Category Archives: Technology

Update VIII: Launching The Most Beautiful Site (& Blog) On the WWW

Aesthetics, Free Markets, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Technology

We have lift off!

At last we’ve launched the fabulous, new ILANAMERCER.COM.

The site is huge; the task Herculean. It’s easily the most beautiful site on the WWW.

As you spend time on the new ILANAMERCER.COM, you’ll get an opportunity to test the site’s database and advanced search, and enjoy its many features.

“Going live” is much like moving into a castle in cyberspace.

Developing some of the concepts was great fun. First to my favorite, the creature named “that funky snake”:

At the risk of being denounced, I did not want the Stars and Stripes on the site. The flag no longer stands for the classical liberal ideas and ideals of self-government and individual rights. I don’t think I’d get an argument from our regular readers.

Conversely, early American symbols do represent the values cherished and championed in my work. And in particular, the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Or the Gadsden flag.

Other candidates were the Liberty Bell and Liberty Tree. The massive trunk and gnarled bark of the oak (elm was also used) is depicted famously in a lithograph by E. C. Kellogg, the “Connecticut Charter Oak.” (It lives at the Connecticut Historical Society.)

The two symbols, however, turned out to be way too busy as website wallpaper. I just knew that, enlarged as background, the snake symbol would give the page the depth I wanted, bar the busyness. The snake just needed the right artistic touch. He got it.

Although fierce, the rattle snake is an honorable creature that never attacks without provocation and gives its enemies ample notice before attacking. Read about the Gadsden flag here.

The “Ilana Shrugged” concept was certainly unorthodox, down to the Atlas that matched the site’s theme colors.

A nice touch is the call-out side bars on the site’s core pages, showcasing Mercer quotes. The quotes rotate and change each time the page is refreshed. Other favorite and fun elements: the Gallery design, and the mouse-over effect on the upper navigation bar. Naturally, I just had to bring Leonidas into our world. Big and bold. (Read “300.”)

But mostly, the contents. At last, all my work is under one roof, and what a smashing roof it is.

And a huge shout-out to a true maverick: our benefactor, David Szasz. David donated most of the funds for this project.

A big “thank you,” too, to each and every reader who has contributed materially or intellectually.

Enjoy.

Update I: Another handy feature: If you wish to receive the weekly newsletter, click “Mailing List” on the navigation bar, and sign up here. Want to “Unsubscribe”? That too is possible, although never recommended.

Update II: Thanks to Sam Karnick of The American Culture for his kind wishes on our launch, as well as to the Canadian economist, champion of liberty, Pierre Lemieux. He quipped that ours was a “nice site/sight.”

Professor Haym Benaroya is most gracious:

Ilana, your new web site is representative of its owner: unique, and attractive to the mind and the eye. You truly are a master of language. I also appreciated the Atlas-like pose, as would have, I am sure, Ayn Rand. I will spend some more serious time looking it over. (I am wondering why, given Sean Hannity’s endorsement, he does not invite you to his show?) Best of luck! I do what I can to publicize your columns.

Update III: Barely a Blog is getting a makeover too. Fear not.

Update IV (October 29): Another favorite of mine is the “Click-to-expand-click-to-close” features on the Biographical and Quotables pages.

Update V (October 31): Although extremely user-friendly, some of you may find the Advanced Search a little intimidating. So, on the Articles Page, a smart, Search-by-Category button has been set up. Click on it! You’ll arrive at this lovely page, where you can flit between the many search categories with great ease. Let us know how that works for you.

Update VI (Nov. 6): I continue to receive web-approving letters. Thanks to Prof. Rob Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies for his kind words; to the intrepid Jim Ostrowski (he has launched a new site too; I wish him all the best. I was always very pleased to have been instrumental in pushing him to write Political Class Dismissed). And to my mother, of course, for her good wishes.

Update VII (Nov. 7): Working with programmers, you learn pretty fast that Microsoft WORD is regarded as a virus. Programmers say it is crappy code. (About programmers, the spouse, who’s an RF engineer, and a PhD., once made this succinct comment: “They–programmers–manipulate ones and zeros; we–engineers–manipulate the laws of nature.”) Fair enough. I won’t get into a turf war; after all, what do I know about code? I’m willing to agree that programmers are right and WORD is crappy from a technical point of view. It sure has gummed up the beautiful font and formatting on my site with HTML gunk. However, WORD is the most popular program in the WORLD.

It is what most of us PC plebs choose to use. The market has spoken. The market always chooses voluntarily what it prefers. Hundreds of million of users have voted. Few of us want to use those other rarified programs PC snobs are always exalting. And for a reason: WORD must have an advantage. (As opposed a government agency, a company grows by gaining market share; by getting people to cast a vote for the product. There is no such thing as monopoly where voluntary exchanges are concerned; only where government is concerned.)

The fact that (far fewer) programmers cannot adapt their code to the most used program chosen by the market is a fault of the programmers, not the market. The market is always right. Call it the aggregate customer. Programmers have simply failed to come up with solution to the problems presented by WORD.

Again, theoretically, programmers who complain about WORD are probably 100% correct, but pragmatically, they’ve not solved the market’s problem. So they’re at fault.

Update VIII (Nov. 21, 2008): I have now launched the most beautiful blog on the WWW, after I had found the perfect blog spot on which to unfurl my signature, Gadsden, “Funky-Snake” flag.

Enjoy!

Avoid FrontPages Web Hosting Network

Barely A Blog, IlanaMercer.com, Technology

Those who frequent Barely a Blog know by now that we’ve been down for close on two weeks.

Our host, the FrontPages Web Hosting Network, crashed the server, bungled the backup (or didn’t backup), and corrupted the “backup” data. All this, during a sloppy upgrade/transfer. Forensic recovery service was apparently initiated, but we saw no evidence of a positive outcome.

Follow-up service, moreover, was non-existent. I cannot speak for the hundreds of clients affected, but I was not informed of the bungle, or of the steps being taken to put things right. Hell, as far as I’m concerned nothing was done to correct matters. We were left hanging.

FrontPages Web Hosting is a Third World operation by any other name.

IlanaMercer.com is on the Microsoft FrontPage System, a clunker of a system, but extremely reliable—the site is automatically backed up on one’s PC. (Now that I’m in the process of having a new website designed, I also realize the FrontPage System offers the best editing tools.) We could easily have uploaded IlanaMercer.com right away on one of their functioning servers, but we decided that this would give the incompetents a way to wiggle out of forensically resurrecting the blog. So we waited until it became untenable. After contacting what goes for technical support at FrontPages Web Hosting repeatedly, it transpired that they were unable to locate the blog data base. Lost it; couldn’t find it, whatever.

Naturally, I had been backing my blog up diligently. As you know, BAB is a companion to my main site. On it I offer original daily commentary; not mere links to other reports and commentary. FrontPages Web Hosting appears to have made changes to the backup procedure, so that my backup had been incomplete for close on a year. The consequence of this is that a large portion of the blog has now to be restored manually. Your comments for the last year were lost.

If you are Fujifilm, Honda, and Intel—big customers with dedicated servers—you’re, no doubt, treated well by FrontPages Web Hosting. My business they handled with contempt. I would go so far as to say that this company operates in bad faith (not toward Boeing and the Library of Congress, I’m sure). What else would you call an Internet host that fails to back up its (smaller) clients’ data properly, or does so carelessly? Reliability, after all, has to be the most important feature in a hosting company. Suffice it to say that this isn’t the case with FrontPages Web Hosting. In fact, their advertising here is nothing but a farce. “Expertise, security, highest ranking in reliability”—are you kidding me?

Live Free or Die Hard: Geeks As Gods

Film, Hollywood, Objectivism, Technology, The Zeitgeist

I enjoy Bruce Willis, but even he can’t be expected to make a pathetic script and characters come alive in the latest “Die Hard” flick.

“Live Free or Die Hard” is studded with familiar Hollywood clichés:

The future of the US—and hence the free world—lies in the capable hands of unkept, dirty-looking, young 20-something computer geeks.

Older men like Willis may be muscular and heroic, but they are essentially dumb—devoid of the young’s brilliance, something they keep chanting. What’s more, everything about them is so yesterday—the music they like, the sort of parents they are; it’s all just crap, deserving of the hissing contempt of the young.

The shallow progeny has no idea dad’s daily drudgery includes many a heroic feat. Only when dad nearly dies rescuing the young bitch’s worthless behind does bitch decide to take on his last name.

This admittedly is the staple Hollywood pabulum. You’ve seen it in every single film and TV series: youngsters sneering at their parents, dishing out dirt, telling the parent—dad predominantly—how worthless he is. For his part, instead of cutting off the viper’s funds, dad grovels on his belly begging for some crumbs from the imperious offspring’s metaphoric table.

Yes, these are undying Hollywood themes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not as sick-making each time they’re encountered.

I watched the film with two technologically savvy “older” men (aged 42 and 52 respectively), who’re rather competent at problem solving. As much as they (and I) love action films, nothing about the special effects was believable.

Perhaps most ludicrous is Hollywood’s mythical, infantile conception of computers. Seat a PC savvy type—provided he’s young, of course—in front of a random monitor, and, evidently, there’s no end to the information he or she can squeeze from the thing, including to intercept a fighter aircraft flying above.

Don’t these people consult anyone who actually works in the business?

The usual useless idiots will try and extract heroic symbolism from this sorry script. Resorting to symbolism is subjective—to project one’s own infantile projections onto a cultural product is certainly an intellectual cop-out. Objective merits are what ought to count first and foremost in the assessment of all such products.

Consider a good review of “Live Free or Die Hard” as the litmus test for the stupid reviewer.

Updated: Are Objectivists Cultural Philistines?

Democracy, Music, Objectivism, Technology, The West, The Zeitgeist

When it comes to culture, too many Objectivists display quite a bit of philistinism. For example, from their publications one is led to believe that the Superman/Spider-man genre of film is somehow the pinnacle of Western cinematic accomplishment, philosophically and stylistically. Or at least, this is the impression they give, perhaps unintentionally.

In her appreciation of music, Ayn Rand was undeniably very limited. She took mainly to Rachmaninoff. So what? Her imperfections are not the point. Ayn Rand was enough of an innovator to have her eccentricities. The point, rather, is the cult-like conduct of her acolytes—to religiously assimilate the peculiarities and tics of another is to relinquish one’s judgment, and learning curve, to say nothing of one’s individuality. Monkeys mimic.

Nevertheless, Objectivists fetishize Rachmaninoff, and try and make the case that classical music’s worth hinges on one representative of Russian Romanticism, rather than on very many giants from other places and periods.

Objectivist publications often feature large, glossy photos of tall American buildings. This rather hackneyed, crude imagery is meant to capture man’s heroic mastery of his environment. I’m an enthusiastic champion of man as master of the universe. But these displays are just too outsized, clunky and out-of-date.

Patriotism is all well and good, moreover, but realism, at least to this writer, is paramount. If Objectivists—and Americans in general—tuned into the world, they’d recognize that our once-great cities are looking rather shabby and old. I am told that America is no longer the place for the latest in architecture (that goes for free-market capitalism too. Here are more amazing buildings).

Sean, who’s at the pinnacle of the electrical engineering profession, always chuckles at the shiny technology shots in said publications—these are supposed to stand for innovation. The projects depicted are often statist rather than private. But even odder—and off—are the “heroic” images of the microchip assembly line. Don’t Objectivists understand that the assembly line is where the product designed by industry innovators is put together by factory workers?

An emphasis on the values of equality and representative mass society is increasingly central to the more militant among Objectivists and certainly to the neocons—values that are also America’s main export. Perhaps celebrating those low on the creativity ladder comports with this philosophical tenet.