A while ago, I posted about my problems with keeping various RSS readers informed about what information I’ve already seen. I failed to find an adequate solution – I was desperate enough to even try Bloglines, even though I try to avoid web solutions where native apps exist, but I abandoned it when I noticed that some lesser-visited blogs (like mine or all my friends’) were updated about once a week, only.

Over the Easter weekend, I got annoyed with the problem enough to hack a quick solution into Sage. This works to the extent that I now can have multiple Sage installations that know when they should mark a feed as updated. As pointed out on the mailing list, what I built is basically a glorified bookmark synchronizer, with the disadvantage of requiring a CGI script (which is just a flaw of the current implementation, this could probably be made to use WebDAV easily).

What motivated me is that I think the problem of reader-local RSS status is a pretty common one, and that it should be solved in a more general, perhaps even standardized way (perhaps one more WS-* standard? :)).

To my RSS-using readers: Do you use multiple readers/machines, too? How do you keep them synchronized? Any other thoughts or pointers on the design or implementation of this beast?

It’s not all that new any more, but I still think it’s interesting – David Brin has an article titled "How the US saved the world by buying vast amounts of stuff.." on his blog. He compellingly argues that the much-lamented economic globalization is an enormous force of good:

Far outweighing all “aid” the world ever saw, the greatest force for good in the world has consisted of Americans purchasing megatons of crap we never had to buy in the first place, under trade rules designed to favor those thousand of foreign factories.

My take? Globalization seems to be pretty unpopular around here. I attribute this largely to the dominant role that labor issues play in public debate, while the consumer point of view gets entirely neglected. While it is true that competition from developing countries costs jobs and drives down wages (see the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, predicting that real wages will fall with prices for labor-intensive products), it also has a tremendous effect on prices that is largely neglected in popular discussion. Do you think you could get that cheap DVD player if it was manufactured in Austria? Would your t-shirt cost the same if it was stitched in France instead of China? Actually, the job loss and wage decline are a consequence of lower prices for imported goods, since otherwise they wouldn’t outcompete locally produced ones. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the net social benefit of globalization is positive, and it does not mean that everyone will benefit.

My economic argument for globalization is incomplete, but I think that the ethical argument is pretty much unassailable. If you accept a universal definition of humanity, there is no good reason to deny that an Indian or Chinese worker should have an opportunity to sell his products on a developed country’s market. I also don’t see how an Austrian doing the same work is morally entitled to earn a higher wage. The much-proffered argument that workers in developing countries are unfairly exploited because their wages and working conditions are terrible is invalid, since in the huge majority of cases, these workers voluntarily choose their jobs. Yes, the wage figures for textile workers in India sound shocking in comparison with European living standards, but these same workers consider them better than their alternatives.

Even if there are no immediate economic benefits for "us" from globalization (and I suspect there are, even if some will inevitably lose), I still think Brin’s "uplift" argument is a convincing reason to support free trade. Keep buying cheap crap to save the world!

On a side note, I really like Brin’s serialized take on modernism vs romanticism, starting at the bottom this page and still running. Besides promoting an intesely positive philosophy, it offers a way to reconcile myself with the unpleasantness of pulling a number two.

SLEEPTRACKER looks like a really nifty idea. The GearLive review is all enthusiasm, too. The comments are a bit more critical, basically stating that though the thing works as advertised, it’s terribly designed:

You can imagine what happens at night, when you are wearing this watch, and you somehow move your arm such that your hand is resting with the top of your wrist against a pillow, or a blanket. The button gets depressed, and goes into "set" mode in whatever view you left it last. Probably that the "date and time" view. So, it’ll start beeping at you every second that the "set" button is depressed.

Well, I guess I need to wait until Apple starts making one of those (integrated into the comfortable wireless headphones that beam me neurologically adequate music while falling asleep, or something).

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing confuses a lunar eclipse with a solar eclipse.

There’s a Mozilla bug that’s been around for some four and a half years now – there seems to be no way to do something like ‘View as text’ or ‘View as XML’ in Mozilla. This is quite annoying for the various MIME types that people choose to serve their RSS as, since it’s not possible to debug RSS problems by simply looking at the feed XML in Mozilla. A quick look through my blogroll:

• 1 Content-Type: application/rdf+xml
• 1 Content-Type: text/rss
• 2 Content-Type: application/xml
• 2 Content-Type: text/plain
• 3 Content-Type: application/rss+xml
• 20 Content-Type: text/xml

I can’t view text/rss, application/rdf+xml or application/rss+xml in Mozilla, and the text/plain example has to do without the XML prettying.

It finally looks like there’s some activity on this, but I have no idea about Mozilla’s internals, so I probably shouldn’t hope I hope that this will be fixed anytime soon.

I have written about my liberal ideas on this blog, and I have been complaining to everyone who would listen that I felt that I was occupying a kind of blind spot in our country’s political system – essentially, on the two-dimensional playing field of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, the top corner is not represented. You get to choose your social convictions when you agree with statist economic politics, but if you want to vote for economic liberalization, you essentially have to accept that you’re also voting for people who want to tie Christianity into our constitution.

Granted, I’m a bit late in writing about it, since it’s been in the [DE] papers [DE] for a few weeks, but there actually is a party supposed to occupy the blind spot. I’m intrigued, but not yet convinced. I agree with a lot of the stuff I read on their web site, but I have yet to see that there is actually an organization behind this that is capable of seriously evaluating policy choices and organizing political action. The LIF’s performance during the first decade of its existence isn’t necessarily a good omen there, since they managed to virtually disappear from the political stage since their running start as FPÖ defectors in 1993. The question I’m unable to answer is whether this happened due to the lacking popularity of liberal ideas or through their various internal mishaps.

I hope they’ll produce a convincing campaign for the elections in Vienna and manage to build some kind of federal presence from there, since I’d really like to have someone to vote for without the huge reservations that currently accompany my choice.

Well, C programmer humor, to be precise. From the great bash.org, this gem:

Anonymous-san: okay so there's these two strings, right
Anonymous-san: They walk into a bar
Anonymous-san: The first string says
Anonymous-san: Hello, I'd like a rum and cokerhe7954454gh2kjn.,.43>>[][]21?24
Anonymous-san: The second string says
Anonymous-san: You'll have to excuse my friend, he's not null-terminated

I have to admit that the hilarity of this is greatly enhanced by having to actually deal with this kind of crap on a regular basis, but the sheer amount of laughts this collection of IRC humour elicits from me makes me wish that I had ever been lucky enough to have both huge amounts of free time and always-on Internet access at my disposal. Immaturity can be so relaxing…

Finally, the web site for WhatTheHack, formerly called HEX 2005, is up. I’ve rushed to order my ticket, and now I’ll spend the rest of the weekend picking out the spot for my tent on the huge aerial photograph. This is going to be so much fun!

Let’s contrast Marginal Revolution’s China Fact of the Day with this BBC France factoid. Now, if you had to build a manufacturing plant, would you do it in France or China?

Rising prices (caused, of course, by the Euro) seem to be a favourite topic for ranting among the economically unsophisticated. Things get a lot better, however, once you widen your viewpoint beyond the immediate Schnitzel&Bier area.

Case in point, Internet bills. While sorting out some old product manuals, I just stumbled across my phone bill for August and September of 1998. Even though this was four years after the end of the telecoms monopoly, competition was limited to international calls, phone services for large business customers, and leased lines. Residential Internet access was via the monopoly’s "Onlinetarif" rate, giving you about an hour of dialup time for the then-equivalent of one Euro.

My phone bill for the two-month period in question amounted to ATS 2556.40, which converts to roughly EUR 185. This with first ISDN dialup, and lots of nail-biting every afternoon, since dialing before 18:00 meant double rates. There was an empty box of CD-R’s that we used to save for the bi-monthly phone bill, but it regularly turned out to be undervalued – and coping with these sums wasn’t that easy as a student. Bad old times, indeed.

Nowadays, I pay EUR 98 for the same period, but I get 24 hour connectivity at twenty times the downstream bandwidth and four times the upstream bandwidth.

Ah, the marvels of progress and competition. Let’s not even get into mobile phones or international air travel…