Charles and Christy’s Weblog

There’s been a lot of brouhaha since the Massachusetts Court decision around gay marriage. To me, the answer is simple and it sure doesn’t require a constitutional amendment.

Let the state’s only responsibility be to recognize the rights of couples to form civil unions. This provides committed partners the right to insurance benfits and household tax filings. It grants the right to access and make decisions about a hospitalized loved one. It grants the right to full legal status as a parent. The state should only recognize and grant these rights in the form of civil unions and should not have anything to do with marriages. The state evaluates couples of any orientation purely on the basis of whether they are fit for the legal obligations.

Then let the churches and other religious institutions perform the rite of marriage according to their customs and beliefs. Let them decide what “preserves sanctity. Religious groups then have complete power over the portion that is relevant to them - the spiritual portion. Couples that wish to have their household observed in the eyes of religion must find a spiritual home in which to hold their rite.

Heterosexual couples enjoy this freedom rather well as they can currently choose an officiant that best fits their beliefs. That may be a priest or a judge - the priest performs a rite while the judge simply grants rights.

To me, any other legislative solution confuses the roles and responsibilities inherent in the church and state separation. It is simply a question of right versus rite.

Recently, I’ve been using my FreeBSD computer a lot, and I’m starting to get used to it as a desktop computer.

One of the coolest little software programs I’ve found is part of KDE called KWeather. You configure it with local airport codes and it periodically grabs weather updates. It shows the current weather in a great little display in the taskbar.

One word I’ve heard and read a lot lately is robust. I’m tired of it.

This word, especially in the context of macroeconomics, is overused and abused so much that it is nearly devoid of meaning anymore.

Tax cuts, recoveries, GDP growth, sales, employment - it is applied as an adjective everywhere with no technical requirements for what it means to be “robust.”

Merriam-Webster, by way of Britannica defines it as:

1 a : having or exhibiting strength or vigorous health b : having or showing vigor, strength, or firmness <a robust debate> <a robust faith> c : strongly formed or constructed : STURDY <a robust plastic>
2 : ROUGH, RUDE <stories… laden with robust, down-home imagery — Playboy>
3 : requiring strength or vigor <robust work>
4 : FULL-BODIED <robust coffee>; also : HEARTY <a robust dinner>
5 : relating to, resembling, or being any of the primitive, relatively large, heavyset hominids (genus Australopithecus and especially A. robustus and A. boisei) characterized especially by heavy molars and small incisors adapted to a vegetarian diet — compare GRACILE 3

Perhaps we need a yellow-orange-red scaling system.

I propose these:

1. diseased
2. sickly
3. weak
4. Sound
5. Prosperous
6. flourishing

Other recommendations welcome.

Kyle has an excellent anecdote about converting users to superior software.

I’ve added some personal online photo albums using Gallery software.

Fairly easy to install, though it requires some very detailed configuration screens upon setup. After that, it is very simple to work with.

It has great organizational features - albums and subalbums with selectable highlight photos to use as the thumbnails. It keeps a database of photo captions, so you can annotate very easily. Great little app.

I wish they would add some batch-edit features, however. If you need to move a bunch of photos from one album to the next, it takes quite a while. Also, it uses some database files, so you can’t simply move the files on the filesystem. Looks like version 1.4.1 is on the way, with some enhancements.

Based on Rod’s suggestion, I’m trying MiniRubyWiki.

So far it seems really cool. Lots of great Wiki features. It will take me some time to get used to it, and give a better evaluation. I’m not super keen on the custom web server it uses, but I’ll give it a try.

A few things to note that are not apparent from either Rod’s post, or the MiniRubyWiki website:

• Requires Tcl/TK
• Requires GraphViz
• Don’t try the “just-get-the-2-files-and-run-a-command” approach to installing. Get the whole set using cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@rubyforge.org:/var/cvs/minirubywiki export -D [DATE] minirubywiki instead.

Already I can see some easy improvements to be made:

• Document install better - if only a few files are needed, then only distribute those
• Use CSS. Opera doesn’t handle all the <font> tags correctly, especially the Wingdings stuff.
• Send the correct HTTP headers and META information so that browsers don’t cache the pages during edits
• Add a wrapper shell script for the server and send output to a logfile
• Have a cleaner set of initial pages - it’s ok to make it fun and for the insider, but there’s a lot of junk there too.

I’m also going to look into mod_ruby (or equivalent) to see if I can use Apache for the webserver.