2005 June 06 | Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Archive for June 6th, 2005

Tikun Olam Moves from Typepad to WordPress

Monday, June 6th, 2005

First, I wanted to announce that I’m the proud father (& mother!) of a new baby WordPress blog: Tikun Olam: Make the World a Better Place. Can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl!

Let Us All Now Praise Famous Men

But almost all the credit for this miracle goes to Carthik Sharma, my ‘midwife.’ He answered my e-mailed call of despair a few days ago & did tons of work helping me to convert my old Tyepapd blog to WP (& it wasn’t easy!). No task or request fr. me was too large or small for him. In fact, I’ve never had such a wonderful, smooth interaction with technical folks before in any other setting. So from the bottom of my heart–thank you Carthik.

Typepad: Goodbye to All That

And for those of you interested, why did I switch from Typepad to WordPress? A succession of problems and issues developed in the Typepad environment and I just felt that I didn’t have a sufficiently flexible and expandable system for my current needs. First, one of Typepad’s worst and most glaring deficiencies is comment and trackback spam. But it’s larger than that–encompassing user control of one’s blog and control of access to it by unwanted ‘invaders.’

In general terms, Typepad was no longer sophisticated, adaptable or flexible enough for my needs. I must’ve submitted Help tickets with 30 suggested features (maybe more, I didn’t keep count). In fact, let’s take just one for example: I wrote this post in my TP blog calling for a feature that could link together a series of blog posts on the same subject so that it would be easier for a reader to read everything you’ve written on that subject (and I wrote a similar TP Help ticket long before I wrote this post). I got one of those polite “We’ll look into it” responses from support staff. They suggested I use Categories but that would not have served my purpose at all since it would not have displayed links to each post in the series within the posts themselves. In fact, it showed they weren’t really understanding what I was suggesting.

WordPress and the Beauty of Plugins

When I moved on over to WP guess what I found? In-Series plugin which does precisely what I’d been asking TP to consider for nearly two years! Again, remember it’s Open Source and created by an unpaid volunteer so it wasn’t the easiest to install for a code-deficient fellow like me. But once I got it working it was a beauty to behold. It gave me the power to order my blog content as I wished and make it more accessible to my readers–plus it saved me time by automating the cross-linking of multiple posts. And power used wisely is a beautiful thing.

So, Anil Dash, if you’re listening: go back to your TP programming shop and get your users something like In-Series. Otherwise, WP will leave you in the dust!

All my other feature suggestions were greeted politely and non-committally. You could tell that your suggestion went into some technical bottom drawer never to be heard from again.

Typepad always felt to me like a top down blogging system. Everything was pretty centrally controlled. It also felt to me too corporate with its ambition for global reach (and probably profit). I never saw even in the Unofficial Typepad Forum, where you might expect to see people trumpeting their hacks, a whole lot of technical innovation or hacking. Yes, there was some. But nothing like what you get with an Open Source system like WP or Firefox. And that’s what I’ve liked so far about WP. If you find something lacking chances are another user’s noticed it too and done something about it by creating a plug-in. There is an immediacy about responding to bugs and other issues. If something’s wrong, let’s fix it. It sure wasn’t that way with TP. There are many good things about TP, but speed in launching new features isn’t one of them.

Is Open Source potentially quirky and unreliable sometimes if you find a plug-in with a bug or conflict? Sure, but I’d rather have the innovation and creativity along with the quirks than live in a blog system where you have to wait for innovation to dribble down to you from on-high programmer heaven.

Which brings me to another reason why WordPress is significantly more robust than Typepad. When SixApart is weighing which features to adopt for TP, the Trotts have to determine how much programmer time they’ll need and how to spread their programmers over their various projects, how important a feature might be and how many users would actually use it. That’s why no one from Typepad ever paid serious attention to my suggestions. Because they didn’t feel there would be sufficient need or interest in my suggested features.

These considerations are hardly relevant in an Open Source system like WordPress. All it takes is one enterprising programmer to see a need for a feature and he or she writes some code, tests it and voila–you have a plugin (I’m sure the process is significantly more complex than that–but you get my drift). Then users determine whether the programmer’s idea was a good one or not by adopting it (or not). You couldn’t get a more democratic system than that.

Typepad, Spam and Other Forms of Abuse

Typepad in an announcement a few days ago trumpeted that it would be introducing Typekey to TP users. All well and good. But all they said about the rollout was "soon" ("Expect to hear more about these features in the coming weeks."). Well, "soon" can mean a lot of things. And why has it taken so long? Typekey has been available to MT users for some time. Plus MT has other anti-spam features like the MT-blacklist not available to TP.

On my TP blog, my spam comes (oops, ‘came,’ I’m gonna have to get used to using the past tense in referring to TP) in waves. I might get 10 spam comments (including trackback spam) in a day and then go a week before I get my next one. I’d say I averaged one or two every day. But if you look at my Help tickets they’re 95% spam related (reporting spam IPs for global banning). And banning someone either from your blog or globally is tedious and time-consuming. First, find the e mail comment notification. Highlight the offending commenter’s data. Open your browser and a new TP Help ticket & paste the data into the text field & then submit. Just imagine doing that 12 times in a day as I have! If you want to ban within your blog you have to open Comment Banning & paste the IP address into the proper field.

Why does TP make it relatively easy for spammers to get to blogs and so tedious for bloggers to get rid of the spam once it’s published? TP will tell you that they have spam filters which capture the lion’s share of it. Maybe so, but mountains of the junk still get through.

Another deficiency is that Typepad will essentially not ban globally any abusive commenters (read my sordid tale of blog abuse and TP’s unsatisfactory response to it) no matter how severe the abuse and no matter how many of its Terms of Service conditions have been violated (at least that’s been my experience). TP claims they have no technological means of individually identifying comments and so have no ironclad way to know commenters identity. And if that’s so why don’t they develop one? I much prefer a system like WordPress where I have myriad ways to control access to my comments.

In fact, my last hate commenter caused me so much irritation (with TP and the commenter) that I decided I needed to start looking for a new blogging system. That’s how I came to WP.

Typepad’s Lacks (themes, automatic pinging, photo gallery)

Other TP drawbacks for me were the paucity of themes. Essentially, if you have an advanced template you can’t use most Typepad themes unless you know how to adapt the css to your template. Also, if you use an advanced template it becomes extremely complicated to add new Typelist categories requiring inserting new code into your template each time. I disliked that Typepad would not allow you to automate pinging. You simply cannot add ping sites to your default settings unless they are standard TP pings (blo.gs and weblogs.com). This means that if you want to ping technorati or pingomatic, you have to manually enter each url each time you write a post. You can, of course, use the tremendously useful blog publishing software, ecto, which like WP allows customized automatic pinging. But that leaves you one step removed from your blog interface.

Typepad has no ‘Edit’ link in the comment display allowing you to access the edit function. To do so, you have to navigate to the Comment section of the admin interface. And once you click “Save” for your comment edit, it brings up the post edit box. So if you decide to edit the same comment again you have to reopen the coment edit box. WP has an “Edit” link within each comment displayed on the blog so you can immediately and very simply navigate to edit any comment. This type of feature should be a no-brainer for TP and the fact that they don’t have it means to me that they’re not thinking enough about maximizing the ease and convenience of the editing function for their bloggers.

I thought that Typepad’s photo gallery feature was fairly weak and relatively featureless (here is a critique I wrote some time ago before I stopped using it). It seems you cannot upload a file to your photo gallery and then display the same image in a post. You must upload the image twice (at least that’s what I found when I tried this myself). Photos displayed in default sizes and you couldn’t customize display size. There were few photo gallery themes to choose. While I do find that Typepad’s image upload feature is much more robust than the WP default, I’m sure there are WP plug-ins that will answer this need. I just haven’t had time to explore this yet. What I liked about TP’s image upload was that you could create default custom parameters for uploads. You could automatically create thumbnails which linked to larger image displays. I don’t like TP’s image display limitation (640px max.), though I don’t know if WP has one too.

When I first switched to TP from blogger.com nearly three years ago, the romance of being part of a blogger community was exciting along with the wonderful new features I had at my command. It was a heady combination and I loved it for quite some time. But gradually my feelings began to change.

TP does not have an offical forum as MT does. There is an Unofficial Typepad User Forum and I found it tremendously helpful–until I started posting about my use of images & mp3 files in my blog. One moderator who worked in the publishing industry took especial offense at my mp3 blog and my use of images from online media believing I was engaging in flagrant copyright infringement. Even after asking him to stop, he continually publicly warned other members of the errors of my ways. Because the forum was independent of Typepad there was essentially no recourse or appeal. Naturally, the other moderators were not going to discipline one of their own or suggest that he tone down his actions. So I was forced to leave the forum.

In fact, a Typepad staff member told me there had been similar complaints from other TP users about the tone of the forum. I asked why they didn’t have an official forum. The staffer replied that they’d thought about it but it was something they might get around to at some point in the future. There went another good idea into that bottom drawer.

I don’t think I’ll ever have the same sense of romance with WP. But that’s just fine. I don’t expect WP to be perfect. But I do expect it to be a work in progress in which the developers and members are constantly improving its features and capability. And that, as Jews say in the Passover haggadah, will suffice ("Dayenu"). In fact, it will more than suffice.

While I believe that the WP support forum has some serious structural deficiencies and wish it would use a more standard forum environment, I haven’t found any moralizing or fingerpointing there yet and hope I will not in the future. What I HAVE found is lightning fast responses which are largely helpful in answering my questions and issues as I learn the WP environment. Who could ask for more?

Posted in Blogs-Tech-Science | 13 Comments »

Massacre at Ein Arik: IDF Condones Ambush Murder of Unarmed Palestinian Police and Civilians

Monday, June 6th, 2005

The New York Times reports a story that originated in the Israeli daily, Maariv (this is the online Hebrew-language version of a longer article published in the hard copy edition), that the IDF carried out an "eye for an eye" indiscriminate reprisal in February, 2002 against Palestinian police officers (some unarmed). The Israelis believed that some of the officers might have been complicit in an attack on their own forces that left six IDF troops dead.

The original material in the Maariv report emanated from the Israeli group, Breaking the Silence ("Shovirm Shtika"). Breaking the Silence was founded by former IDF officers who wished to reveal the extent to which the Occupation has debased the ethical and moral standards of Israeli soldiers.

Several soldiers involved in the attacks came to the organization to tell their story. Here is the Times’ paraphrase of the Maariv story:

The interviews in Maariv refer to an attack by Palestinian gunmen on a West Bank outpost on Feb. 19, 2002. Six Israeli soldiers were killed, and their attackers escaped. The Israeli Army said at the time that it believed that two squads of Palestinian gunmen had attacked the soldiers at an Israeli checkpoint at Ein Ariq, west of the Palestinian-controlled city of Ramallah. One squad opened fire on two soldiers on duty at the checkpoint, wounding two men, the army said. At least one gunman burst into the outpost where six other off-duty soldiers were relaxing and killed them, it said.

The retaliation began that same night and continued through the night, according to the soldiers.

In one of the Maariv interviews, a soldier identified as "D" said his commander described their mission: "Six of our soldiers were killed at a checkpoint, and we are going out on a revenge operation. We are going to kill Palestinian policemen at a checkpoint, as blood revenge for the six of our soldiers who were killed."

"An eye for an eye," the soldier was quoted as saying in Maariv.

He said that he and other soldiers waited in ambush for Palestinian policemen suspected of having operated the checkpoint where the Israelis were killed.

Units were sent to other West Bank checkpoints as well.

Referring to the killing of one Palestinian, the soldier said. "About five of us sprayed him at the same time. I emptied a magazine in him." A member of a reconnaissance unit said they were instructed to go to three checkpoints near Nablus and shoot Palestinian police officers regardless of whether they were armed. "We didn’t raise the issue of how to identify Palestinian policemen," the soldier was quoted as saying. Maariv quoted another soldier as saying: "My conscience is most quiet. As far as I am concerned the Palestinian police committed terror operations, and if the political and commanding echelons decided that the operation was the correct thing to do, then I want to do it."

"I did not go with a knife between my teeth and to suck blood," he said, explaining that he did what he did "only because I had to get back at the Palestinian policemen for what they did."

Maariv’s headline said 15 Palestinian policemen were killed that night.

"My conscience is most quiet." Hmmm. I’d like this soldier to tell me–is this what the IDF taught you in your training, that it is correct and just to attack unsuspecting, and in many cases unarmed Palestinians merely because they wear the same uniform as others whom you suspect of killing your own??? I wish I were Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and all the other prophets so I could scream from the Judean hilltops: No! This is not the Israeli army founded on the ethical principles of tohar neshek, the purity of arms.

Breaking the Silence quotes an excerpt from the testimony of a First Sergeant in the operation who, after initially questioning the operation and its target, admits of the pursuit of the Palestinian policemen: "I really enjoyed it." He also states clearly that no policeman ever fired upon them at any point in the action. If anyone needed proof of the absolute debasement of the IDF and Israeli society by this conflict it is here right in front of one’s eyes. At first, the officer questions why they are targeting these policemen and whether anyone can proof their culpability for the prior ambush. But once he gets into the thick of the action, his sheer animal instinct for pursuit and felling of his quarry takes over. He has stopped being a sentient human being and become a military machine.

Maariv quotes (these are my somewhat rough translations) R. a 25 year old soldier in the engineering unit Yael and another named D. who describe their general attitude toward military service and how it was expressed that night:

R: You want to be a hero. So that they’ll look at you and say: "He’s a special soldier, salt of the earth." In order to attain that status you have to get under your belt a few big actions. The objective isn’t important. The reason for the operation isn’t important. There’s no such thing as Left or Right. All that’s erased. When they told us this was a revenge operation ("avenging blood") we thought only that we’re going to kill people. What could be more sexy than that? What could be higher quality? We’d never done this [type of operation] before.

D: They told us it was a revenge operation and that we would take an eye for an eye against three or four checkpoints. Not more.

Everyone was "lit up" on the idea that we were going to liquidate people. We were satisfied. From the beginning of the Intifada, we’d never had the chance to do something with "honor" [their usual tasks as engineers were to raze Palestinian homes related in some way to terror]. No one had looked through a gunsight.

R. [responds to the question of whether he was absolutely sure their purpose was to be revenge killing]: The commander said that the checkpoints manned by Palestinian police might have allowed the terrorists to pass. He said our mission was to liquidate them. He mentioned the soldiers of Ein Arik [the six dead Israelis]. We knew why we were going there.

D: We were committed to the mission with a sense that "I’m a member of the Yael Brigade and this is the most important mission there is." We blackened our faces and got this John Wayne look in our eyes and that was it. We went on our way.

R [describing the attack on the Palestinians]: They [the policemen] gathered in a group drinking coffee. Maybe there were seven or eight. Only two were armed. All the rest were unarmed civilians. We looked at them. We didn’t think, ‘here’s our objective, go kill.’ At the moment we knew we were going to liquidate them we didn’t see them as human beings. Again, we very attuned to our objective.

D: …This was the first time that I killed and the first time I saw someone dead. It was a day of pleasure.

R: I still think of this. This will not leave me ever. It made me lose a lot of sleep. I think I was part of something problematic. I don’t see any difference between this and between slaughter. There was no just objective. I wanted to kill. Afterward, I felt very uncomforable with this.

Apparently, the IDF has no quarrels or qualms about what happened that night of February 19, 2002. Maariv quotes an Army spokesperson as saying: the Palestinian policemen were "implicated in terror." Howso? When you lie in ambush and indiscrimately murder policemen how can you tell?

Further, the Times describes the Army statement:

…"On Feb. 19, 2002, Israeli forces operated against Palestinian Authority targets in the West Bank."

"Among those targets were checkpoints manned by Palestinian policemen who facilitated the passage and actively assisted the terrorists who passed through this checkpoint to carry out murderous attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers," it said.

No investigation ensued [according to the IDF statement] regarding the events described in the Maariv article because it was part of a series of operations against terrorism in line with Israeli Army orders and procedures. "It took place during the year in which Israel was hit hardest by terrorism," said the army.

I suppose one can hardly point the finger at the IDF alone when the behavior of our own military at Abu Graib was so repulsive AND hardly a single U.S. soldier (and certainly no upper echelon officers) will be held culpable for such horrendous abuse. Even so, the blithe IDF response seems more than a little outrageous even for Israel’s typically lax attitude toward violations of its military code when it comes to Palestinians.

If the Army refuses to investigate itself, perhaps the Attorney General or some other body will do so. This incident might not rise to the level of a MyLai, but it certainly sounds like a war crime to me. The problem of course is that Israel is so fixated on security that it often forgives such lapses saying that the IDF is entitled to break rules once in a while as long as it does so in the interests of protecting Israel’s security (sound like any other government you know??).

Another interesting aspect of the IDF’s response is this:

…The army was instructed by the political echelon to change the mode of operation and adjust it to the harsh reality on the ground.

In plain English: "The Defense Minister ordered IDF officers to attack that night and they only followed orders." The IDF doesn’t need to hide behind fig leaves as Don Rumsfeld has done regarding Abu Graibh. The IDF assigns responsibility for the massacre to the Defense Minister and he clearly accepts it willingly. It is simply shocking.

Haaretz published an editorial today about this incident calling for an independent judicial inquiry since the current Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz, was the IDF chief of staff at the time of the massacre and presumably issued or knew of the orders for this odious action.

Posted in Mideast Peace | No Comments »