One of the Web sites I administer has me down in the dumps. A forum participant who has always gotten on my nerves made inappropriate, stupid remarks about one of my friends (a friend in the forums and in real life). I’ve always had an aversion to this forum participant. She’s abrasive and self-righteous and usually wrong. She’s the type of person I should ignore, the type I usually do ignore. Having her in the forums has made me not want to be there myself, and that’s most bothersome. What’s more, it turns out that I’m fiercely loyal to — very territorial about — the people I value. I’m fair about my loyalty, though. If someone calls down a friend with good reason, I’m behind the accuser (this has gotten me in trouble with friends who value preference over justice). But if I see injustice, I’m quick to leap to my friend’s defense and, apparently, to spout vitriol. There was another case recently in which one respected member of a discussion list I participate in tossed unfair, rude accusations at another participant I very much admire. I leapt to the second participant’s defense, insulting the first guy in the process. In the more recent forum debacle, I wrote a very harsh post aimed at the offending participant. I later went back and deleted it, but not before she (and probably a couple of others) had a chance to read it.

It’s not that I was especially ashamed of what I wrote but that what I wrote was inappropriate for a public forum, especially one I’m an administrator of. So but she saw it (or was told about it)

Saturday, eight days ago. Dropped a project I was working on pro bono. With making stuff for the baby’s room and trying to enjoy the last few months of my childless life, I just didn’t have it in me to maintain the commitment. I felt guilty for leaving the guy hanging (but not too guilty — I did a lot of work for free and turned it all over to him), but I feel like a big weight’s been lifted. I no longer feel guilty for not getting up at 6:00 on Saturdays to put time into the project before my day proper starts. No more guilt about vegging in front of the TV when I should be either programming or reading so that I’ll have time to program later without digging into my reading time. It’s a small thing, but the quality of my life has risen a lot since I dropped the project.

Monday through Thursday. Worked my butt off. I’m putting together a bunch of static demos of dynamic programs my company uses on a daily basis. The demos, it turns out, are very useful to the sales team. So while I hate the physical act of creating the demos, I don’t mind doing them, because they’re useful. I joke with my boss that if the demos are so helpful to the sales team, I should be earning part of the commission for jobs reeled in. Partway through the week, we got a call telling us that one of Mleeka’s aunts was moving to Florida the next day (first we’d heard of it) and that we were welcome to come scavenge the belongings they were selling at a yard sale the next day to get first pick. I snagged a box full of books, including the following stand-out titles:

• Gray’s Anatomy
• Subterranean Kerouac
• The Satanic Verses
• Calculus (with Analytic Geometry)
• Practical Mathematics for Home Study
• Man and His Symbols (Jung)
• How the Mind Works (Pinker)
• University Physics
• Principles of Surgery (never know when you’ll get caught unawares at home without transportation and a surgeon)

Friday. More demos. While I was working to meet one tight deadline, I was hit with another one (more demos). Meanwhile, there were some software issues that I had to spend a few hours looking into, and my primary desktop system started acting up after I reinstalled the OS. Rough day.

Saturday. Up at 6:00, in to work by 6:30, doing one of the demos due early this week. Because of all the distractions I’ve had this week, I figured I needed a few hours uninterrupted to get at least one of the demos done. Out at 12:30 and off to pick up a glider we ordered a few months ago. I had to cram the partially disassembled glider in the car with me and almost had to call on a friend with a truck to come help me out. Got home and put the glider together and spent a warm afternoon partially outside prepping our little garden area and partially inside rearranging furniture while enjoying a nice cross-breeze afforded by our open windows. Stabbed my palm with a garden tool by accident. Later, my brother in law came over to bring some pictures to Mleeka, and he and I wound up going back to his apartment to play tennis, something I haven’t done for a couple of years. I’m sore today in that good limber way. Went out later to an eatery called The Tijuana Taco and invalidated my rare day of calorie-burning physical activity by stuffing a grande burrito down my gullet. Wobbled over to Linens and Things, Pier 1 Imports, and Target to look for bath mats and rugs for the baby’s room. (Won’t it be funny, when my forthcoming daughter’s a little older, to joke about going to Lennons and Things?) We almost bought a 12-piece set of pretty attractive cookware for 100 bucks, but couldn’t figure out why the price was so low and decided not to make the purchase. Came home and sat in the glider absently leafing through the eyeball section of Gray’s Anatomy. Eyeballs begin as little outcroppings of brain that become specialized, apparently. And (my reading wasn’t utterly linear) some people have taste buds around their epiglottis and their soft palates. It was a good day — very full, but very satisfying.

Today. Rolled out of bed a little before 8:00 (late for me for a weekend — still glad I dropped that project a week ago) and read email. Got ready for a program I had helped to organize that turned out to be pretty successful and then went out for a late lunch at a local eatery that serves brunch until 2:30. I had a ham and cheese omelette with three or four glasses of complimentary champagne and topped them off with a couple of gimlets. Mmmmm. Came home afterward and read some more of The Recognitions, which I had sort of partially back-burnered because of the aforementioned project, napped a little, caught a short snippet of a basketball game (way out of character for me), and then grilled some burgers for dinner. Caught a new Simpsons and here I am, relaxed and content and just about ready to hit the sack and fall asleep reading.

In choosing marriage partners [people] solemnly and seriously follow a custom which seemed to us foolish and absurd in the extreme. Whether she be widow or virgin, the bride-to-be is shown naked to the groom by a responsible and respectable matron; and similarly, some respectable man presents the groom naked to his prospective bride. We laughed at this custom, and called it absurd, but they were just as amazed at the folly of all other peoples. When men go to buy a colt, where they are risking only a little money, they are so cautious that, though the animal is almost bare, they won’t close the deal until saddle and blanket have been taken off, lest there be a hidden sore underneath. Yet in the choice of a mate, which may cause either delight or disgust for the rest of their lives, men are so careless that they leave all the rest of the woman’s body covered up with clothes and estimate her attractiveness from a mere handsbreadth of her person, the face, which is all they can see.

Sir Thomas More put it pretty well in his Utopia, a bogus and sort of pedantic travelogue whose title (meaning “no land”) coined the word we’re all familiar with. In more bizarrely anachronisic modern terms, “Try the milk before you buy the cow.” Or at least, before you buy the cow (or bull) make sure the cow’s teats (bull’s balls) aren’t cankered and thus indisposed to provide what you expect from the cow (bull).

What brings this to mind is a discussion over lunch with some of my coworkers recently in which a couple of them were bemoaning marriage. If he were ever to get divorced, one of them said (the other seeming to agree), he wouldn’t marry again. In fact, when his brother, recently divorced, had been about to marry again, one of my coworkers had commented that the brother must be crazy indeed to go down that road again.

One of the predominant concerns seems to be with the stereotypical spending of money by unemployed wives (stay-at-home moms in this case). I’ve heard this complaint from coworkers across multiple employers. It’s not a novel complaint, in other words. When I countered, at lunch, that I must be lucky indeed to have the frugal wife I do, my coworkers said that it wasn’t just the money. They didn’t elaborate about what else it could be that drove them to speculate that they’d never marry again, however.

Granted, they’ve both got about ten years on me, though I think they both got a later start on marriage than I did. I celebrated three years of marriage (add that to a couple of years of shacking up) this weekend and so can’t be too far behind them. Maybe something happens after four or five or seven or nine years of marriage that I can’t even imagine now.

I’m more inclined to think, though, that, as by and large rational and thoughtful people, my wife and I both made smart decisions about our mates. We declined to be slaves to convention (we met over the Internet before it was common to do so) or to the standard restrictions of Judeo-Christian doctrine and assessed one another based on personal valuations.

If I hadn’t valued my then-girlfriend, I wouldn’t have moved to Tennessee. After the trial period following my move, if I hadn’t determined that I still valued her, I wouldn’t have bothered to spend money on an engagement ring. And if, after the engagement, I hadn’t resolved that she was a good match for me, I wouldn’t have gone through with the marriage. I’ve heard of many couples who were for whatever reason (usually religion) reluctant to try before they bought (so to speak). And I’m not talking just sex here. There are all sorts of compatibility issues that can pop up once a couple’s been living together for a while, and they can stress the relationship. These couples have a harder time of it, I imagine, than I’ve had. The most popular argument rebutting my point probably suggests that marriage is all about compromise and getting through the hard times. I’m not sure I buy that, though. When I’m making a large purchase, I don’t think of its downsides as things that demand compromise — I simply don’t purchase what doesn’t please me. Why should picking out a mate be any different?

Given my coworkers’ comments, I can’t help wondering if women don’t automatically turn into hydras after three or so years of marriage. My coworkers seem to be smart, by and large reasonable, people, after all, and I don’t mean to suggest that they weren’t as diligent as I was in vetting their wives or that I was more rational about it (and thus somehow superior). It just seems odd that so many people see marriage as a sort of trap or unpleasant obligation, while I see mine as a partnership characterized by mutual respect with benefits to both parties. Maybe I’m just lucky.

Some of the negative perception of marriage has to do, I suspect, with the fact that men are supposed to roll their eyes about their wives, much as women are supposed to nag their husbands. There is definitely a ’50s atmosphere at my work. Most of the men, I get the feeling, go home each night to rest with a beer in front of the TV while their wives, many of whom have also worked a full day, cook dinner. I overheard one woman say the other day that her husband didn’t allow her to watch a particular show because he didn’t agree with some of its content. It’s not at all uncommon for me to hear comments about women’s driving (”Boy, look at that dent in Larry’s car. He must have let his wife drive it”) as if I’m expected to chuckle in agreement. And then there’s the fact that women from several departments have been trained to spell our receptionist when she needs breaks; no men have been recruited because that job is perceived as women’s work (were I not terrified of the phone, I might volunteer, just to shake things up a bit). I’m at times a little surprised that women are allowed to wear slacks to work rather than skirts or dresses.

So it really shouldn’t surprise me too much that my coworkers, raised in a man’s world and working in what is very much a man’s company (and one filled with conservatives, at that), are inclined to toss off comments about what burdens their wives are. I think a lot of it is just talk, and what I’m ultimately trying to get around to here isn’t that these guys should be condemned for indulging in this sort of male-bonding talk, but is rather that it’s a shame that we haven’t come far enough yet that chauvenism and good-ole-boyism are still considered worth a slap on the back from a coworker.

I’ve often thought of celebrities as being much larger than me. It’s probably because I’ve most often seen celebrities on the big screen where they’re ten feet tall in long shots and large enough in closeups that I’d easily fit in their nostrils (and I’m sort of a burly guy) or on TV, which is sort of an extension of the big screen.

Take Julia Roberts, for example. At a reported 5 feet, 9 inches, she’s got me by about an inch, but I can’t help imagining her as being less than about a foot taller than me. Or Jeff Goldblum, who seems very tall. He’s got to be at least 8 feet tall, right? I just have a great deal of trouble imagining these people being my size or smaller, or within a foot or two of my size. I don’t think they’re 20 feet tall — just 7 feet tall. Am I alone here?

I don’t think it’s that I idealize these people, that I elevate them emotionally in some way that colors my view of their physical stature. I think I’m just fooled spatially by the movie screen. I think I’d be disappointed in a way to see one of the apparently larger movie stars in person and discover that s/he wasn’t a head or two taller than me.

I did see Robin Williams up close and personal once, but I knew in advance that he was sort of short. The film Patch Adams was being shot at my university. It was actually pretty neat, as I got to see a false front added to a building next to the one in which I worked. I also happened to be walking back to my dorm one night and was routed around some scene or another being filmed. I believe it involved a bicycle. I also remember that fake ivy was strung up all over the place, thin nets strewn lightly with fake ivy leaves; the movie was set at an ivy league school, I believe. The crew overtook one small building entirely. I never had occasion during the four hallowed years of my college education to go into the building, but it was pretty ramshackle outside, which probably meant that it was one of the buildings dating back to the time of James Polk and company.

There was a little campus convenience store next to this building at which, most mornings, I purchased a pair of foil-wrapped chocolate Pop-Tarts and a Mountain Dew. At lunchtime, I’d traipse back over to the store (skirting the aforementioned false-fronted building) to purchase a sandwich in a plastic triangle-shaped pack and usually some Fritos. The store had a main entrance with a shabby little lobby, in which I often ate my lunch and read a paper. The lobby then had a door to the store proper. I think the building/store was called the Ram’s Head. One day during filming, as I was going into the store to get my lunch, I held my half of the double-door open for the person coming out, which person happened to be Robin Williams. He was a good bit shorter than me.

Not wanting to put him on the spot, I just nodded at him as I would have at any person for whom I was holding the door open and went on in to buy my chicken salad sandwich. It must be trying to be a famous person always being asked for an autograph or being Hey-aren’t-you-Robin-Williamsed, so I figured it’d be a small relief for him if I didn’t make a big deal of pointing him out. It must be even more trying to be in such a position if you’re not six feet taller than the people bugging you.

When I took the dog out for his nightly 10 p.m. walk tonight, I had a clear view of the big and little dippers, Orion, and the north star, all among the most recognizable stars in the sky. I wasn’t sure about the little dipper until I remembered that the two stars that form the front edge of its cup point vaguely toward the north star, which reminded me, as I followed a path from the north star to the big dipper, that the little dipper pours into the big dipper. And sure enough, when I had traced a path back to the big dipper from the north star, there the little guy was, apparently having spilled its inky contents over the peaceful dome of the night.

I remember these intersections of the constellations from my childhood. My parents were really into star gazing and took us out for all the would-be remarkable astronomical events. There was Haley’s Comet, for example, probably about 20 years ago. This was a big deal for my parents because the comet only appears about every 76 years, so this was their only shot at getting a good look at it. I remember going way out in the country in the middle of the night, stopping by corn fields (on a snowy evening?), and passing the binoculars around among the four of us. As I recall, the comet was very disappointing, looking at best like a white blur rather than the spectacular flame-tailed hurtling mass I had been expecting. In spite of the let-down of the comet itself (more of a let-down for my mom, I’m sure, as I’ll have a chance to see the comet again when they pull me out of my cryogenic storage tank and thaw me in another 55 or so years), I can’t help remembering this short period fondly. There’s something special to a kid about being not only allowed, but encouraged, to creep about in the dark six hours past bedtime. And there’s something that seems very right, very lucky, to an adult, about having had parents who fostered in him a sense of curiosity about his surroundings, whether or not he rewarded it by going on to hang a dozen Nobel prizes on their mantle.

My primary memory of Orion has to do with my having been really sort of socially inept and lost in the 50s (30 years too late) as a kid. A childhood friend and I were at some church function — a lock-in, maybe, something that has us at the church at night. Maybe we were there after choir practice. We looked up at the sky and I happened to see Orion. I believe I had been watching a lot of The Andy Griffith Show at the time. And I believe there had been an episode recently in which Andy had said “I see X,” where “X” was either Orion or some person he was happy to see. Whether or not this was the case, I have the distinct impression that I was either impersonating that warm, toothy greeting or that I afterward thought I had sounded rather like Andy Griffith as I crooned “I see Or-eye-uhhhn.” The friend laughed at me. This was the same friend — the sort of friend to whom, in later years, I was a buddy when we were alone but a marginal sort of footstool figure when other of his friends were around — who insisted that I be Daisy when we were playing The Dukes of Hazzard and there were enough of the more important friends around to fill the roles of Beau and Luke, Uncle Jesse, Boss Hawg, and Roscoe P. Coltrane. (Or Roscoe Picole Train, as I always sort of thought it was based on the character’s own pronunciation.)

I like the word “Orion.” It packs a wallop if you break it down and reassemble it in various ways. It contains the distinct words “or,” “rio,” “ion,” and “on,” for example. And if you read it from right to left (as I automatically do with many words, such as TUMS, which chalky antacid tablets I could eat by the gross but which name bothers me because I see SMUT almost before I see the actual product name), you get that lovely French word “noir.” I suspect that if you tried hard enough, you could come up with a pretty good palindrome about Orion in the (French) black night sky.

This all (in a roundabout way) puts me in mind of a couple of poems I reencountered recently when revisiting Hardy:

Shut Out That Moon

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.

Step not out on the dew-dashed lawn
To view the Lady’s Chair,
Immense Orion’s glittering form,
The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too frangrant was Life’s early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought.

I Look Up from My Writing

I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon’s full gaze on me.

Her meditative misty head
Was spectral in its air,
And I involuntarily said,
“What are you doing there?”

“Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole
And waterway hereabout
For the body of one with a sunken soul
Who has put his life-light out.

“Did you hear his frenzied rattle?
It was sorrow for his son
Who is slain in brutish battle,
Though he has injured none.

“And now I am curious to look
Into the blinkered mind
Of one who wants to write a book
In a world of such a kind.”

Her temper overwrought me,
And I edged to shun her view,
For I felt assured she thought me
One who should drown him too.

Hardy’s view of the evening sky is somewhat gloomier than what I’ve had called to mind tonight. He was 69 and 77 when he wrote these poems and had been through a bunch of wives and several wars (of which the current one was World War I). I hope his bitterness is a function of his personality and not of age in general.

I couldn’t close an entry entitled “Star Gazing” without mention of one Hollywood star or another. Tonight I cast my net toward Paris Hilton, not out of any especial fascination with her or her naughtiness, but because of others’ fascination with her. It appears that my referer logs (the logs that tell me what sites people click from to get here) are being spammed with links to various sites peddling promises of Paris Hilton’s home video. It’s not that I generate enough sordid content that my site is of high relevance to those in search of Paris (but then, neither are my compositions to be found in the old Norton anthology alongside Hardy’s) but that people are faking referers to my site so that their links will be visible to my reader, or both of them.

I just got the March edition of Poetry magazine. I’ve only read the first few poems, stopped in my tracks as I was by the five poems by one Atsuro Riley. My first thought upon reading his poems was “there’s something of Gerard Manley Hopkins in this guy’s stuff.” Consider the following example

– Mama, mainly: boiling jelly. She’s the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there, and stove-coil coral; the quick silver blade-flash, plus the (magma-brimming) ladle-splash; that’s her behind the bramble-berry purple, sieved and stored.

This quotation from “Map” is one of several that makes me think of Hopkins for a number of reasons. First note all the hyphenated words (dare I call them kennings?). A very quick review of some of Hopkins’s more well-known works netted me the following such hyphenations:

• dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
• bow-bend
• blue-bleak
• gold-vermillion (all from “The Windhover”)
• couple-colour
• Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls
• fathers-forth (all from “Pied Beauty”)
• Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded
• dapple-eared
• rarest-veinèd
• neighbour-nature (all from “Duns Scotus’s Oxford”)
• sóng-strain
• wheat-acre
• crush-silk
• blood-gush blade-gash
• Flame-rash
• broad-shed
• Tatter-tassel-tangled
• laced-leaved
• Foam-tuft (all from “The Woodlark”)

All of Riley’s poems published in Poetry include at least a couple of these nonstandard hyphenations. He could certainly have arrived at such hyphenations without any influence from Hopkins. He could have been, as Hopkins likely was, influenced by the Anglo Saxon poets in whose honor I proposed the term kennings for these lexical constructs.

But there’s more of Hopkins in Riley’s work. Note for example Riley’s complex internal rhyming and his ample use of alliteration and assonance. Similar sound pairings within the one line I quoted above include the following:

• Mama / mainly (alliteration)
• boiling / jelly (just similar sounds)
• boiling jelly / apron-yellow (meter and a near-rhyme)
• rickracked / magma-brimming (inverted [or “chiastic”] vowel sounds)
• coil / coral
• blade-flash / ladle-splash
• bramble / berry
• boiling jelly / bramble-berry (meter, alliteration, near-rhyme)
• stove-coil / quick silver (chiastic alliteration)

And these are just a few of the more obvious ones within one line. Compare the quotation above to the following stanza from Hopkins’s “Inversnaid”:

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

Or the first stanza of one of the most linguistically enticing poems I can call to mind, “The Windhover”:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Between this poem and the quote from “Map” above, I can’t help noticing a syntactic similarity as well — “the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there” could almost be an echo of “and striding / high there” And there’s also something of Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” in Riley’s poem, the unusual, vivid, at times oblique descriptions of things, that closing “sieved and stored” making me think of Hopkins’s “landscape plotted and pieced.”

Still, I haven’t pointed to anything that couldn’t have occurred in a vacuum without any knowledge whatsoever of Hopkins. I’m not done yet. One of the things that has bothered me the most about Hopkins’s poems is his stilted language and, in particular, his decision to dictate using accent marks how his poems should be pronounced, how certain words should be stressed. I’ve always sort of thought that if you couldn’t put your words together in such a way that your lines were metrically sound without mangling the syntax or requiring nonstanard pronunciations, you should take another stab at it. The best example of my beefs with Hopkins can be found in “Spring and Fall”:

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves, líke the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Áh! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Note the various accent marks and the first two lines in particular. Now compare to the first two lines of Riley’s “Strand”:

Alphabet, sluice the porch.
Bind (and try to braid) our river-wrack and leavings.

If we go by Hopkins’s notation, “Margaret” is pronounced pretty much like “alphabet.” Further, if you get rid of the parenthetical part in Riley’s second line, the first two lines of the poems are almost identical rhythmically, if you forgive the lack of a feminine ending in Riley’s first line, and of course the endings of the second lines are similar. Hopkins’s poem deals heavily in leaves (and their falling) as a metaphor for death. Riley’s poem is about his dead father and includes lines like “Leaf. Leave. Leaves. Leaving. Left.” I think there may be other echoes of Hopkins in the poem as well, and there’s the progression of the poem’s lines, starting with “Alphabet” and “Bind” and ending on “Yesterdaddy” and “Zag” (with no other consistent linear progression through the alphabet in the poem), suggesting a beginning and an ending, a life and a death couched in terms of a child’s sing-songy lesson. Certainly there are some thematic similarities between the two poems.

I don’t know that I’ve proved conclusively that Riley’s work is informed directly or consciously by Hopkins’s, but I think it’s a good bet. As I mentioned above, I’ve never liked Hopkins all that much in spite of his ear for similar sounds (which I do appreciate). The jury’s still out on Riley. I do and I don’t like what I’ve read so far. I’m definitely going to read his poems some more so that I can make up my mind, and his getting me to want to do so says something about how engaging his work is. It may be the case that in a literary environment in which poetry has of late tended to be more about expression than about lexical craftmanship, a more modern and worldy poet with roots in the tonguey earth of Hopkins’s work and a mouth for linguistic innovation can make a pretty good go of it.

PDF. Portable Document Format. It’s great for delivering print-friendly documents readable across platforms. A PDF looks the same on a Mac as it does on a PC as it does on a Linux system. Want to send a contract or an invoice to somebody with a reduced likelihood that they’ll be able to apply some sneaky edits prior to printing and signing it as they can readily do with a Word document? Use a PDF. Sure, it’s not foolproof; as with most any document format, you can buy an editor and change a PDF, but fewer people have the ability to do so than have Word-compatible text editors.

PDF is especially good for delivering invoices and reports over the Web. While HTML can be tricky to print and to display consistently across platforms, PDF can be pegged, and all it requires on the end-user’s part is a simple, free plugin download. My company makes extensive use of PDFs for just these purposes, pulling data out of our database and generating PDFs on the fly with up-to-the-minute information.

We have not done so without having to get past some roadblocks, however. More specifically, we have had problems with PDFs in Microsoft Internet Explorer. The most common problem has had to do with reloading a PDF already downloaded, most often by clicking a link in the PDF to sort a column. Such a link reloads the script that generates the PDF, sending updated sorting choices to the script so that the data can be reformated and the PDF rebuilt. In some cases, when a user tries to sort a report in this manner, he gets a standard MSIE dialogue prompting him either to save or to open the file, as MSIE doesn’t know what to do with the file by default. This error is particularly strange given that MSIE, in order to load the PDF initially, must have known what application to use to open the file. But it gets stranger. Once you opt either to save or open the file, another error pops up (a dialogue box with a red X icon rather than a DNS or 404 error) indicating that the site requested couldn’t be found — which is a bald-faced lie as, again, in order to try to sort the columns, the user had to have loaded the PDF from the site in question. This could turn into quite the existential quagmire for users of a philosophical turn of mind.

There are conflicting reports from Microsoft about why this behavior occurs. In one error report, it’s stated that it’s a feature rather than a bug. And in that case, it may be, as the report speaks to the phenomenon of cached information over SSL. It may not be a good idea to cache information sent over SSL (credit card or personal data display pages, for example). But in other reports, the same issue — though not limited to SSL connections — is listed as a bug in the software. Here’s essentially what happens behind the scenes. Many servers by default send “no cache” information to the browser when they send certain types of content. When MSIE gets this information, it still stores the information in the cache, but it deletes it immediately. It deletes it so fast, in fact, that it’s gone by the time the Adobe Acrobat plugin (in my case with the PDFs) tries to load the cached document. So the error noting that the file’s not available is displayed and both user and frazzled Web developer are one step closer to going postal.

I develop in PHP, and the issue is particularly heinous because I use sessions to determine whether or not people are logged in. There is a fix, though. To try prevent “no cache” headers from being sent, you can issue various headers (such as “Pragma: no-cache” and “Cache-Control: no-cache”) that may not necessarily override the server’s default settings. You could also modify your Web server’s configuration to change the caching information it sends. But there’s what would appear to be an even simpler fix: Execute the command (in PHP; presumably there are similar commands in other Web development languages) “session_cache_limiter()”, sending one of several possible values such as “nocache” or “private” or “public” or “private_no_expire.” This overrides the server’s settings. It must be called before you start your session using the “session_start()” command.

Which can be tricky because if you’re requiring a login to view the page if somebody’s not already logged in (if they try to hit the link directly rather than logging in and navigating to the report, for example), you’ve told their browser that it’s ok to cache pages. So they try to log in, but the login page keeps refreshing its cached version rather than showing that they’ve logged in and letting them proceed. You have to send the “private” or “private_no_expire” information in order to dodge the weird MSIE cache bug, but you can’t send it unless the user’s already logged in (or they won’t know they’ve logged in because they keep getting the cached login page), but once they’ve logged in, the session has started and it’s too late to send the caching information. It’s the chicken and egg problem, another conundrum for those of a philosophical bent.

The kluge of a solution I finally arrived at in my own code was to have my session/authentication check for a special variable before it starts a session. I send this variable only if I’m generating a PDF on the fly. If the variable exists, the authentication code knows to send the caching information before starting the session, and the PDF can be generated without the aforementioned problems. As the variable exists only when I send it, which I do only when generating certain problematic PDFs (the other issue with this is that it’s not consistent!), other pages, such as the login page (Incidentally, this might not be a problem if, when someone wasn’t logged in, I redirected to a login page, but as it is, I happen to keep the same URL and simply print out the login form if a session doesn’t exist.), aren’t adversely affected by the caching information I’m sending. Immediate problem solved and existential woes eliminated.

This posting at Slashdot points to the text of a condescending letter one apparently wizened software developer wrote to a younger developer after a discussion at a conference about the philosophy of free software. The younger programmer was idealistic about free software and the older developer somewhat less optimistic.

The argument against free software is essentially that giving your code away earns you neither money nor fame among anyone but other coder geeks. And the assumption the older programmer makes is that a task performed for neither money nor far-reaching fame isn’t worthwhile. He also seems to characterize the creation of free software as a form of altruism. He’s wrong on both points.

There’s more to some tasks than money or fame. For example, if I write a tool that makes my life easier, even if I make no money directly from writing the tool, my writing it has been rewarding and is worth the effort. If I provide this tool free of charge to other developers, I’m contributing to an environment — a sort of marketplace — wherein the free exchange of such tools is embraced. By writing software and making it free, I’m generating for myself a sort of capital within that marketplace. The nifty thing is that in order to take advantage of that marketplace, I don’t even have to have any capital. But the fact that some people do have such capital is what makes the marketplace thrive, and the more capital there is, the more it thrives, which makes it easier for people to write their own better free software, which they pump back into the system, and so on, ad infinitum. If nobody contributed free software to the development community, life would be a lot harder for developers and thus for the business world. Further, free software drives innovation within the free software community and within the business world, and innovation is good for everybody in the longrun. Not all developers of free software become millionaires or find themselves famous, but it’s a stretch to say that there’s no other good reason for performing a task, especially if it’s one, as it tends to be with those who develop free software, that you absolutely love doing.

I don’t get paid to read books and to share my impressions of them with friends; nor am I famous for doing so. But I love doing so, and that’s worth plenty.

Which brings me to the second point on which the author of that condescending letter was wrong. Some people may consider the deployment of free software to be an act of altruism. In fact, many who write free software probably pat themselves on the back for performing such a selfless act. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as selflessness, though, in software development or in any other field. There is a “me” motivation in everything we do. In my case, I write tools that I’m willing to make available for free, but I write them first for myself, to ease my work load. Giving them away is an afterthought. And even then, there’s a selfish motivation: What if somebody runs across my tool and likes it? There’s always the possibility that I’ll either be paid for further development or that I’ll get a compliment, at least. There’s nothing selfless about it.