Jefflog

After being away from home for the past two Halloweens, we stuck around this time and gave out treats to the kids coming to our door. Very weird, but I had a hard time getting kids to say “Trick or Treat”; many just stood there after ringing the doorbell and just wanted their candy. I made ‘em say it before they got any, tho’.

I carved a pumpkin, following a design I found on the Internet. It came out quite good if you ask me!

I just got the new Neal Morse album One in the mail today, four days before its release date. Yay! I’m importing it into iTunes and listening to it now.

Yesterday, Baby Maggie reached 2 months of age. A month ago, we were still dealing with sleepless nights, but a few nights ago she managed to sleep for nine hours straight, and repeated her performance last night as well. As a result, things have been much saner for us at the Seifert household.

It’s still a bit of a challenge to take her places. Unlike most babies, she hates riding in the car. No idea why. Everything else about her seems completely normal, even extraordinary at times. She’s babbling like crazy and loves looking at books with bright colors.

For the project I’m working on for work, we’re developing what’s known as a smart client application. Among other things, it offers the centralized management of a web application, but the response rate of a local application. It also allows you to utilize the power of everyone’s desktop computer (cheap) instead of investing in one super-powerful server (expensive) to drive the application. The best of both worlds, so it would seem.

But as I work harder at developing it, I’m finding that there are a number of things that we have to “reinvent” in a desktop application that would come automatically in a browser-based system. Things like navigation from page to page, which we take for granted in the web world, turns out to be quite difficult to reinvent. Developing forms is a tedious affair for a desktop application, offering nowhere near the ease-of-use of writing pages in HTML (at least for this experienced HTML developer.)

Meanwhile, browser technology is getting more sophisticated, with more dynamic controls being possible. Any experienced JavaScript programmer can write drag-and-drop controls offering many of the features that a full-blown desktop application can provide, and can use XML to post back to the server without a screen refresh. I don’t have examples of either of these at hand, but I’ve done them both before. Joel Spolsky has spoken of the need to develop this even further, and in fact got many responses suggesting that many of these technologies might be available soon.

So I got to thinking: what if someone developed a browser-based application that you installed on your desktop? It would install Apache, perhaps mod_perl, mod_python, or mod_mono, and the code for your application. When opened, it starts up the server and opens up a browser window pointing to http://localhost:2878. It’d be super-responsize, wouldn’t require a connection to the Internet to use, would utilize the power of the desktop machine, and be easy to develop for. And, if you ever did decide to deploy it centrally (because everyone’s running on 233 Mhz machines or because you’ve got a combination of Linux, Mac, and Windows machines accessing it), it would be easy to configure that way too.

When Hong and I first got married, we applied for a green card for her. (Before that point, she had been in this country on an H1-B work visa.) We went to the INS office, took a number, waited in a crowd of 50 people (much like going to the DMV), and eventually had an interview with an INS agent to prove we were married. Unlike the sitcoms, he didn’t put us in separate rooms and grill us with personal questions like “What kind of toothpaste does your spouse use?” Our marriage license and the fact we appeared together was good enough for him.

When you marry an American citizen, though, they don’t give you an out-and-out green card, but a conditional green card that is only good for two years. After two years, if you can prove you’re still married, they’ll remove the condition and it will become a full green card. This deters any quickie marriages for the purposes of attaining a green card. Of course, it hasn’t worked out quite that easy so far.

After 9/11, the INS ground to a halt, presumably because they perform many more background checks on their applicants these days. When her two-year expiration was approaching, the INS (now reapportioned as a bureau of the Department of Homeland Security) sent her a letter saying they didn’t have the time to remove her condition but gave her a one year extension. That extension was due to expire on October 16 of this year.

Of course, we didn’t hear from them at all within that year, so Hong called them about a month ago. “Call us back when it’s 10 days away from expiring,” they told her. Thoughts of not being able to remove the condition and Hong getting deported are going through our minds. We stayed on the ball, though, and on October 6, Hong called again, at which point we made an appointment for 2pm the next day.

I blocked out the entire latter half of the afternoon in my calendar, thinking that if we show up at 2pm, they won’t be able to see us until 4:30 due to the queue of people who got there before. But once we entered (after being checked for bombs and weapons), we found the place was completely empty. Apparently, they only do things by appointment now; I guess the idea of having 50 potential terrorists immigrants in one room is too much to handle these days. In any event, we were seen promptly at 2pm, and was given…another one year extension. “Oh well,” I joked, “I guess that means we have to stay married for another year.”

A few days ago, I posted an entry about dealing with comment spam. That method prevented about 75% of the comment spam that was coming through, but I was still getting several hits a day. So I peered into the issue a little further.

Looking at my access logs, I found many entries similar to the following:

220.93.120.39 - - [05/Oct/2004:18:40:35 -0500] "GET /wp-comments-popup.php?p=1531&c=1 HTTP/1.0" 302 218 "http://12.163.72.13/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

Even though the originating IP address was different in every case, the referrer was always the same: “http://12.163.72.13″. My guess at this point is that it’s a virus that’s been installed on people’s machines, who then contact this server for a list of URLs to spam.

mod_rewrite to the rescue. I installed the following rules in my Apache configuration file, and haven’t heard from them since.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://12.163.72.13/
RewriteRule .php$ http://12.163.72.13 [R,L]

I recorded the first Bush v. Kerry “debate” on my Tivo, and had the chance to watch about half of it over the weekend. Maybe it’s just my bias against Dubya, but it sure looked like Kerry was winning. Bush seemed to be on the defensive for the most part, sounding like a broken record saying we need to “stay the course” in Iraq so that our enemies become demoralized and our own troops do not.

When Reagan was President, one of his oft-cited strengths was that he made a decision and stuck to it. He was resolute in the Cold War against Communists, and people attribute the winning of that war partly because of his unwavering committment. It feels like President Bush is attempting to follow the same path, without realizing that Iraq is more like Vietnam than the Cold War and it’s not Reagan he’s emulating but Lyndon Johnson. (Ooh! Low blow!)

In business, there’s a time to be resolute and a time to admit your mistakes and retreat. In this light, Kerry doesn’t look like a “flip-flopper” at all, but a man who was willing to change his mind when the data no longer supported the original decision. That’s what a good CEO does, and that’s what a good President should be willing to do.

Mind you, I’m still not going to vote for Kerry…economically, I think he’d be almost as bad, if not worse, than Bush has been. (See Badnarik/Campagna for my choice.) The debate merely made me believe that, of the two evils, Kerry is the lesser one.

Some friends from Shalom Mennonite Church threw us a baby shower. Many people came, gave us some nice gifts that we’ll be able to use in a few months, like a high chair and clothes in the 6-month to 1-year range. We also got numerous volunteers for baby sitters.

I haven’t been to church since the baby was born, and it was great to see everyone again and know that, even though we don’t have any family here, we still have a church family for love and support. I haven’t even been attending the church that long, but they’ve been very open since day one. It’s been a very rewarding fellowship to be a part of.

The forecast was calling for our first frost of the season tonight, so we went ahead and harvested the watermelon in our garden, which was ripe anyway. We tried to grow them last year with no success. The vines for this plant ended up covering most of the ground in the garden, but in the end, this was the only melon to grow. I don’t think it gets hot enough to successfully grow melons in Indiana.

The watermelon is of the Orangeglo variety, but as you can see in our case, the flesh was more yellow than orange. In any event, we should end up harvesting hundreds of seeds from this fruit alone, so maybe I’ll try to plant more next year and see where it takes us.

All in all, this year we harvested

• Zucchini squash
• Tomatoes
• Eggplant
• Green peppers
• Green beans
• Green onions
• Coriander
• Lemon basil
• and Watermelon

Vegetable gardening is a lot of fun and you get to eat what you grow, which is something you can’t get from a flower garden. I’d like to tear up more of our yard for gardening — right now, we’ve only got a 20′ x 10′ plot — but people around here seem to prefer grass and we’d like to sell the house in a couple of years. For our next house, I’m going to tear up a good portion of the lawn for gardening purposes right after we move in.

For a great book on vegetable gardening, check out The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible.