As I move toward presenting at SXSW on the Beyond Folksonomies panel, it just made sense to set up a site for the panel. We're using it to work through the ideas for the panel itself, to figure out what we'll cover, putting up links to information that we won't have time to cover and generally providing an extension to the 1 hour on stage, making that 1 hour only one bit of how we explore this topic.

So, if you'll be sitting there in the audience (or playing along at home), now's your chance to influence what we talk about. Give us a visit.

It's been really busy around here for the last few days. My mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law are going to be in from Montana on Saturday and staying with us. This always seems to snap us out of complete apathy when it comes to home improvement and cleaning. Suddenly, because someone else will be visiting our house, it needs to be returned to some level of order and cleanliness and unfinished projects become glaring embarrassments that need their shame covered up.

Photo: Todd Klassy

The home theater wall nearest the garage was the glaring problem this time around. The entire home theater was originally encircled by a wallpaper border. If you have never dealt with removing old wallpaper, you may not know that the product was invented in the depths of hell and removing it was featured as one of the tasks of Hercules that eventually got edited out as just too scary for readers. Apparently, the people who put this stuff up on the walls used some sort of Cold War era, top secret mega glue to put this stuff up, because it did NOT want to come down.

That, combined with the fact that the room is full of stuff that can't go anywhere else, has led to a slow progression around the room of moving things to the side, venturing into battle with the wallpaper, painting the area and moving the furniture back into place.

Except for the one last wall. It's pretty much been sitting as this beige and green blob in the middle of my warm yellow and "iced tea" colored theater, the leaves in the wallpaper mocking my lack of ambition.

When I finally tackled the task this weekend, it proved one of my personal development mantras that I've been trying to drill into my own head. Most painful tasks are all bark and no bite. All of these tasks that are barking threateningly at us are just not that bad in reality. We let the barking intimidate us because we're afraid of a bite that never happens. In many cases, 5 minutes or 5 hours or 5 days of just dealing with it completely takes care of it instead of the hours, days and weeks we envision.

So, in a matter of 4 hours or so, the wallpaper was down and 3 coats of paint were nearly done drying. Emboldened by my success and already covered in paint (I am NOT a tidy painter), I decided to make use of the aquarium stand that I ended up with.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a good deal on a used 75 gallon aquarium setup. It's all sitting in the garage while I build up the rest of the stuff I need to make it the spectacular project I envision. However, it came with a basic pine stand that was just 2 inches too narrow for what I wanted to fit underneath it. Which, of course, means I'll be building my own. However, that left what to do with the stand I had in the garage.

Enter the gallon of dark brown paint (matches the couch) I bought to see if I wanted to put a faux finish on the "iced tea" color (I didn't). While I didn't want to use it on the walls, it suddenly entered the picture to make the pine stand into the base for my snack station at the back of the room.

So, I moved the dropcloth over, pulled the stand inside and painted it up. It's now sitting in the back, with the refrigerator and pizza oven on top of it. I'll add a bit of a "counter" on the other half and put in the little cabinet also sitting in the garage and I'll have my prep area, popcorn maker, microwave, pizza oven, soda refrigerator and movie library at the back of the room. Almost no money invested, a few hours of hard work and I'm thrilled.

I'm sure my guests won't notice, but they don't need to. They already contributed by being the catalyst. And, I feel a renewed sense of ambition to get some things done this week. I'm downright humiliated by some of the barking tasks that I've been avoiding.

Photo: Paul Keller

Last night on public radio, I heard an analyst talking about a trend in American companies rebranding themselves as "global" companies. As an indicator of this shift, the CEO's of these companies have altered their rhetoric to include statements like:

"I'm the CEO of a global company."
"We're not outsourcing jobs, we're bringing work to the places that can do it more efficiently."
"We're doing business where we can get the best environment in which to do business."

The last one was expanded more to include business taxation, regulation and . . . intellectual property laws.

It's that last bit that is causing me to write this post. Mr. Global CEO, listen up. You can't have it both ways.

See, while you are busily working hard to become a "global" company, the non-corporate entities in the world have been quietly working to become global citizens. They have easy access to labor pools, manufacturing and the ability to route data of any sort all over the planet.

When you complain that your global music business is hurt by internet users downloading music for $0.02 per album from Russia, those global citizens are just getting their music from an environment that's willing to provide the resource more efficiently.

When you complain that your global movie business is hurt when Americans buy the DVD for $1 on the streets of Shanghai instead of $29.95 in their local Sam Goody, these global citizens see it as just bringing global business to the place providing more efficient delivery of the product.

When you rush to move your manufacturing from country to country chasing the cheapest prices, the global citizens are looking to buy the same stuff directly from the wholesaler in China you bought it from, without the 70% markup.

When you push the American Congress to loosen the laws against bribery and other activities that are illegal under American law so you can do those things in other countries where "that's how things are done", these global citizens are using the internet to route traffic offshore, to cover their tracks when "stealing" your intellectual property, to anonymously blog about internal corruption within your organization and otherwise skirt the rules you want enforced in the United States.

In short, mr. global ceo, while you are busy getting all excited about how globalization and technology can revolutionize how you do business, just remember that you aren't the only one who has access to it. You've given up the protections of several hundred years of protective legislation in the United States. You've given up control of how your products and services are used in the interest of being global. And, your customers, your employees, your offshore contract drones have all started making the shift to Global Citizens as well.

Are you ready?

As some of you who use this site via its RSS feed have undoubtedly noticed over the last couple of days, those feeds pretty much entered FUBAR territory. Instead of nicely structured XML data, there was an error about the XML entity not coming at the beginning of an external file.

This weekend, Tim McGuire saw it and let me know. I cleared the cache and it seemed to go away. Of course, like all good problems, it came back and the old remedy wasn't any match for it.

So, what was the problem you ask (and lots of people on lots of forums have been asking about this very problem)?

1. If there is any space, extra line or anything at all before the initial <?xml at the beginning of the output, the strict validators will puke on it.
2. Are you serious, J? Yes. An extra empty line in front of the first text is what was breaking it.

So, it's just a matter of removing the line and my chest can swell with geeky pride, right? Well, not so fast. See, the empty line wasn't in wp-rss2.php.

Where was it? I still don't know. The general consensus on this bug was that any one of the installed plugins, on any one line (depending on the plugin) could be contributing the extra line. Which, of course resulted in a gigantic case of

Whiskey
Tango
Foxtrot

Never one to voluntarily take on the drudgery of manually digging through files while the live system is up and running, I whipped up a quick solution that fixes it in the short term, while I try to figure out which one of the 25+ plugins is outputting a single empty line.

So, I used output buffering and PHP's trim() function to just strip off extra whitespace before and after the content. The stupid extra line is still there, but is suppressed, making the feed OK for use. In other words, the tumor is still there, but the headache is hidden by aspirin.

If you'd like to put this change in for your own Wordpress site while you, too, play "Where's Whitespace" with your code tree, do this:

Add:

ob_start();

as the first line inside the PHP snippet in wordpress/wp-rss2.php (and wp-rss.php, etc. for the different feed types).

Then, at the bottom of the file, add this snippet.

<?php
$output = ob_get_contents();
ob_clean();
print(trim($output));
ob_flush();
?>


If you're using any plugins that mess with output buffering already or any fancy header control, this may not work, but it did on this site and patched things over while I play oncologist and go digging for the little tumor.

While I'd be irritated at the author of whatever plugin is causing the problem, to me every tool along the way should be working against this being a problem in the first place. I understand how putting an ampersand inside the file would cause an error. But, come on, whitespace inside the tags is ignored, so why is the same whitespace inserted in the beginning enough to make the parsers choke? And, why doesn't Wordpress already do something similar to my fix to prevent poorly written plugins from breaking the whole thing because they hit an extra ENTER key.

Beyond them, why does PHP implicitly flush the headers at the first sign of whitespace? Or at least allow you to turn it off? Wordpress isn't the only PHP app to run into this problem. Forums are full of people completely clueless as to why they're getting errors only to discover that that little extra line at the top of the file is breaking their entire script.

Photo: Brian Boulos

According to their official website, Gov't Mule is back in the studio to record a followup to Deja Voodoo. As Warren Haynes and Gov't Mule are some of the hardest working musicians on the planet, I have no doubt that the album will be out this year and will be the musical highlight to my 2006.

MULE IN THE STUDIO
Following a few days off after the New Year's shows, Gov't Mule is returning to the studio to record its follow-up to Deja Voodoo. Warren flew down to Austin, TX yesterday to write with producer Gordie Johnson (Big Sugar) and the band and crew will join him next week and enter Willie Nelson's famed Pedernales Studio to begin recording.

The soon to be launched In The Studio will be providing you with "fly on the wall" access to the recording of the new Gov't Mule record. Beginning January 18th with rehearsal, and continuing through the entire recording process, come right back here for daily updates including a blog, photos, streaming video, and more.

As it's still early on the 18th, I expect that the extras they mention will show up later today and I'll be watching and waiting.