Day: March 23, 2001

Keeping Track of File Names In Conversant

Briefly, everything in Conversant (the system used to manage this site) is a discussion group message. Tools are provided on top of this to do different things with messages. One of the things you can do with a message, for example, is bind it to a URL. What this means is that I can tell Conversant that I would like http://brian.carnell.com/690 to be available as http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2001/02/000046.html.

Notice the naming convention there, in the /articles/ directory, by /year/, then /month/, and then finally a unique number (i.e. this is the 46th article I wrote in February).

A great system, but it has one drawback — I can never remember (and don’t want to, actually) what number a new article is. Should this be article 23 or 47? I have no idea. But since the file names are off in the structure editor — sort of a file manager for Conversant — I usually just wait until the end of the week to bind articles and do all of them at once. That system works okay, but I’m adding a number of new features which really work best if articles get bound to URLs right away.

Fortunately, the flexibility of Conversant allows me to put together a solution that reminds me exactly what the next URL name in the series should be. Here’s how the bind URL form looks today:

and here’s how it looks with the solution I put together:

Notice the second image shows me at the bottom that the last URL in the folder is 000038, so I know I want to call the next article 000039. The “modify” option lets me access the HTML code for this, so that I can change which directory it looks at (at the end of the month or year, for example). Here’s how I did this.

First, go to the Preferences option in Conversant and select the “Web Server” preferences. Then select the “Appearance” tab in the “Web Server” preferences form. One of the boxes in that form is the Admin Box Template:

From there, simply paste in the following macro at the very end of the existing admin box template:

What’s going on here?

The “path” attribute tells the macro where to look, and obviously you will need to change that to whatever path it is you’re binding URLS to.

The “limit” attribute tells Conversant that we only want a single URL returned from that directory (the last one).

The “sortdescending” attribute is set to “true” which means — if you’re numbering URLs sequentially — the macro will return the last URL first.

The “cache” attribute is set to “false,” since if we add a new bound URL we want this macro to update immediately rather than caching any results.

I’ve also created two new templates specific to this weboutline. You would need to go the template menu and create these. They are rather straightforward, however.

The admin_outline_folder template is simply one line:

We don’t really care about folders, we just want the last URL displayed.

The admin_outline_file template looks like this,

(modify)

The pageURL macro tells Conversant to return the URL text rather than the page title or some other attribute. Setting the “link” attribute to “true” means the URL will be hyperlinked to the page itself, just in case we want to visit it.

Then the link to the preferences section is hyperlinked to the word “modify” so at the end of the month or year I can quickly go to the right section of the Preferences area and alter the “path” attribute of the web outline.

John Tynes’ Insider Account of Wizards of the Coast

Yikes. I never thought I’d see John Tynes’ byline in Salon.Com, much less on an over-the-top insider’s account of his time working at Wizards of the Coast right after Magic: The Gathering took off (Death to the Minotaur).

This is part of a series, with the next installment appearing Monday.

Detroit Police Routinely Arrest Witnesses

A couple weeks ago I was in Detroit for the first time in several years. If you’ve never been to Detroit but want to get the same experience go to a local video store and rent the cheesy John Carpenter film, “Escape from New York.” The cityscape of Carpenters’ futuristic New York isn’t that different from Detroit (the Detroit Free Press/Detroit News building, for example, has enormous fences and brick walls as protection and looks more like an armed fortress than a newspaper).

Ironically Detroit police can’t seem to do much about crime even though they routinely violate the civil rights of suspects and now, it turns out, witnesses as well. The Detroit Free Press reported this week that last year a federal prosecutor contacted Detroit police chief Benny Napoleon to warn him that his department’s policy of arresting witnesses to crimes was unconstitutional.

Apparently the police have a written policy such that when investigating murders they arrest witnesses, family members and anyone else in any way contacted with the crime on top of arresting any suspects. As Michael Steinberg of the American Civil Liberties Union tells the Free Press, “Arresting people and interrogating them without probable cause to believe they committed a crime is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Witnesses can apparently be arrested if they are likely to flee, but this requires the approval of a judge. Detroit cops were simply arresting everyone in the vicinity, taking them down to the police station for interrogation, and then releasing them — sometimes not until several days later.

And of course since this is Detroit, even the fact that the city was paying thousands of dollars to settle civil suits over the practice didn’t motivate Napoleon to put a stop to it. According to the Free Press, Detroit last year settled a false arrest suit for $500,000, and yet the policy remained in place.

Police had been warned: U.S. prosecutor and chief discussed witness arrests. David Ashenfelter and David Zeman, Detroit Free Press, March 22, 2001.

Columbia’s Sexual Harassment Policies and Its Status as a Private School

Wendy McElroy makes an interesting observation that I had not heard before about the controversy surrounding Columbia’s sexual harassment policy. If Columbia were a public university or college its policy would be clearly unconstitutional and the courts would take little time at all overturning it. Columbia is a private university, however, and so doesn’t have to abide by the Constitutional protections that a state institution would have to consider — the standard for private colleges is that it has to adhere to “fundamental fairness.”

But as McElroy points out, Columbia is using a federal grant to pay the university official in charge of administering the harassment policy,

Columbia’s Administration also points out that the University is a private institution and the courts have upheld its right to determine which procedures are appropriate to serve its needs. In short, students have no right to expect Constitutional protections from university procedures. Private or not, it is the government, which means the taxpayer, who will foot much of the bill for Columbia’s experiment with gender justice. As part of their Report, the Task Force mentioned that grant funding to finance a full-time officer responsible for disciplining sexual misconduct was available from the Department of Justice. The on-campus gender crusader is estimated to cost $125,000 of taxpayer money in the first year. Yet, according to Patricia Catapano, who chaired the Task Force, “The courts only have said that Columbia…has to have fundamental fairness” because it is a private institution.

If Columbia wants to maintain its Star Chamber-like system of student justice it may have the right to do so as a private university, but it certainly shouldn’t use taxpayer money to enforce a policy that would be unconstitutional at a public institution.

Source:

Gender Madness on Columbia’s Campus. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, March 20, 2001.