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26
Feb
2008

Unintentional comedy

by William Vambenepe

With these two words, “unintentional comedy”, Damon Edwards finds the perfect description of the IT management standards scene. In a very restrained way, he captures it all:

  • the irony,
  • the predictability,
  • the unstated rules of the genre,
  • the stereotypical roles that keep reappearing: the bully, the calculator, the rambler, the simple-minded (that’s the one I used to play),
  • the pretentiousness,
  • the importance of appearances,
  • the necessity of conflict and tension,
  • the repetitiveness,
  • and the fact that after a while people tend to behave as caricatures of themselves.

I don’t mind being (with many others) the butt of the joke when the joke is right on. Plus, I made a similar analogy in the past: Commedia dell (stand)arte (once there, make sure you also follow the link to Umit’s verses).

To be fair, I don’t think this is limited to IT management standards. Other standard areas behave alike (OOXML vs. ODF anyone?). You can also see the bullet points above in action in many open source mailing lists. And most of all in the blogosphere. BTW Damon, why do you think the server for this blog is stage.vambenepe.com and not a more neutral blog.vambenepe.com? It’s not that I got mixed up between my staging server and my production server. It’s that I see a lot of comedy aspects to our part of the blogosphere and I wanted to acknowledge that I, like others, assume a persona on my blog and through it I play a role in a big comedy. Which is not as dismissive as it sounds, comedy can be an excellent vehicle to convey important and serious ideas. But we need people like you to remind us, from time to time, that comedy it is.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Everything, IT Systems Management, Specs, Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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5 Responses to “Unintentional comedy”

  1. Josh Says:
    February 29th, 2008 at 2:18 am

    William said:
    BTW Damon, why do you think the server for this
    blog is stage.vambenepe.com and not a more neutral
    blog.vambenepe.com? It’s not that I got mixed up
    between my staging server and my production server.

    Actually, its your own fault. Your RSS feed has links to stage.vambenepe.com.
    Furthermore, going to http://www.vambenepe.com redirects to stage as well. Right now, its a redirect loop.

    You’ve got some wise things to say in your blog, but they are undermined by your apparent lack of web skills. Perhaps you should be less smug in your comments to Damon until you’ve sorted this out. *cough*

  2. vbp Says:
    February 29th, 2008 at 8:59 am

    Dear Josh,

    My turn of phrase might be a little confusing, but I wasn’t telling Damon “you’re wrong to link to stage.vambenepe.com, what were you thinking”. In fact, stage.vambenepe.com is the correct URL for this blog. What I was saying is “here is the reason why I chose stage.vambenepe.com (and not something like blog.vambenepe.com) as the sub-domain for that blog, it’s because I think this blog participates in a large comedy called the blogosphere”.

    I know that http://www.vamnbenepe.com redirects to stage.vambenepe.com, that’s by design. Where is the redirect loop? I am not aware of stage.vambenepe.com pointing to http://www.vambenepe.com.

    I have plenty of shortcomings in my “web skills” (never really learned to use CSS properly, still over-reliant on HTML tables…) but I don’t think they are in evidence in the text you quote. My lack of ability to write clear English on the other hand might be. Or maybe it’s you reading a little too fast.

  3. Josh Says:
    February 29th, 2008 at 1:41 pm

    probably a little of both :)

  4. Josh Says:
    February 29th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    oh, and for me going to http://www.vambenepe.com results in a redirect loop of some kind.
    I’m using IE7/Vista. It does seem to work ok with Firefox…

  5. vbp Says:
    March 2nd, 2008 at 3:32 pm

    You were right about the loop. My bad. The HTML page contained this element:
    <META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0; http://stage.vambenepe.com/”>
    While the correct syntax is:
    <META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0; URL=http://stage.vambenepe.com/”>

    Firefox is smart enough to accept the incorrect syntax, but not IE. As far as IE is concerned there is no redirect URL and it sees this as an instruction to reload the current page. Thus the loop.

    Tracing this was an interesting exercise because the HTTP-EQUIV attribute is supposed to contain a valid HTTP header but RFC 2616 doesn’t contain a “Refresh” header. So, while I easily found a bunch of Web authoring pages that describe the syntax of this as an HTML element I struggled to find the authoritative definition of “Refresh” as an HTTP header. For the record, it is a Netscape extension from the old days that never made it in the spec but is still supported. This is the closest to a formal spec for that HTTP header.

    Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It should now be fixed.

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