A Boolean argument was expected.

I have decided that this weblog is in need of a name change.

I originally named it Spontaneous Publicity on a whim, from the line in the movie The Jerk where Steve Martin’s character sees that the new phone books have arrived and excitedly exclaims, “This is the kind of spontaneous publicity — your name in print — that makes people.”

This was back in September 2005, when my first entries into a nascent weblog were about other weblogs having taken notice of my Blues Brothers map.  To have other people talking about my website was, quite literally, “spontaneous publicity” — which immediately made me think of that movie line, and thus I had a title for my weblog.

Of course, since then my topics have ranged much further from self-referential contemplation of my website and its place in cyberspace (this entry notwithstanding).  The title has no relevance to these topics.

In addition, I find that the domain name for the dot-com version of this title is held by some Microsofter and his family, and is used for the usual semi-literate stuff-going-on-in-our-lives rambling of all blogs — I won’t denigrate it any further than that, per the “glass houses” rule.  Suffice to say that we both got our titles from the same source, but they bought the domain name when I didn’t bother to do so.  By the way, my blog pre-dates theirs by more than two years.  But no matter.

Here’s the funny thing, and the one reason I’m reluctant to change my weblog’s name.  If you Google “spontaneous publicity weblog” my site, not theirs, comes up first.  This is because Google loves me.   (Of course, if you use the loogie-word “blog” instead of “weblog”, theirs wins.)

Still, that’s probably not enough reason not to change it.  Moreover, a good reason to change the name is this: I’m not all that big a fan of The Jerk.

I have a front-running candidate for the new title.  It comes from having clicked on an external link in my entry on Angelo Testa the other day, in order to check that it was still a good link.  It came back successful, with this result:

460 Angelo Testa sculpture USA, c. 1978 11.5 h x 28.5 w inches : A Boolean argument was expected. Provenance: Collection Of The Artist; Daniel Czubak, Chicago $4000-$5000

As I read the description, I thought to myself: that’s an interesting title for that work.  It took me several seconds to realise it was in fact a database error –  “A Boolean argument was expected.”

Here’s a point in favour: current Google results imply it would stand out a little more…

• “spontaneous publicity” = 2440
• “A Boolean argument was expected” = 1210

Best of all, the title is in a vague way a better reflection of what this weblog is about. The arguments one finds here are distinctly not Boolean. There are no clear-cut, black-and-white, Manichaean dichotomies here. Just a whole lot of shades of grey. Kind of like the new “inove” theme it’s using.

Another blog has come along to tout my Blues Brothers map. This one’s in Dutch, and was posted early on 28 March 2007:

Het zal jelui bekend zijn dat ‘t epische muziekdrama The Blues Brothers — de film van de jaren tachtig, werd gefilmd in Chicago. Alle reden dus voor ondergetekende om de diverse filmlocaties van Robert Landis’ masterpiece eens nader onder de loep te nemen. Met andere woorden: ik zal, gebaseerd op deze voortreffelijke pagina, even langswippen bij die locaties — mits ik in de buurt ben — en gedurende de komende maanden op deze plek een fotografische impressie geven. ‘t Zal niet allemaal even spectaculair zijn, en tal van locaties zijn compleet veranderd, maar niettemin: dit is geschiedenis mensen. Mis ‘t niet!

Which, according to Babelfish, says something like:

It [is well known (?)] that the epic music drama The Blues Brohters — the film of the [Eighties] — was filmed in Chicago. All reason therefore for undersigned to evaluate the several film locations of Robert {sic — it was John} Landis’ masterpiece once closer. In other words: I, based on this excellent page, [will take a look (?)] at those locations — provided that I am in the ['hood] — and during the coming months on this spot a photographic impression to give. [It] will be not all even spectacular, and numerous locations have completely changed, but [nevertheless]: this is history people. Wrong [it's] not!

(Haven’t included a link to the weblog… because I’m not sure yet whether it’s a smutty site or not.)

On Tuesday, 2 January 2007, I made a minor update to my Blues Brothers map that both improved its function and reduced the number of extraneous image GETs.

The long of it… Previously, when clicking on a marker, the popup balloon would be undersized for the content. Part of the screen capture image and any text below it would be superimposed on the map rather than on a nice clean white background, making it hard to read. Clicking on the marker a second time would redraw the balloon in a proper size, but each click sends another GET command for the image (even though the subsequent clicks usually result in a “304 – not modified” response).

I was stuck on thinking that a fix would require some complicated and obscure tweaking of the Google Maps API, but the actual solution is mindlessly simple. My sudden realisation may be considered a dope-slap epiphany. When the balloon is first drawn, the image has not yet been downloaded, so the browser doesn’t know how big it is. It assumes that the image is 0 pixels high, and draws the balloon accordingly. (This seems like a silly assumption, but I suppose it’s better than assuming it’s 1000 pixels high.) Then the image is downloaded, and since it’s much more than 0 pixels high, it overshoots the bottom of the balloon. Follow-up clicks redraw the balloon, and now since the browser knows the image size in advance, the balloon is drawn in a proper size.

To fix it, all I needed to do was include the height of the image in its tag, thus giving the browser advance warning. I added another variable to the data set: iheight. The elegant part of this is that with only a few exceptions, all of the images are 100 pixels high. Therefore the iheight declaration only needs to be included in the exceptional entries. The code now checks for iheight==null, and if so automatically sets the value to 100. All the code to accomplish this only increased the total download size by 207 bytes. This margin is more than absorbed by a reduced need to click twice on each marker.

By early Wednesday morning, the logs were showing success. A visitor arrived and viewed nearly every marker on the map — yet only clicked once on each.

In other news, my first weblog comment has appeared, in reference to my Sloucho post, and it’s an odd one:

Name: Trademark Answers » A paean to public access | URI: http://trademark.inventionanswers.com/?p=344 | IP: 216.93.250.34 | Date: 13 October 2006

[…] Original post by Spontaneous Publicity […]

The link points back to another weblog, titled “Trademark Answers,” where the first few paragraphs of my post (or at least yesterday’s edit of it) are reprinted (poorly, losing paragraph breaks) along with a link to it. Seems like the whole thing is some kind of spamming autobot — no comments, no added content, nothing. I think maybe it got picked up because it includes the phrase “copyright issues.” How fucking ironic that this (intellectual property theft or breach of weblog etiquette?) occurred on a site about… copyright infringement!

Well, as the pessimist in me expected, the owner of that MAC/MSU Sesqui site (no link, because he has pissed me off) did a totally half-assed job of updating his pages to reference me, putting a parenthetical statement at the end of all his stolen sections saying “Descriptive text lifted and modified from Kevin Forsyth’s excellent website. Thanks Kevin!” Note how the link is, in all cases, to the first page of my chronology, not to the front page nor to the page specific to the entry, either of which would have been more appropriate. And of course, it does not include the phrase “used with permission,” because it — more and more emphatically — was not. And frankly, whether he intended it or not, the whole thing feels cheeky to me, particularly when a correction I offered (removal of “Olds Hall” from images depicting the older Engineering Building rather than Olds Hall) gets this treatment:

Engineering Building (Olds Hall)

Note: According to author Kevin Forsyth, the building that burned in 1916 never carried the Olds name. Olds Hall was a total rebuild from the ground up on the old foundation, and while it looks exactly like the older building, Kevin thinks it’s inaccurate to show the building that burned down and call it Olds Hall.

So while he gives my correction a forum, he neither shows his agreement by actually changing the offending heading, nor offers an opposing view or rationale, instead treating me at arm’s length like a pest. Wouldn’t it have made more sense just to take out the parenthetical (and inaccurate) reference to Olds Hall and leave it at that?

Wait a minute! It occurred to me, the words in the above excerpt sounded familiar. So I checked. Everything that appears after my name are the exact words I used in my e-mail to him, with a change of inflection from “I think” to “Kevin thinks.” Except — without quotation marks or other attribution! This guy just so totally doesn’t get it.

Fucking shithead. Thus endeth this acquaintance… if he ever needs my help again, he’s going to have to come hat in hand. (As if he would — I’m certain he’ll steal from me first.) It’s times like this that make me wish the whole web was wikified.