Curious Creature

Last week I ran into an odd situation with our HTML output from JasperReports in Internet Explorer 7.  All text, link or otherwise,  was being underlined and I’m not really sure of the root cause other than it would appear we ran into a CSS rendering bug.   The same thing does not happen in Firefox 3 (though my research indicated that the same issue occurs in Firefox 2).

In rendering HTML output JasperReports inserts various anchor tags of the form:

<a name="JR_PAGE_ANCHOR_0_1">

It doesn’t use these with href attributes but it does use them for some purpose.

Our global CSS file indicates that anything that is inside an anchor tag should be underlined.  This would make sense assuming that anchors are used for links (a pretty good assumption).    We also use the Dojo JavaScript framework and the Dijit ContentPane widget allows using the ContentPane (normally used with a DIV) to show external content.   That external content can be “scrubbed” to allow it to play in a nicer fashion with the overall site design.  That is where the problem occurs.

The scrubbing of the content coming in to the DIV, to filter out things like styles, TITLEs, and other tags, is where IE seems to have issues.  Those anchor tags mentioned previously, and which look fine in IE when previewing a report inside of the iReport designer, now all have text inside them underlined.   The quick fix, or so I thought, was to remove the A tag from our global CSS file.  That fixes things until someone hovers over any text at which point another CSS rule comes in to play for a:hover and all text is again underlined.    Probably time for another CSS tweak…

I know that it’s a tough thing to move forum contents from one system to another and I know that Oracle and BEA, prior to their buyout by Oracle, had a different forum system than Oracle.   I also understand that Oracle would want to move the Weblogic forum traffic to their own forums once the buyout was complete.   However why didn’t Oracle keep the BEA forums in place in a read-only format?

Seriously.  I’ve been trying to research some Weblogic 9.2 issues I’ve been dealing with and Google results return a lot of hits to the BEA forums.  Clicking on one of those links brings you to the Oracle forums….at the top level of the forums.   It would appear that those postings were never moved.  Again I understand this given the difficulty of moving from one system to another but they should have kept the old system in place for those of us who need to get answers for our Weblogic problems.

The odd thing is that Oracle kept the BEA edocs site in place with the same URL.  Why didn’t they do the same thing with the forums?

Update:

Thanks to Justin for pointing me to the read-only forums.  They are located at the following url:  http://forums.oracle.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=202

They still don’t have them at the original URL so that a Google search will bring up the posts but at least they have the data available.

Whew. Big piece of work for the summer out of the way. Looking forward to starting some of this stuff in the basement soon. That is the next step, getting the basement set up for seed growing!

In the July 2007 issue of ‘Diversified Farmer’, which is the news letter published by the Lake County Farm Bureau (of which I am a member due to having insurance through Country) there is a section titled "Addressing Misconceptions about Agriculture" and the misconception they are supposedly addressing is "the only sustainable form of food production is organic".

I quote:

If we were to convert to totally organic food production, yield would decline by 30 to 40 percent.

Now, before even addressing the flat-out falsehood of the claim of a 30 to 40 percent loss in yield I’d rather first ask the question: who exactly is talking about totally organic food production?    I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone make the claim that all agriculture should be organic.  "Organic" implies a very specific type of farming.  I think what more people are saying is that we need to figure out a better system than monoculture farming as practiced today.  Whether farming would be conventional in the sense of pesticide use, or organic, or something else is a completely different conversation.

The first paragraph of the article states:

A variety of studies demonstrate this yield
reduction. The Bichel Committee, appointed by
the Danish government as it considered a move to
only organic production, found even greater impacts
than this. They reported to the Danish government
that moving to a mandated, total organic production
system would result in 47 percent less human food.

I have read the Bichel Committee report and so can you.  It is located here.  The conclusions of the committee are here.  As stated in the mandate the point of this committee was to report on what the effect of lowering pesticide use would be on agricultural yields.  The study says that they would use experiences of the organic farming industry as extensively as possible.

To state that the report said a total organic production system would result in 47 percent less human food is oversimplifying the report itself and in fact nowhere in the report is the 47 percent figure mentioned.  What is mentioned are the figures of production being 30-40% of current (ie: 1999) assuming zero imports of animal feed.   More important is the figure of production being 71-93% of current assuming imports of animal feed of 15-25% (at that time the rule). 

My reading of this report indicated to me that there were a lot of assumptions made but even so the figure given in the farm bureau article is fiction.

The next two paragraphs go on to talk about the use in organic farming of "green manure" for fixing nitrogen (never mind that in organic farming green manure isn’t a requirement):

One of the main issues that a totally organic
society would need to face would be the nitrogen
requirement of most crops. In order to produce the
necessary nitrogen a third of all crop acreage would
need to be converted into green manure production.

Green manure is a crop such as clover, alfalfa,
or trefoil that is grown to be plowed down back
into the soil. As these plants biodegrade they
release nitrogen in a form that other plants can
use. Green manure crops are usually legumes that
fix nitrogen from the air. The loss of acreage to
green manure crops would need to be added on top
of the previously mentioned 30 to 40 percent yield
reduction.

AGain the Bichel report mentions 30-40 percent of current yields but that means a 60-70 percent reduction, not 30-40 as stated above and in the opening paragraph of the article.  The statement by the Bichel report is actually worse than what the Farm Bureau is mentioning!

Just to make sure I’m being clear here.  I’m not arguing about organic versus conventional farming in this post.  I’m just discussing the "article" from the Farm Bureau.  If fully organic farming would reduce yields by 60-70 percent that’s a pretty bad thing but this article isn’t even good at getting the numbers right.  If they can’t do that I think the full article itself is suspect.  As always its easy to cherry pick data to fit any conclusion but they’re not even doing that well!

Now we get to the truly bizarre conclusion with the following two paragraphs:

Another option that could be used instead of
changing a third of all farming acres to green
manure production would be to increase the number
of cattle on the planet. Cattle. and more specifically
the manure they produce is another source of
nitrogen that is an organically approved fertilizer.
However, in order to produce enough manure, we
would need to increase the number of cattle on the
planet by 700 percent.

Vaclav Smil, professor of geography from
the University of Manitoba, made the following
calculation. The United States alone would need to
raise roughly one billion additional cattle to replace
nitrogen that we currently use from commercial
sources. Is this possible? We currently have 97
million head of cattle in the United States. (Globally
there are 1.3 billion head of cattle.) If every square
foot of private and public land (including all parks,
forests, wildlife refuges, golf courses, roadsides, and
lawns) was used to graze cattle there still would not
be enough land to graze one billion head of cattle in
the United States.

So we have gone from using green manure making sure there are enough cattle to provide nitrogen for plant use.  Why does it have to be one or the other? Never mind that any system would use a variety of methods to achieve the required inputs of nitrogen.  Why let small things like facts get in the way of a good smearing?

The final concluding sentence states:

Insisting on strictly organic production would
denude the earth.

Again I don’t think anyone is calling for strictly organic production but we can’t possibly do that because it would, <ominous music here>, denude the Earth.

Shoddy journalism pure and simple.  I think it’s pretty clear that monoculture form of agriculture in major practice today isn’t sustainable.   We simply can’t afford to keep creating fertilizers from petrochemicals.  All other issues aside it’s a simple supply issue.  I also think it’s pretty clear that agriculture needs to be a many-headed animal to be effective.    There isn’t just one answer but to attempt to make people think that the current way is the only way is deception pure and simple and the Farm Bureau should be ashamed of themselves for printing this piece.

Here is a fantastic journey through the recycling process with the Green Lantern, Brendan I. Koerner, at Slate about just how all that stuff you’re throwing in your recycle bin gets recycled, if it gets recycled at all. I’m not sure that Bill McDonough would agree with the Lantern’s assessment that “Despite its labor-intensive and relatively inefficient nature, plastics recycling still makes long-term sense.” but it is still a great article and food for thought.

Three thoughts instantly come to mind after reading this: buy less, buy smarter, and reuse more of what you do buy.

• In the New York Times Magazine from 5/04 Arlo Crawford’s
  Cold-Comfort Farming
• Yahoo Finance on the increasing costs of food, how long it might last, and why its happening. Shocker: American’s only spend 10% of their income on food. Is it really expensive or was it just too cheap before? Of course the point is completely missed by Chris Hurt, agricultural economist with Purdue University, when he says:
  

  “I expect greater use of technology to increase crop yields and better use of genetics to create drought-tolerant crops,” he said.

  Why do we keep banging our heads on this stuff?

• An article on Yahoo Finance from last month about the decline in the popularity of organic food items and the reasons as to why it is happening. Overall I liked this article but it drives me absolutely nuts to read something like:
  

  Higher cost of organic products versus mass market alternatives is a primary deterrent to many consumers, especially during a period when families are already struggling to stretch the household budget.

  Many families are spending untold dollars on TV, cellular phone service, internet service, etc. which, while nice to have, aren’t as important as quality food.

  One interesting connection made is:
  

  To that end, Cummins estimates that 20% of organic shoppers are already switching away from grocery store purchases of organic items to buying locally from farmers markets.

  “It’s a lot cheaper to buy directly from farmers and I expect that trend to continue,” he said.

  “That end” refers to people wanting to cut food costs this year. I’d bet that cost may be one reason why 20% of organic shoppers might be looking local but knowing what I know about that market segment and the reading I’ve done I’d bet a bigger reason for the switch is because of the writing of Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, etc. I suspect the people shopping at farmers markets are reading those guys and buying in to what they have to say about the environmental impact even organic food has when it is being shipped thousands of miles to get to your table. Is it better to eat organic berries that have been shipped a thousand miles or conventional berries that are from a farm down the street (metaphorically speaking) from you? I’d bet that 20% is voting on the local stuff because of the food miles as well as wanting to support local agriculture. I know where I prefer to spend my money.

Exhausted. Between work and getting over being sick I’m just plain tired. Too exhausted to write much but wanted to mark Earth Day with at least a shout out. I hope everyone had some time to reflect a bit on where we stand on this 2008 edition of Earth Day. I know I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my place on the planet (saying this while looking at the veggies growing in my basement) and hoping I can do a lot more to live a lot more sustainably. We’re getting there even if not as fast as I’d like

Tom Philpott wrote both this week and last about Michael Pollan and Alice Waters and their commentary in a New York Times story about rising food prices. I commented in the first posting and argued that both the article, and Philpott, were radically oversimplifying the message that Pollan and Waters have been getting out for years.

One of those basic messages is (and Bill McKibben had said as much as well) that people spend far less on food today than in the past and that the reality is that better food that costs more really isn’t out of reach of most people if they make smart choices about what else they are spending their money on. Here is a perfect example…

For several years I had some neighbors where the family was two parents, three kids, and a grandmother living in the house. These were not rich people but both parents were working. They ended up losing the house because the parents though it more important to buy their high school daughter a car, pay for her cell phone, pay for all sorts of expensive baby clothes for their grandchild, etc. than to pay their mortgage. Needless to say these people weren’t eating very good food either. Obviously their priorities were very misplaced. Had they been a bit wiser on where their money should be going they would probably still be in that house (and it was not a large house). The same thing applies to food spending.

People need to get over the fact that they don’t need the newest shiny techno-bauble, etc. Might they want it? Sure but what the hell ever happened to saving for something? I’m not innocent as I dug myself into a large hole with credit card debt but I’m working my way out of that. I know how hard it can be sometimes but I’m a hell of a lot smarter about how I spend my money these days.

We can’t afford to keep going on this way. The planet can’t take it and neither can we as a society.

Just an FYI for those who live in the Chicago area and don’t have a rain barrel program in their town/county. Lake County has extended their rain barrel ordering deadline until April 23rd (for a early May pick-up). More details here:

• http://www.lakeswcd.org/Rain%20Barrels.htm
• http://www.lcfpd.org/rainbarrels/

Clearly renting things isn’t a new idea. I lease a car because for my current situation the lease is a better option. But the key is I can afford it even if I were to have the monthly payment for owning the car.

This article points to just what is so f***ed up with America (and Western Europe for that matter). If you can’t afford a luxury item just rent it!

Isn’t a “luxury” item something that by definition you can afford? I guess that’s the old definition.

It just amazes me what people consider affordable. “Oh its only $10 a month” I get told all the time when I hear about this subscription or that subscription to some service a friend has decided on. Taken by itself that one service at $10 a month may be affordable (I subscribe to emusic.com…where at least the $10 a month I pay gets me music that I own) but all those $10 a month services really start to add up quickly.

I have a friend who has satellite TV, a new HD TV set, monthly subscriptions to the Rhapsody online service, a new digital camera every once in awhile, etc. He insists that he can’t afford to save for his kid’s college fund or retirement. It just boggles my mind.

What the hell is wrong with people?