Non-surprise!: dental insurance remains a complete and utter scam. I’m still waiting on the follow-up phone call, but some mail I got over the weekend has made me think that, for the second time in six months, my dental insurer has decided they aren’t responsible for paying for more than a thousand dollars’ worth of work that, before the procedure, my dentist assured me they would.

Last time it was because they only pay for dental technologies that are no longer in use — trepanning, internally-administered quicksilver, that sort of thing. This time the procedure was safely archaic — no joke, my molar is now filled with a tree sap discovered in 1842 — so I suspect that instead they’ll say they’re off the hook because I was switching jobs. In fact I was doubly covered for much of the period in question, with two — two! — separate insurance providers supposedly responsible for the care and upkeep of my mouth. There was no point at which I did not have dental coverage. I was awash in dental coverage! And yet…

It turns out that while an individual dental procedure occupies an infinite amount of time when viewed through the lens of subjective experience, when the perspective is shifted to the realm of paperwork even vast swaths of appointments suddenly collapse into single instantaneous points, which are located such that entropy/out-of-pocket-expenses are maximized.

Anyway it’s all quite fascinating in a mathematical and ontological sense, but at the same time it’s also really goddamn irritating.

I’ve been watching the SoapBlox saga, and its coverage, with morbid fascination — my interest and the vehemence of my reaction to it all are probably a sign of the increasingly provincial nature of my expertise, I suppose, and that’s a little depressing. But still, I feel compelled to point out that most of the reaction to it is idiotic.

Here’s the story: DailyKos runs on a system called Scoop. It’s kind of a monstrosity, but large swaths of the netroots are used to it, terrified of change, and have consequently convinced themselves that the system they started using first happens to be technically superior to all the ones they encountered thereafter. This isn’t a novel delusion by any means; most of us do it all the time, myself included.

One developer decided there were some things he didn’t like about Scoop and elected to rewrite it in a different language. You can find the project announcement here, and it should immediately set off warning bells:

• There’s no indication that he’s envisioning his efforts as an open source project.
• He clearly hasn’t bothered to learn much about Scoop, given that he misidentifies the language it’s written in as PHP rather than Perl. If he’d opened a single source file, he could not have made this mistake.
• He said this:
  

  I am not a language snob. I know all languages have their place. And I see php as the language for a small to medium sized operation. Java is an Enterprise solution and a complete, robust language, capable of interacting with just about anything computer.
  
  
  If we want to take blogs to the next level, we have to take our blogging software to the next level.

  This is the kind of meaningless bullshit that salespeople say when they know nothing about anything except that they have something written in Java that they’d like to sell. Java’s great, it’s fine, but PHP powers sites like Digg and Facebook, so don’t tell me it can’t run your blog about Rhode Island politics. Perl, can, too — obviously it powers dKos and other Scoop sites, but it also manages to keep Slashdot afloat. It’s not the loveliest language around, and aside from Scoop and Movable Type, web development has pretty much moved on to faster and/or cleaner languages. But it can clearly get the job done.
  
  
  Also: “capable of interacting with just about anything computer”? What does that even mean?

• His email address is pacified69@yahoo.com. Come on.

Despite this, the sorry state of Scoop hosting and the netroot throngs in its thrall seem to have been enough to push jScoop to some success as a proprietary host for political communities. The hosted effort was branded as SoapBlox, it acquired a few machines, and it charged reasonable rates. Then it got hacked.

I haven’t seen the code; it’s not open source. And it’s been years since I wrote any Java, so I might not be able to make heads or tails of it even if I did see it. But my guess is that the author didn’t just reinvent the wheel in terms of Scoop, but also in terms of forms processing, sanitizing input, session handling and who knows what else. Some vulnerability was left exposed, and someone took advantage of it.

Hey, we all make mistakes. Bugs happen. But it’s our responsibility to make sure that our mistakes happen in places that are unlikely to lead to catastrophic problems. That means building on other people’s work. Googling for existing projects and reading old mailing list archives is less fun than firing up TextMate and starting to type, but you’ve just gotta grit your teeth and do it.

One of SoapBlox’s servers went offline, and the dev abruptly declared defeat. The users were understandably freaked out. Unfortunately, that’s leading them to make some bad judgments. Here, from a Kos diary entitled “Why SoapBlox Matters“:

SoapBlox includes all the major features of a community blog — namely, user diaries and other community-building features. These features are NOT readily available in any other software platform WordPress, MoveableType and others make it exceedingly difficult to do things like diaries and frontpage promotions, and SoapBlox makes it easy.

This just isn’t true. There are plenty of projects that can match the requirements of SoapBlox’s users. I’ve used Drupal a lot, and can say with confidence that it offers the diary, threaded-commenting, rating, voting and front-page-promotion features that seem to be at the heart of Scoop. And hey, this guy seems to like it. SoapBlox doesn’t matter because of its software; it matters because of the bloggers and diarists that use it. Writing blog software is much, much easier than running a successful online political community. There’s plenty of software out there, and the SoapBlox community ought to set its priorities accordingly.

Right now parts of the netroots are rallying around SoapBlox, trying to get it back online in a sustainable way. This speaks well of them, but it’s a mistake. This one-off of a project should never have been trusted with anything worth saving. Who knows what other exploits lurk in its codebase? Or what business problems might take it offline in the future? You can say that opensourcing the project will help resolve these problems, but that’s only true if you can also find developer manpower willing to continue reinventing this particular wheel. Frankly, you’re not going to find high-quality talent that’s willing to donate its time to a cause this pointless.

TechPresident suggests another path:

Options now for SoapBlox include [...] wrapping the platform into the services offered by one of the bigger progressive tech firms like Blue State Digital, EchoDitto, or Advomatic.

Speaking as a someone who until recently worked at EchoDitto, and whose boss is now one of Blue State’s founders, this is also a stupid idea. If one of these firms wants to do this work for free, then sure, the SoapBlox bloggers should jump at the chance. But hiring a consultancy is an option that’s vastly more expensive than what’s needed by these sites — sites which are, frankly, not particularly sophisticated from a technical or design perspective.

Here’s what I would suggest. First, make sure the SoapBlox admin is content to keep the sites up, at least temporarily. Second, find a college-age technical wunderkind who’s interested in politics and willing to work for cheap. These guys are a dime a dozen — I used to be one myself. Third, convince him to write an exporter for the SoapBlox data that puts it in a standardized format. Hooking into this project (found via al3x) might not be a bad idea. Getting the data into a portable form is the priority.

Then, find someone at a consultancy like one of the aforementioned ones who’s willing to help you figure out your requirements and specifications for a new suite of software. The simplest, best option is probably to just run Scoop. It’s what you want anyway; might as well stop nosing around it. I’m not intimately familiar with Scoop, but a quick look at its installation procedure makes it look like the complexity of installing and running it has been vastly overstated. If you don’t do that (or just want to help get the netroots off Scoop — a noble cause), then I’d suggest a hard look at Drupal and maybe WordPress MU, or maybe Slashcode if for some reason you want to head toward Perl-land. You may have to get someone to develop a custom module or two to make the solution maximally Scoop-y, and you’ll certainly need someone who knows their way around the system to help configure it.

But given where the aesthetic bar has been set, this is not a particularly tough problem, and it shouldn’t cost that much money. If this community can afford to send people to Netroots Nation or the DNC, it can surely afford a minor investment in its critical infrastructure. Oh, and one more thing: when users inevitably raise a hue and a cry because the order of links on the sidebar has changed, or because they have to reconfirm their email address, or because of some other stupid thing, you should ignore them. They just want attention. Learning new systems and habits is a pain, but not nearly so painful as continuing to limp along in a system that never should have been used in the first place.

We live in a pretty Jehovah’s-Witness-heavy neighborhood, but I mostly don’t mind. Sure, it means the occasional well-meaning pair of Sunday visitors will find me groggily staring at them, potentially shirtless. But that’s mostly their problem — I’m perfectly happy to see them. Besides, you never know when you’ll find yourself wishing you had a few dozen copies of The Watchtower on hand.

The best side effect, though, are the hand-addressed notes I get in the mail, which contain handwritten notes, which contain printed tracts, and all of which contain numerous spelling and grammatical errors. Still, they’re preferable to the ones I used to find placed under my windshield wipers back when I had the car with the awful front-end damage; those would encourage me to seek help for my alcoholism (lucky guesses don’t count!).

Anyway, here’s the latest one I’ve received. In most respects it’s pretty unremarkable, but does make a case for Bible study that I don’t remember encountering before: that it will protect you from zombies and/or ghosts. Possibly also draculas; I’m not sure, it’s been a while since Sunday School.

Look, I don’t know what you guys have against Vince or ShamWow, the revolutionary new absorption concept that is sweeping — well, if not the nation, then at least the parts of it that watch TBS at 1am. But this mean-spiritedness has got to stop. Yes, it’s clear that Vince had been awake for at least 50 hours when that commercial was filmed. And yes, he is an ex-Scientologist who sued Anna Nicole Smith for breach of contract in relation to his failed gross-out comedy movie (the New York Times called it “a monument to ineptitude and self-delusion“).

But what’s the alternative? This is a subject that Charles, Emily and I have discussed at length. Vince may not be perfect — he’s just a human being, as flawed and beautiful as any of us — but at least he has the guts to stand up to Billy Mays and the grasping tentacles of his infomercial syndicate.

Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge Mr. Mays’ impressive achievements. But his time has passed; it’s clear that these days, his heart’s not in it. Worse, his Zorbeez project is a transparent attempt to destroy Vince and the ShamWow, no matter the cost (how else can one explain his proffer of a $60 value for a mere $14.99?!). Doesn’t America deserve a fresh new face to sell us oddly-shaped cooking implements and citrus-based cleaning products? Can we really sanction the sort of anticompetitive behavior that Mr. Mays represents?

I say yes! And no! Respectively! Vince may not deserve your love, but when, every night, his shaking hands remove that headset — in that moment he at least deserves your respect. And your order, of course. Call now.

Guess who I’ve been shopping for this season…