It’s a helluva thing, a trial by jury. It was a radical notion 200 years ago, and it’s still a radical notion today.

I served on a jury once. Getting called for jury duty sucks, because most of the time you just sit in the jury lounge all day and then go home. But actually serving on a jury is a totally different thing. I think everyone should experience it at least once. In one sense, it’s just like you see on TV, except everything takes longer and you can’t go to the bathroom every 12 minutes. But it’s weird, if you’ve seen it on TV, because you realize that you already know the script. “Burden of proof,” “innocent until proven guilty,” “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” The judge lays it all out for you, from scratch, even though most people have seen the scene and heard the speech and read the words a hundred times.

Everything is slanted towards the defense. Big stuff, little stuff, process stuff, everything. We learned later (during sentencing) that the defendant in our case had several prior convictions, but the DA wasn’t allowed to bring them up during the trial. Witnesses were always being cut off in mid-sentence, but the defendant was given a wide berth to tell his version of events. We didn’t even know exactly what the charge meant until the defense lawyer made his closing argument. That, in particular, was incredibly frustrating. I made all sorts of notes like “is this important? don’t know, check later.” The judge said it was to force us to listen to everyone and everything as fairly as possible. It was frustrating on purpose, but it worked.

And I remember thinking at the time, “This thing. Right here, this thing. This is what we say America is about.” Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and everybody gets their day in court. We suspected that Hans Reiser killed his wife. What did we give him? A trial. We suspected that Timothy McVeigh blew up a building and killed 168 people. What did we give him? A trial. (BTW, this is why people get so upset over our mishandling of terror suspects. What could possibly be more un-American than saying that some people don’t deserve a fair trial?)

The case I served on wasn’t anything you’ll ever hear about, or read about, or see on TV. Just some neighbors who had ongoing petty feuds for years and years, until one day one of them went too far and made a real death threat. You’d say he “crossed the line.” I think the actual charge was called “commencement of threats,” which basically means he crossed one of the invisible lines that holds society together.

Some people spend their whole life right on the edge of being able to function in a civilized society. I knew a guy like that, growing up outside Philadelphia. His name was Eric. He always seemed to be in trouble with the law. Never anything serious, and not your standard crimes like robbery or drugs or weapons. Just… not quite understanding the boundaries between himself and everyone else. He could make friends quickly, but then he lost them just as quickly. He never had a steady girlfriend. He couldn’t maintain any sort of long-term relationship. I think an ex-girlfriend got a restraining order against him one time. And he’d get arrested for stuff like “criminal trespass” and “commencement of threats.”

Society is about drawing lines that everyone acknowledges and respects. Some people see the lines and cross them anyway and hope they don’t get caught. Eric didn’t even see the lines. They didn’t make any sense to him, so when he crossed them, he didn’t understand why he got in trouble. And you just wanted to smack him and say, “Just stay out of trouble, Eric! Just leave people alone.” And he did, most of the time. But “most of the time” is not “all of the time.” And it’s a crude word, but I think he was a little bit crazy. Not really crazy, like Hannibal Lecter crazy. He just… couldn’t see the lines. You don’t have to be crazy all the time, to be crazy.

Anyway, our case came and went. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but there’s only so much you can say about neighbors yelling at each other. I think the whole trial only lasted a day and a half, from jury selection to sentencing. In the end, we deliberated and found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The victim asked, and the judge agreed, and we the jurors were pleased to hear, that he should get a suspended sentence and a mental health assessment, with mandatory followup counseling. I’d guess he was offered deals and plea bargains, and I’d guess that everyone in his life begged him to take it. But he wanted his day in court, and he wanted a trial by a jury of his peers, and so that’s what we did. And he mounted a vigorous defense, and he was innocent right up until the moment we decided he was guilty.

I’m not going to get all puffed up about the glory of the system or the honor of performing my civic duty or whatever. The system is broken in a lot of ways, and there’s a reason they call it a duty — because it sounds a lot better in the abstract than it feels in the particular, slogging through downtown traffic and standing in line at the metal detectors and sitting quietly while people go on and on about their fucked up lives. But I also got a glimpse of a marvelous and precarious machine, built up and crusted over from two centuries of radical tradition, grinding ever so slowly forward. And it’s a helluva thing.

• FontMatrix, which helped me pick the God-awful fonts I’m foisting on the world
• PowerTOP, because I love viewing new cross-sections of my computing environment
• Wordle (example), despite being a Java applet written in 2008
• OpenJDK, which is now in Debian main
• YSlow, which proved that my Cache-Control headers really did blow goats
• WP-SuperCache, which fixed them (sorry, goats)
• Flight of the Conchords (note: they are actually twice as awesome as everything else on this list)
• Trader Joe’s, because food wasn’t expensive enough already
• Toblerone, just because

And you?

Google (my current employer) has finally open sourced protocol buffers, the data interchange format we use for internal server-to-server communication. The blogosphere’s response? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Aaaaanyway…

Protocol buffers are “just” cross-platform data structures. All you have to write is the schema (a .proto file), then generate bindings in C++, Java, or Python. (Or Haskell. Or Perl.) The .proto file is just a schema; it doesn’t contain any data except default values. All getting and setting is done in code. The serialized over-the-wire format is designed to minimize network traffic, and deserialization (especially in C++) is designed to maximize performance. I can’t begin to describe how much effort Google spends maximizing performance at every level. We would tear down our data centers and rewire them with $500 ethernet cables if you could prove that it would reduce latency by 1%.

Besides being blindingly fast, protocol buffers have lots of neat features. A zero-size PB returns default values. You can nest PBs inside each other. And most importantly, PBs are both backward and forward compatible, which means you can upgrade servers gradually and they can still talk to each other in the interim. (When you have as many machines as Google has, it’s always the interim somewhere.)

Comparisons to other data formats was, I suppose, inevitable. Old-timers may remember ASN.1 or IIOP. Kids these days seem to compare everything to XML or JSON. They’re actually closer to Facebook’s Thrift (written by ex-Googlers) or SQL Server’s TDS. Protocol buffers won’t kill XML (no matter how much you wish they would), nor will they replace JSON, ASN.1, or carrier pigeon. But they’re simple and they’re fast and they scale like crazy, and that’s the way Google likes it.

Despite the promising URL, NYsTopChildPorn.com does not, in fact, contain NY’s top child porn. (”Package contained bobcat. Would not buy again.”) It will, however, be blocked by every web filtering program ever based solely on the domain name — an irony which will sadly be lost on the Attorneys General. I bet they bring in a metric buttload of weird search traffic before they fold, though.

Yeah, I know, I’m joking about child porn. Carlin is dead, Pesci bless him, and somebody’s gotta start picking up the slack.

(The site itself is not notable in any way except as a reason to point out the obvious design flaw — that you’re declaring war on a protocol, and, you know, good luck with that.)

(I really like pluralizing “Attorney General.” And verbing nouns. And parenthesizing.)

The wife and the first born are in New York City for the long weekend, except the second born pronounces it “New Orc City,” which sounds much more interesting if you ask me. This is not the first time Ethan has traveled, but it’s the first time that he and his brother have been separated for more than 8 hours. It has also given them their first opportunity to talk to each other on the telephone, long distance. I assume it won’t be the last.

Wesley and I have been having a wonderful time doing all manner of things without, you know, competition. Watching his favorite movies, wading in the Eno River, and spotting butterflies at the Museum of Life and Science. No pics, sorry (the wife has the camera in New Orc City), but here’s some pictures from our trip 2 years ago: a butterfly, a sheep, and a pot-bellied pig. I swear the pig hasn’t moved in 2 years.

On a coming-full-circle kind of note, the Festival of the Eno uses Papyrus in their video materials. We saw it on the shuttle bus on the way back to the parking lot. My mother was sitting next to me, and I got all excited and poked her and pointed to the screen above us and said, “Hey, I know that font! Everybody hates that font!” Who says designers are useless?

Adobe® Reader® 9 is out. It’s now almost half as fast as Foxit Reader. It lets you embed Flash in PDF and embed PDF in Flash. Adobe supports both kinds of music, country and western. They’ve also “conveniently” bundled Adobe® AIR™ for no apparent reason and added synergistic integration with their cloud, which claims it doesn’t support my browser and then requires both Javascript and Flash to sign up for an Adobe® ID, the use of which is governed by this draconian service agreement, which is a PDF.

You can’t make this stuff up. And apparently it gets worse if you try to, you know, actually install it.

It occurs to me that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to achieve a harmonic convergence with these mega-platforms. “Adobe® Acrobat® version 9 with Adobe® Flash® version 10 with Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 with Adobe® AIR™ beta 3″ will get truncated to “Adobe 9.” Coming soon on Overheard in New York: “Hey, are you on Adobe 9?” “No, I’m on Microsoft 14.” “Pity. I was hoping we could have sex.” Or something like that. Who knows, with these wacky kids today and their vendor-specific runtimes?

> PDF is neither

AIR is both.

All the heuristics that you are inexplicably defending at this time

I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.  Where did I say I was defending anything?  It’s like you’re having an entirely different discussion in your head, and I’m not invited.

This was proposed on a blog, and ultimately showed up here.

Thank you for making my point so succinctly (though you probably didn’t realize it).

The original RSS autodiscovery “standard” (nee blog post) was TERRIBLE.  It didn’t specify what clients should do when multiple autodiscovery links were present; it wasn’t clear that attributes could appear in any order (which led directly to interoperability issues); it wasn’t clear that “alternate” could be one of any number of space-separated keywords in the @rel attribute, that the @rel attribute was not case-sensitive (more interop problems); it wasn’t clear whether relative URIs were supported and how they should be resolved; and on and on.

Oh, and it used “text/xml” for the @type attribute instead of “application/rss+xml”.  Even though that mistake was corrected THREE DAYS LATER and I chased my referrers and left comments on OVER 100 BLOGS to notify people about the new syntax, the damage had already been done.  To this day, client implementations still need to support the “text/xml” variant that I “standardized” on my blog FOR THREE DAYS, over six years ago.  But since there’s no spec governing this behavior, clients are free to implement it in incompatible ways.  For example, did you know that Firefox only treats a type="text/xml" link as a feed if the @title attribute contains the magic letters "RSS"?  (And of course they’re still tweaking that heuristic as well.)

So one of the founders of Atom is in favor of people just making up a new “standard” and announcing it on their blogs after they’ve already implemented it.  And he either can’t see — or is deliberately obscuring — the difference between “making shit up on a blog” and “standardizing behavior in a formal group setting.”

How far we’ve fallen.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that leading accessibility experts agree on is that nobody listens to leading accessibility experts, especially not the microformats cabal, which has never cared about accessibility, has never bothered to test it, and has never acknowledged those who have tested it. In fact, the BBC recently removed one microformat from their site because one piece of it may be confusing to some screen reader users with a certain non-default configuration. This proves what leading accessibility experts have been saying all along, that all microformats are inaccessible, and we should all just use RDF.

Meanwhile, the devilish cabal is secretly solving the problem on their public wiki page, their public mailing list, and their public IRC channel. But will it be enough for the BBC? Be sure to tune in next week, when we’ll drown a leading accessibility expert to see if she’s a witch.

Calendars are data tables.

Benjamin Mako Hill is awesome. That reminds me of a story.

During my brief tenure at Cornell University, I worked at the campus computing labs. It was just grunt work — keeping the waiting list during peak hours, refilling printer paper, and playing Tetris-as-a-desk-accessory (because the Macs were all on System 6 without MultiFinder). I was technically employed by CIT, which I think stood for “Cornell Information Technologies.” They were the organization that ran the computer labs. But nobody except employees really knew that; people assumed I worked for The University and didn’t know or care about internal bureaucratic structures.

Anyway, in the back of the computer labs, we kept boxes and boxes of printer paper. This was dot-matrix paper, with the edges that you had to thread into the (ImageWriter) printers and then tear off after you printed. CIT could never seem to keep printer paper in the labs that needed it, and about once a week we would get a call from another lab across campus crying that they were out of paper and could we please send some over right away? And by “send some over,” of course I mean “carry some over.”

In an effort to deter theft (because everybody steals printer paper), we were told to write “Stolen From CIT” on the outside of each box. The thinking being, if someone were to break into the (locked!) cabinet and make off with an unwieldy box of near-worthless paper, they would be foiled by Good Samaritans who saw this insignia on the outside of the box and reported the crime. Seriously, that’s exactly how it was explained to me.

Of course, nobody knew what “CIT” stood for, nobody wanted our printer paper except other CIT labs, and and nobody ever took the boxes out into the open air except us, the hapless CIT employees, who had to carry said boxes to said labs.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would be proud.