One of the ironic things about being forced to work on my own projects over the last nine months since I started this current job, and have been on overhead, is that I have become fairly comfortable with Perl. I used to hate Perl because the way that it is written often makes it incredibly hard to read. What would be twenty lines of fairly clear code in another language can be only a handful in Perl. It is, after all, the only language that has the distinction so far of being able to crack a DVD's encryption in about seven lines of code. Very terse, essentially unreadable code, but about seven lines of code nonetheless!

This morning I encountered my first limitation in the Movable Type API for database access, but a quick email to the developer mailing list got me a work around. See, I wanted to do something a lot more complicated than the basic functionality it provides. I needed to be able to join three tables, tell the database to select all of the tag ids associated with an entry, count the unique groups and order them by the large groupings first with a limit of the first five results. That's the proper way of telling the database that you want to return a list of the first five most related posts based on the tags associated with the post you are looking at. For performance reasons, the only sane way to do that is to send over a small paragraph of SQL code to the database, and tell it to do all of the work for you, so all you have to do in your code is display the results. The only catch is that I will have to test this code across the other two database servers that Movable Type Open Source officially supports besides MySQL.

In other news, I have converted three more WordPress themes so that they can be used as Movable Type styles for the default template set. As always, there is the caveat that they are more "inspired by" than a direct conversion because the HTML generated by the Movable Type default templates is different from that used by WordPress.

I haven't been paying close attention to the number of delegates they both have, but this black racism scandal surrounding Obama's campaign made me think that there might be another option beside Vox Day's idea that Obama is just a distraction until Hillary Clinton can take the nomination. What if the party elites actually prefer John McCain, and are setting up Barack Obama to be wiped out by default by McCain in the election?

OK, here me out on this one. Last I checked, Obama still has a decent lead on Hillary, and they can't very well complain about Bush taking the presidency away from Gore without exposing themselves as hypocrites by giving the nomination to Hillary in the event that the superdelegates are upset over Obama's ties to that racist black church. Either way, the Democrats are in trouble. They either have to run a black man whose church of the last 20 years is a haven of hardcore black racists, or they have to choose to override the candidate with clearly more delegates in favor of the candidate with a less controversial (at this point) background. Racist or elitist. It doesn't work out well either way.

A lot of people like McCain, and a lot of Democrats might vote for him out of spite to Hillary Clinton. If Obama wins the nomination, all of his optimistic rhetoric will be overshadowed by the fact that he was a member of a church that preached a very vitriolic antithesis of everything that Obama has talked about with being optimistic and unifying the United States. He's badly damaged, there's no doubt about that, and he's damaged in the way that Bush would have been damaged if it turned out that the pastor of his church of 20 years had preached sermon after sermon demonizing blacks and spouting all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories involving the federal government. It raises the simple question of "if you don't agree with that shit, then why did you go to that church for 20 years?" This isn't Saudi Arabia where you have to take whatever you can get with respect to worship services.