Obama, we engage in it ourselves. We believe that the more power people exercise, the more scrutiny they deserve.

However we also believe that people ought to be discriminating in the criticism they pursue. We support intelligent, principled criticism of Barack Obama, just as we did with George W. Bush. On the other hand, as was our practice with Bush, we oppose ignorant criticism of Obama that is motivated by personal political opposition rather than high ideals.

Many of President Obama’s opponents on the Right have become fond of characterizing him as a Communist. In a literal sense, it’s quite clear that Obama is no Communist. There has never been any evidence that Obama ever was enrolled in any version of the Communist Party. Obama never has even registered as a Socialist of any kind. He’s a Democrat.

Of course, Obama’s right wing critics usually don’t mean to imply that Obama is literally a member of the Communist Party, although they would probably love to find such information. What they accuse Obama of is being a Communist in deed, if not a Communist in name. They say that Obama’s policies would bring about a Communist state, if they were not opposed by the Republican Party.

What are these supposed Communist policies, though? An economic stimulus package in the middle of a big recession? Opposition to a permanent repeal of all taxes on inheritance from millionaires and billionaires? Health care reform?

There are many people now involved in politics who did not come of age during the Cold War. For them especially, it is important to put statements about Barack Obama’s purported Communism into historical context.

I suggest to people who are tempted by these arguments that they read the book Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It’s a well-written account of the life of Stalin before the Bolshevik Revolution that created the Soviet Union. Read this book, and then read Obama’s early autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Compare the two.

Criticize Barack Obama’s policies, if you feel called to do so, but understand the terms that you use when you do. Obama is no Josef Stalin, and he’s no Communist.

When I walked into Trader Joe’s last week, I found that I could not resist the offer of cheap wine. They were selling bottles of 2007 Charles Shaw merlot for just $2.99. I was too curious not to bring a bottle home with me.

A couple nights ago, I opened the bottle, let it sit for an hour, and gave it a try. I couldn’t swallow more than a sip. It was practically vinegar.

I couldn’t bring myself to pour the wine down the drain, though. I kept it on the counter, open, for the next couple of days, with the idea that I might use the wine in a recipe with something meaty.

An occasion to cook with the bad wine didn’t come up, though, and so, this afternoon, I prepared to dump the merlot. I took another sip first, just to check with myself that the wine was as bad as I remembered. It wasn’t.

After two days of airing, the Charles Shaw merlot mellows considerably. It’s still not the best merlot in this condition, but it’s perfectly acceptable as a table wine. My recommendation is to buy the Charles Shaw merlot. Save a few dollars, but be patient. Uncork it. Wait. Then enjoy.

I picked up a carton of organic orange juice from a Trader Joe’s grocery store yesterday. I wanted to get organic juice because I know how destructive non-organic agriculture can be.

There were two kinds of organic orange juice available. One had no pulp, which didn’t seem very healthy, given that the pulp in orange juice provides dietary fiber. So, I picked the alternative: Trader Joe’s organic orange juice “calcium added”.

When I opened up the juice back at home and had a glass, I was disappointed to discover that the calcium added juice didn’t have pulp either. My assumption that it would, because it wasn’t marked “no pulp”, was not well founded.

I started to consider more about how that carton of juice was marked. It was called organic, but the label said that calcium was added. Is that an organic practice, to add calcium to orange juice?

Looking on the label, I read the following ingredients: “Organic orange juice, Tricalcium phosphate”. Hold on. Stop the breakfast. The juice is marked organic, but the tricalcium phosphate isn’t marked organic. So, is the Trader Joe’s orange juice really organic?

Organic food is supposed to be free of synthetic (human created) chemical treatments. Tricalcium phosphate sounds like a synthetic chemical, but it isn’t necessarily. Tricalcium phosphate occurs in nature. It’s found in rocks in places like Morocco, and it’s also obtained from the bones of animals like cows and pigs.

I can’t find any information about where exactly the tricalcium phosphate in Trader Joe’s orange juice comes from, but if it comes from animal bones, that means that my juice wouldn’t be vegetarian, or at least not vegan. It’s not marked as organic tricalcium phosphate, and so I want to know whether the Trader Joe’s tricalcium phosphate comes from cows or pigs that were not organically reared. If that were to be the case, that orange juice would definitely not be organic.

However, if the tricalcium phosphate Trader Joe’s used came from the ground, well, I can’t find any reason to conclude that the mineral disqualifies the juice as organic, strictly speaking. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it would truly be beneficial for the health of those who drink it. Arsenic occurs as naturally as tricalcium phosphate, after all, and arsenic is not usually thought of as a health food.

I’ve got a little bone to pick with Trader Joe’s in terms of its labeling, though, saying that the orange juice has “calcium added”. It’s true that the calcium triphosphate has calcium in it, but it has other elements too: Oxygen and phosphorus. You don’t see the label reading “phosphorus added”, or “oxygen added”, but calcium triphosphate has more oxygen atoms in it that it has calcium atoms.

There’s a reason that Trader Joe’s just didn’t come right out and put “Tricalcium phosphate added” on the front of the orange juice package. They know tricalcium phosphate doesn’t sound like it fits with the ideal of organic food as easily as simple calcium does. It seems to be playing around the edges of what’s allowable within the definition of organic food.

Aesthetically, the Trader Joe’s organic orange juice with calcium added tastes like, well, like it has calcium added… At least, it tastes like it has something funny added to it. I can’t honestly say that I know what calcium - tricalcium phosphate - really tastes like. What I can say is that the orange juice tastes not quite right, and that’s the best reason of all for me to decide against buying any more in the future.

That seems to be the implicit conclusion of Joseph Tartakovsky, who writes an essay in today’s New York Times giving a belly-slam to people who drop puns… unless they are members of British upper-class society. Tartakovsky drops hoity Brit names like an Anglophile on speed in mumsy’s drawing room: P.G. Wodehouse, Countess Margot Asquith, Archbishop Richard Whately, Andrew Lang, Charles Lamb, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke. They’re all dandies according to Tartakovsky, not like your everyday punners, because they aren’t so horribly obvious. The names Tartakovsky conspicuously drops certainly aren’t obvious to most American readers outside the prep-school set (I sure had to look some of them up). I think this may be Tartakovsky’s point.

Tartakovsky’s demand for semi-obscure references, whether it comes to his evaluation of puns or his namedropping, simultaneously misses and (inadvertently) nails the social essence of humor. The point of humor is not to reflect a certain Anglophilic sophistication in literature and society; the point is to communicate in a way that one’s friends, enemies and other associates find amusing. Tartakovsky may consider puns to be boring and obvious, and that’s probably a function of his fine upbringing and education. There are many people who find puns to be amusing, and if the people they know feel the same, then it doesn’t matter how much Tartakovsky fumes. You might even say that punning is an exercise in establishing and reinforcing social bonds between like-minded people of the sort Tartakovsky might label “middle-brow.” All varieties of joke-telling do this, from scatology through Jeeves and Wooster to Dorothy Parker’s vicious circle. Tartakovsky’s obscure Brit-lit namedropping is no different, undertaken as much to identify the author’s idealized social set as to inform. The essay is meant to wink knowingly at those who are to be included and to shut the door on everyone else. An inverse image of Sarah Palin rejecting prayer partners, Joseph Tartakovsky is proudly but simply too good for us. It’s what I have come to expect from the high-society New York Times.

I’m sitting in front of a bottle of Sprite soda that makes a promise, or at least it appears to.

100% Natural Flavors, it says.

I look to the short list of ingredients: Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, natural flavors, sodium citrate, sodium benzoate (to protect taste) Which of those are natural flavors?

I don’t know what the sodium citrate does. It doesn’t sound natural, but it might be, or it might not be a flavor at all. Carbonated water doesn’t have a flavor, so I suppose it doesn’t count as unfairly natural that there’s carbonation in the water.

Then there are “natural flavors”. Sprite claims it’s got natural flavors, but then it doesn’t say what they are. If they’re secret, how do I know that they’re really natural? Furthermore, how do I know that they’re a healthy sort of natural? Maybe those natural flavors are extract of poison ivy, dog poo and bread mold. What’s the point of a list of ingredients if it doesn’t actually list the ingredients?

Is sodium benzoate a flavor, if it is added to “protect taste”? That’s debatable, but it’s pushing the edge. Citric acid has natural sources - but is it still natural if it’s extracted to be a separate ingredient, apart from its source?

Finally, there’s high fructose corn syrup. There’s no such thing as corn syrup in nature. For that matter, there’s no such thing as corn in nature. Perhaps some syrupy substance might ooze from a pile of corn if it were left to rot, but I don’t think that’s the syrup that the Sprite bottle is talking about. Even if there was corn syrup in nature, the concentration of it into a high fructose state wouldn’t be natural.

It doesn’t seem very honest for Sprite to claim to have 100 percent natural flavors… unless the label is supposed to mean that there are just some 100 percent natural flavors in the drink, rather than meaning that 100 percent of the flavors in the drink are natural.

That’s clever word play, but it’s not fair to the natural language of people shopping for something to drink in a grocery store. If we had a Food and Drug Administration that was doing its job, it would regulate the use of this kind of language. Naturally, the FDA is too far in the pocket of agribusiness and food manufacturers to deal with such matters.

College back in the very early 90s was a very long time ago, technologically speaking. We had one TV in the lounge of my freshman dorm and the VHF knob had fallen off, so we had to tune it with a fork. The multimedia experience in my room was a radio with headphones that played AM and FM! There was no such thing as the world wide web for our consumption, but I do recall by the end of my first year responding to a Bitnet message from somebody with the one line, “Sure, I would like to get back in touch with you, but what is the ‘e-mail’ you’re talking about?”

The computer highlight of my first year in college came from the one guy down the hall, Chris, who had his very own PC computer (the rest of us used computer labs in the library). On that computer, he’d snagged a copy of Scorched Earth, and we kids would spend hour after hour sitting around his computer monitor like it was some kind of fireplace, waiting our turn to be one of the six players who could buy weapons and gear for a tank (laser, small missile, MIRV, parachute, dirt bombs, nuke!), set angle and power, adjust for wind speed, and blast the hell out of each other. I was a pretty strident pacifist at the time, but I had no problem unloading a Death Head right on top of my friends. This turn-based combat game for DOS was strictly 2-D and used less than ten colors in its graphics scheme, but it was a whole lot of fun.

Talking about times past with some old friends the other day gave me a sudden hankering for this game that I hadn’t played for over 15 years. I was disappointed to find out that the original game won’t run on my Windows Vista computer. I could find myself a DOS emulator, but by the time I wound myself around to that solution I discovered that my fondness for Scorched Earth is not unique. There is more than one game out there (available for free just like Scorched Earth apparently was) written by fans with the aim of replicating or extending the Scorched Earth experience for play on today’s computers.

Scorched 3D takes the gameplay of Scorched Earth and attempts to bring it into alignment with 21st Century gameplay. Tanks take potshots at one another in 3 dimensions, on mountain islands rendered with polygonal detail and covered with detailed textures. There’s music playing in the background; there are plants growing on the hillsides; there are birds crying above the waves that ripple on the shore. There are shadows to give that extra sense of realism to Scorched 3D. All of these make Scorched 3D a failure as an update. Scorched Earth wasn’t great because it was just like fighting a real projectile battle on real terrain with real birds calling out in the distance. Scorched Earth was great because, just as it was inundated with ridiculously bright red lava, a destroyed tank would call out some silly saying in defeat taken randomly from a text file, like “Bah, I shall fight again!” Then the tank would blow up into little brown or yellow pixels. The whole point was that the fight was unrealistic. Besides, the authors of Scorched 3D have added so many little graphic details that even my current-year computer can’t easily handle the display of them without significant lag. While the game is lagging, I have the “advantage” of being able to change camera angles in three dimensions plus zoom, all by moving around the mouse that also allows me to select options. A common consequence for me is ending up looking at strange, beautiful scenery halfway across the island from where I’d like to be while I’m trying to work with my tank. Perhaps I might learn to enjoy Scorched 3D more if I could get the game to work consistently and predictably. I can’t, so I haven’t.

Scorched Earth 2000 is a Java Applet trying to reproduce the experience and gameplay of Scorched Earth, also allowing people to play from the across the Internet by logging in with an account. Because the applet can be downloaded and put up on just about any server, Scorched Earth 2000 is available on a number of mirror servers on websites across the internet. You may be asked to log in with a username, a password and (!) an e-mail address, which makes me a bit nervous… what is to be done with my e-mail address isn’t specified. Thankfully, you can also log in as a guest.

The appearance and gameplay of Scorched Earth 2000 is most like that of the original Scorched Earth, simple and straightforward, as long as it works. Here you can see a screen capture of Scorched Earth 2000… without a button to start the game! My attempt timed out after 2 minutes. I tried again, and this time I got a more functional screen. At other times, and on other servers, javascript seems to have malfunctioned, making this a pretty unsteady software platform on which to play. When it works, though, it is fun.

Another game which I think best carries on the spirit of Scorched Earth is the differently-titled Atomic Tanks. Free, just like these other games, Atomic Tanks permits single, computer, and multi-user play, lets you select from a wide variety of straight-forward or kooky weapons, allows play over multiple rounds for the accumulation of reward money, and even kicks in silly statements made by computer-controlled tanks as they chortle in victory or curse in defeat (”Je ne suis pas un poisson!”). Unfortunately, documentation of the various weapons and their advantages in battle is skimpy, so you’ll have to learn by doing, but fortunately the doing is fun. Best of all, the software seems to work every time. The most confusing part of game play is selecting players (hint: when a player is surrounded by a white oval, it’s selected), but play moves quickly and coherently from that point. Atomic Tanks gets my recommendation for its combination of function and harmless fake-violent projectile-hurling fun.

In upgrading our databases of information about legislation before the House and Senate in the 111th Congress, we have been writing some scripts that visit government websites, obtain information from them, convert that information into variable form, store those variables in a database, transform those variables, then use them to write some new web pages with things like progressive rankings, individual politician-trackers, and the like. It’s a lot of fun when the process works, but when we hit snags the headaches can be pretty darned big.

One particular headache has been the server-side limit imposed by our web host over at That’s My Congress. Quite understandably, our hosting provider has set up our server so that if we try to run a script that keeps going for longer than a minute or two, it stops the script. It’s a smart move to prevent us from hogging server load and to keep infinitely recursive programs from running infinitely. But some of the things we want to do take more than a minute — for instance, loading up the cosponsorship pages for the 1,104 H.R. bills before the House and scanning each to find out who is supporting what bill. That task takes us about 50 minutes, and so we have to split up that task into about fifty sections.

I can tell you from recent experience that manually typing in fifty script commands, each spaced enough in time to avoid server overload, is really, really boring. I’m not trained in computer science, and in my search for a way to automate this task I’ve tried a few things. My first try was the sleep command, figuring that if I let the server pause a few seconds between each command, I’d satisfy the server gods. Strike one: it turns out that server limits can’t be escaped that way. My next try was to set up cron jobs, unix commands that ask a server to run certain scripts on regularly scheduled basis. Strike two: my hosting provider limits the number of possible cron jobs to less than ten.

I thought I was out of options until I realized that I could do some automation off the server and in my own browser. On my third try, I hit a home run with iMacros, a free plugin for Firefox written by iOpus. It allows you to “record” a sequence actions in a Firefox browser (like opening a tab or accessing a URL containing a script), then “play” them back later. The sequences are editable and customizable with a protocol that makes intuitive sense. For example:

VERSION BUILD=6111228 RECORDER=FX
URL GOTO=http://thatsmycongress.com/senate/
URL GOTO=http://irregulartimes.com
URL GOTO=http://nytimes.com
URL GOTO=http://hampsterdance.com
URL GOTO=http://ivotedforgeorgewbushinafitofinsanity.org

What’s really nice is that I can place waiting periods in between each command so that I don’t annoy the server gods and abuse cpu privileges. If you’ve got similar issues in your online work, I recommend iMacros without reservation.