Officer, am I free to leave? Flex Your Rights has
guidelines for
how to deal with a police officer after being stopped.
I should've known this, but I didn't realize that cops don't have the
right to search your vehicle without your permission (unless they can see
something illegal). Many people waive their 4th Amendment rights when they
allow police to search their cars after asking.
Posted at 09:26
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Almanacs Readers Are Potential Terrorists What's next, books?
FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs
TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer
Monday, December 29, 2003 (12-29) 11:26 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --
The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.
In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning."
It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.
"The practice of researching potential targets is consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning," the FBI wrote.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the bulletin this week and verified its authenticity.
The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, "the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities." But it warned that when combined with suspicious behavior -- such as apparent surveillance -- a person with an almanac "may point to possible terrorist planning."
The FBI said information typically found in almanacs that could be useful for terrorists includes profiles of cities and states and information about waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings and landmarks. It said this information is often accompanied by photographs and maps.
The FBI urged police to report such discoveries to the local U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force.
The FBI warned citizens today to be on the look out for suspicous people carrying books. Reputed to contain valuable information of various types in textual form, books could pose a grave threat if they fell into the wrong hands. While the FBI acknowledged that books may have some legitimate uses, it warned citizens to be especially warry of individuals carrying well-worn copies. Intense reading is considered grounds for suspicion of terrorist activities. The FBI then urged citizens to return to their regularly scheduled TV programs.
Posted at 11:51
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Back from Vieques
I'm back from vacation in Vieques, Puerto Rico. By coincidence, the Nation
has a new article about the
aftermath of the
Navy's bombing there. The island is a small place, so I'm now familiar
with some of the events and people mentioned in the article. I also
visited nearby Culebra, which was a Navy testing ground until 1975 and is
still awaiting cleanup.
Posted at 20:14
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On Vacation
I will be on vacation from Dec. 11 to December 22nd.
Posted at 22:23
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Gear for Dean
This is cool, a bike ride to the DNC convention in Boston from New York.
Gear for Dean. No, he hasn't won the nomination
yet, but they say, "We're not stupid. We know that there are nine
candidates still in the race and the convention is eight months away. But,
we're optimistic enough to start planning now. Our first step is to find
out who is interested."
Posted at 10:28
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Don't judge this spam...
Just got a spam: "Don't judge this e-mail by its subject". More like
"Don't judge this spam by its spam". At least it was in the King's English
(though I'm not sure he'd approve of Paris Hilton).
Posted at 11:59
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Where is Google's Weblog Search?
When Google bought Blogger, I thought for sure they would develop a weblog
search engine. Where is it?
Posted at 11:50
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Group Blogs, Blog Communities I think he's onto something, but I think the terminology is wrong (Dave's
comment about using RSS to dynamically assemble group blogs by category is
also interesting).
There's a difference between a blog aggregation, which I would call a
"blog community", such as JavaBlogs or the
Daily Kos diaries and a "group
blog". A blog community brings together content from people with related
interests. They tend to be insular and mostly read by the other members of
the blog community. It a slightly more distributed discussion forum. A
group blog is when a couple of people come together on one blog to write
about the same topic, for example En Banc
(legal), or Not Geniuses (politics). The
distinction may seem pedantic, but I think it is important. A group blog
is not insular; it is a part of the larger blogosphere. Group bloggers are
often experts or well-reknowned in their own right before the join
together. A group blog allows people who might not have enough time to run
their own site a chance to create something that's bigger than the sum of
its parts.
(P.S.: I am writing for a group blog which I
started. Currently, there is one other author, but as the traffic to the
site heats up and the 2004 campaign gets more underway, I am going to need
more help, because I won't be able to keep up with the time demands of
indexing every campaign ad.)
Dave Winer links
to a piece by
Robert Scoble about why he doesn't like group blogs.
Posted at 23:30
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Quick Links Salon:
The real fellowship of the ring. Cool story about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.
Tolkien.
Molly Ivins:
Picking a winner: "I know, he's even less of a liberal than Bill Clinton
was, but I don't think Dean is a moderate centrist. I think he's a
fighting centrist. And folks, I think we have got ourselves a winner
here."
Devilstower's Daily Kos post on
China, and America,
and the Moon is interesting. Devilstower draws an analogy between the
15th century Chinese missions of exploration, and the 20th century
American exploration of space. But even more interesting is the
response by
sagesource who calls it all a bunch of crap. Check it out!
The Crisis Papers:
The Democrats: When Will They Ever Learn?
Joel Spolsky likes
SpamBayes. I've been saving my spam
for months, waiting for the right Bayesian filter. Maybe this is it. I
was going to use ifile, but I thought it was too hard to set up.
Posted at 12:11
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Research Notes: PACs, 527s, and 501(c)(4) Issue Groups US Code TITLE 26, Subtitle
A, CHAPTER 1, Subchapter F, PART VI, Sec. 527.
Political Action Committee
Study by the Leadership Institute.
Election Year Activities for 501(c)(4) Social Welfare Organizations by
Alliance for Justice.
Under the Radar:
Stealth PACs by Common Cause.
Shadowy 527 Groups Continue Soft Money Grab As 2002 Election Approaches
by Public Citizen.
I'm doing some research about the differences between PACs, 527 groups,
and 501(c)(4) groups and how they will affect the 2004 election. Here's
some notes.
Posted at 11:52
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Quick Links The Dean campaign has talked about their strategy to retake Congress (more
realistically, I would say, to stem the losses) by pushing Dean supporters
to volunteer for local races and give money. Today, the idea will be
tested. Campaign manager Joe Trippi
sent an email to all
Dean supporters asking them to give money to Iowa Rep.
Leonard Boswell. The Boston Globe has
a story on it:
Dean pushing Democratic Congress. Boswell hasn't endorsed anyone in the
race yet.
2071.org has a translation of a French piece about a reporter who
was 'embedded' with the Iraqi
guerilla group that hit the DHL plane. There's some
photos of the
damage at What Really Happened (looks like the plane made an emergency
landing, but was OK). Reading stuff like this gives me the chills. I am
really worried about the situation in Iraq.
Things you have to
believe to be a Republican today (via
Counterspin).
Fortune:
Can Google Grow Up? I wonder if Google will succumb to the IPO disease
and start sucking big time after it goes public.
Are corporations "they" or "it"?
Salon: MoveOn
moves up. Good article about MoveOn.
Washington Post:
Election Is Now for Bush Campaign. More on the Bush/GOP Get-Out-The-Vote
efforts planned for next year. Yikes!
Paul Ford: A New Website
for Harper's Magazine. The first real application of RDF and the semantic
web? Who cares about that crap -- I just want to read Harper's archives
online. Which I still can't do.
(Somewhat related to the above) Peter Van Dijck:
Themes and metaphors in the
semantic web discussion. This is a cartoon-style narative of the frequent
"the Semantic web will never work" conversation. Boiled down like this, I
can actually make sense of the arguments.
Wow, Movable Type can be used to
send spam!
Oops. Six Apart
released a patch to reduce the problems.
George Soros has an
excerpt of his new book The Bubble of American Supremacy in this
month's Atlantic (see, sometimes it's worth reading...like twice a f$@#ing
year!). Soros is pumping big bucks into anti-Bush organizations.
Philip Greenspun made his class do a usability analysis on Friendster for
their midterm. The results are pretty interesting:
6.171
Friendster Usability Analysis.
Posted at 15:35
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GLBT versus LGBT Which is more common? Let's turn to Google.
GLBT:
~425,000
LGBT: ~333,000
Why the difference? Is it regional, or were lesbians just pissed that they
were second? Maybe they should use a regexp-style matching: [GLBT] (yes, I
know that's not right).
Apparently, I'm not the only one wondering. Check out this spoof article
about the dispute: Gay
Rights Organization Torn Over GLBT/LGBT Debate
Leading a rather sheltered adolescence, I was first introduced to the term
"GLBT" at the University of Minnesota. I quickly learned it stood for "Gay
Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender", but I always thought it sounds like a
kind of sandwich (I'll have a GLBT on rye, please). Now that I've gotten
more involved in politics, I've found there's another term that's
sometimes used, LGBT, which stands for "Lesbian Gay Bisexual and
Transgender" and sounds less like something you might order at a deli.
Posted at 18:58
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Quick Links Kucinich isn't making much headway in the polls, but at least fictional
characters are
backing his run. Do you need proof that Kucinich isn't for real? Imagine
seeing this picture on any other candidate's website:
Whoa, I've been out to lunch. I missed this story from last week that
MP3.com's assets are
being destroyed! Holy crap, that sucks. (via
K5).
BBC: Fasting
fakir flummoxes physicians:
Damn! Well, I don't believe that he hasn't eaten anything in decades, but
the ability to go without water for 10 days is still amazing. And check
this out: "A statement from Ahmedabad's Association of Physicians says
that despite no water entering his body, urine nonetheless appeared to
form in his bladder - only to be re-absorbed by the bladder walls."
Wired News:
Congress Expands FBI Spying Power. Great. Just great.
Air
Rage Granny Scrambles Fighters:
In other news
I'm launching a new website to review the 2004 campaign ads and brainstorm
for new ones. It's called BushOut.tv.
I'll be out of town for Thanksgiving. I hope you have a happy holiday.
Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian hermit who claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades - but is still in perfect health.
Prahlad Jani, a holy man, or fakir, who is over 70 years old, has just spent 10 days under constant observation in Sterling Hospital, in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.
During that time, he did not consume anything and "neither did he pass urine or stool", according to the hospital's deputy superintendent, Dr Dinesh Desai.
MIAMI (Reuters) - Fighter jets were scrambled at Miami airport on Tuesday after an elderly woman threw a fit on an American Airlines plane and flight attendants thought she would attack them, police said.
Reports said the woman was aged between 69 and 79.
"They said old," a police spokeswoman said, adding she could not confirm her precise age.
The pilot of flight AA-2133 with 126 passengers on board announced an emergency as a precaution shortly after taking off for Caracas, and fighter jets were scrambled to escort the plane back to Miami international airport.
The plane landed safely.
Posted at 11:41
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Quick Links iPod's Dirty Secret documents the
Neisat brother's guerilla marketing campaign to inform the world about
their iPod's battery problems. A few days ago, I linked to a
photo of their handywork that
Rachelle Bowden snapped.
Howard Dean in 1984 ninja
movie?!? From
Fear Itself, it seems that Howard Dean may have had a bit part in the
1984 ninja movie Ninja III: The
Domination. There's no word from the campaign, but IMDB seems to think it
is legit. You really have to
head over to Fear Itself to check out this post. File under "hilarious if
true"!
Posted at 19:46
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Quick Links Dan Conley reviews the
candidates' websites. I'm working on a review of the new Clark site
(short version: it's good).
Go give some money
to MoveOn Voter Fund.
Give some
money to the striking grocery store workers in California so they can
have a decent Thanksgiving. (via
CalPundit).
CalPundit also points to a page about a law I'd heard existed, but had
never read about: the
banning of "secondary strike". This (among other things) takes one of the
most awesome weapons out of the workers' arsenal: the
general strike. General
strikes are illegal, but colluding between employeers isn't. Not fair.
Slacktivist has a
good roundup of commentary about the new RNC ads I mention below.
Over on Daily Kos, EphemeralNotion
finds that protests
are a good way to meet hotties. Those chicks in the first picture are
looking pretty fine.
Posted at 15:30
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GOP to Run Ads on Terror Issue; Dean and MoveOn respond The RNC is spending $100,000 for the initial broadcast of the ad.
Watch the ad.
The Dean campaign is
responding with a $360,000 bat
to air a new Dean
ad:
Commenters on the Dean blog are encouraging the campaign to punch
up the ad. (Author's note: Damn, that was fast!)
The MoveOn Voter Fund is responding with a
$500,000
fundraising campaign TODAY (as part of the $10 million they're raising
for swing state advertising in January). As of about 3:30 my time, they're
already 80% of the way there.
This post is a little preview of a new site I'll be lauching soo to cover
the 2004 campaign advertising and brainstorm new ads.
New York Times:
G.O.P. to Run an Ad for Bush on Terror Issue:
After months of sustained attacks against President Bush in Democratic primary debates and commercials, the Republican Party is responding this week with its first advertisement of the presidential race, portraying Mr. Bush as fighting terrorism while his potential challengers try to undermine him with their sniping.
The new commercial gives the first hint of the themes Mr. Bush's campaign is likely to press in its early days. It shows Mr. Bush, during the last State of the Union address, warning of continued threats to the nation: "Our war against terror is a contest of will, in which perseverance is power," he says after the screen flashes the words, "Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists."
Misled
TV script -- 30 seconds
Narrator: The president misled us about weapons of mass destruction.
And we went to war when we shouldn't have.
Howard Dean is committed to fighting terrorism and protecting our national security.
But Howard Dean has been opposed to the war in Iraq from the beginning.
He believes it's time to have a foreign policy consistent with American values.
And it's time to restore the dignity and respect our country deserves around the world.
Howard Dean: I'm Howard Dean and I approve this message because our party and our country need new leadership.
Posted at 14:11
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Weapons of Mass...Donkey?
They're attacking us with FUCKING DONKEYS?!?!
Posted at 12:55
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Quick Links
The penguin is mightier than the sword. No, it's not about Linux, it's a
rare interview with Berkeley Breathed about his new comic strip "Opus".
Like Bill Watterson, he's forcing editors to run his strip half-page only.
Good for him.
Salon
turns 8 today. Read what it was like in the old days, plus a link to the
first issue of Salon!
Dan Savage:
I
don't. Dan Savage responds to the gay marriage ruling.
Tom the
Dancing Bug is awesome this week.
Green China? Katharine Mieszkowski talks to two scientists about the
motivation behind China's new fuel efficiency standards I talked about
yesterday.
Matthew Yglesias does
some math and finds that countries with socialist universal health care
are paying less per capita for it than the US. That's not surprising to
me. What's surprising is that their governments -- while paying a higher
percentage of the cost than the US -- also pay less than the US government
per capita with our mixed (and crappy) system. For example, Sweden's
government pays $1,759 per capita while the US government pays $1,895 per
capita. Interesting!
Slacktivist:
Uncivil union. Fred Clark explores the strange ways civil and religious
marriage intertwine. I think this essay gives more weight to the idea that
churches should decide who can get married and the state should hand out
"civil unions" to any people who want one. Fred explores gay marriage in
Uncivil unions (part 2).
Bruce Sterling:
How free software is fueling a new kind of patriotism
Lots of good stuff today in Salon. Watch the day
pass, or better yet, throw them a bone and subscribe.
Posted at 20:02
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Quick Links Here's some libertarian stuff.
W. James Antle III, The American Conservative:
Conservative Crack-Up. "Will
libertarians leave the Cold War coalition?"
Julian Sanchez, Reason: Attack
of the Dean-Leaners: The Libertarian Case for the Democrats: "In short
Dean (or another Democratic nominee) has vices which are unlikely to
translate into real policy. His virtues -- opposition to an imperial
foreign policy, greater support for gay rights, and even a qualified
federalism, evidenced by his stance on gun rights -- are more likely to be
points on which bipartisan coalition building is possible."
...and (for balance):
If Housepets Were Libertarians.
Rich Lowry and Al Franken are
going to
fight...each other's books.
Bush announces
new Iraq policy.
Who knew that John Kerry was a Pac Man master?
Frank Rose, Wired:
The Second
Coming of Philip K. Dick (via wmf).
Joshua Davis, Wired:
The New Diamond
Age. I forgot to link to this when I read it. It's a way-cool article
on synthetic diamonds.
Dan Savage wants us
all to improve the ranking of
santorum, that
frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the
byproduct of anal sex, to the detriment of
Senator Santorum,
the homophobic senator from Pennsylvania.
How embarrassing. The Chinese are going to impose
tougher fuel efficiency
standards than the US. Anyone else feel we're going the way of Snow
Crash, where the US leads in only entertainment and pizza delivery?
Posted at 19:41
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Who will lead in Massachusetts? Nathan Newman thinks it's a setback for gay rights because of historical trends of backlash against judicial activism in gay rights, abortion, and civil rights. The danger of a backlash against gay rights is clear, but I think the experience of Vermont shows that this can be overcome.
Immediately following the Vermont Supreme Court's decision, then-Governor Howard Dean announced he'd support a domestic partnership solution. The Vermont Legislature passed the civil unions bill, and while Dean signed it in a private ceremony, he defended the bill on the campaign trail and won re-election. Today, civil unions in Vermont are a fact of life, and supported by a majority of Vermonters.
However, in Mass. Republican Governor Mitt Romney is ardently opposed to gay marriage or any civil union-like compromise and says he'll work against them: "Marriage is a relationship between a man and a women. The exact equivalent to marriage is also reserved to a man and a woman. Over the next several months, I will work with legislative leadership and other legislators and community leaders to decide what kind of statute we can fashion, which is consistent with the law. We obviously have to follow the law as provided by the SJC. Even if we don't agree with it, we are going to follow it in terms of preparing legislation. We will initiate a constitution amendment process that will be consistent with what I think the feelings are of the people of the commonwealth."
There are other differences from the Vermont case. The Massachusetts SJC was closely divided in it's ruling, while in Vermont the decision was 4-1 -- with the dissenter arguing for full marriage rights. And no one is really sure how much latitude the Massachusetts Legislature has to implement a solution, whereas the Vermont Supreme Court left everything up to the Legislature.
I can see this ending badly. Because of the difficulty of amending the Massachusetts constitution, there is no way gay marriage opponents will be able to amend the constitution until at least 2006. Meanwhile, thousands of marriage licenses will be issued to gay and lesbian couples. So, what is Gov. Romney going to do? Romney and his allies may decide to sabotage legislative efforts to create civil unions or amend current law to comply with the ruling. Then, after the 180 days are up, they can blame the Supreme Judicial Court for forcing divisive "gay marriage" on the people of the state. Romney and his allies could attempt to create an anti-gay backlash and run against the ruling for the next two years (including during the 2004 presidential election). Indeed, the Republicans plan to make opposition to gay marriage a cornerstone of their national strategy. (Whether this will ensure Republican victory or turn off gay-friendly swing voters is another matter.)
I disagree with Nathan Newman that the courts shouldn't overturn unjust laws. But I agree that this decision could set back gay rights. Massachusetts needs a leader who will fight for civil unions or gay marriage legislation, and then, just as importantly, lead the healing that will be necessary to sooth the wounds of what will surely be an explosive 180 days. This will ensure that gay rights move forward and help to neutralize anti-gay rhetoric in the upcoming election. In Vermont, Howard Dean filled that role admirably. But Mitt Romney is not that leader. Who will step up?
Today, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4-3 that the state's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional and gave the legislature 180 days to comply with the ruling. Will the ruling lead to an anti-gay backlash and national election disaster for the Democrats, or will it ultimately advance the cause of civil rights in a way everyone can accept? I argue that it all comes down to leadership.
Posted at 21:30
Permanent Link
More fun with tinyurl.com
Via BoingBoing, a new way to have fun with
TinyURL, by spelling out stuff like your initials
and seeing where it goes. I
had some fun poking
around TinyURL last month.
Posted at 14:18
Permanent Link
Quick Links The Wingnut
Debate Dictionary is pretty funny if you're into that sort of thing.
Fundrace has some interesting stuff about the
2004 candidate's fundraising statistics (it's a little misleading because
the campaigns don't report donations less than $200, which is where Clark,
Dean, and Kucinich get a lot of their money). The
maps are totally cool, though.
The blogger behind Notes on the Atrocities has a cool idea for a
collaborative documentrary project using decentralized filming and
digital editing. I love collaborative media!
Jay Rosen:
A Politics that is Dumber Than Spam. "Well, I did some back of the
envelope math: There are 17 states where the winner in 2000 won by 6
points or less. That is a very generous definition of a battleground
state. (Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri,
New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee,
Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin are the states.) The population of
those states in 2000 was about 98.2 million total, or 34 percent of the
U.S. Total votes in those states amounted to 38.4 million, or 36 percent
of all votes cast. If we take a generous estimate of 14 percent
'undecided', (the highest I could find in any national poll in fall
2000) then at most five percent of Americans actually mattered to the
operatives who ran the campaign and 95 percent did not matter. And what do
the lucky five percent get? Ads!"
Rachelle Bowden has a cool photoblog and her
Street Writing project is really
nice. I go back every day for shots of New York City. Here are some of my
favorites: Bitter Former Customer
(iPod graffiti), Photo Friday:
Night, and Brooklyn Textures.
Chasing Bush has the best domain name ever:
interwebnet.org
Watch Gen. Clark go balistic on a Faux News interviewer.
If you have Real Player, Flash, and all that jazz, you can watch the new
Star Wars:
Clone Wars cartoon on the web. Episodes come online one day after they're
broadcast. The sad party is, the cartoon is probably better than Episode I
or II.
CodeCon 2004 is on for February 20-22 in San
Francisco. I'm always the last to know.
Posted at 17:34
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Psalm 2003 Psalm 2003
I found this in a weblog comment.
Bush is my shepherd, I shall be in want.
He leadeth me beside the still factories,
He maketh me to lie down on park benches,
He restoreth my doubts about the Republican party.
He guideth me onto the paths of unemployment for the party's sake.
I do fear the evildoers, for thou talkest about them constantly.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy deficit spending,
They do discomfort me.
Thou anointeth me with never-ending debt,
And my savings and assets shall soon be gone.
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me,
And my jobless children shall dwell in my basement forever
Posted at 17:31
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Audio for America The Problem with the Mainstream Media
Eric Alterman's work on the "so-called liberal media" ably demonstrates
the problem our nominee is going to have breaking through the pundit
filter and right-wing spin machine. Even so-called liberal pundits will be
critical of the nominee (just look at how they're covering the
primaries!). They are not on our side. As Bob
Somerby puts it, they have "millionaire pundit values", not progressive
values.
On top of that, the nominee will have to fight back against George Bush's
$200 million attack ad bonanza and grassroots GOTV effort.
We need a way to take our case directly to the voter, bypassing the
mainstream media.
Getting Around the Mainstream Media
I call my solution "Audio for America". The plan is to create audio CDs
about the candidate and distribute them to 5-10 million voters. It is the
AOLization of presidential advertising.
Why CDs?
This is not a unique idea, but most people have focused on using DVDs
instead of CDs. I think this is a mistake. There is no question that video
is the more interesting and engaging medium, so why should CDs be used
instead of DVDs, VHS, or internet distribution?
CDs are ubiquitous, but not everyone has a DVD player. VHS is impractical
because VHS duplication is too expensive and VHS tapes are too heavy and
bulky to distribute easily. Internet access is still too limited to rely
on for distribution, and on the internet the voter has to come to you. CDs
are also easy for consumers to copy and share with their friends and
family.
However, using primarily using CD does not preclude doing DVDs and
internet distribution on a more limited basis. Campaign multimedia will be
posted on the campaign website and file sharing networks for download and
distribution.
Suggested Format
As I imagine it, the "Audio for America" CD would be an authoritative
audio overview of the campaign. It would not be a mishmash of speeches
slammed onto a CD. Instead, it would be carefully crafted to introduce
voters to the candidate, flesh out his ideas, and then tell them how to
get involved.
The CD would feature a narrator to introduce each track (for example, what
the event is, where and when it occurred, and what will be discussed). The
first track would introduce the candidate's overall theme and movement (a
sort of commercial). It would be followed by major speeches, radio
commercials, and town-hall format question and answer sessions where the
candidate fleshes out his policy positions. It would conclude with a
message from the candidate about how to get involved with the campaign.
The Package
The "Audio for America" package to be distributed to voters will contain
the following: 1 audio CD (~72 minutes of audio), gray scale printed
cardboard mini-jacket (front: CD title, campaign artwork, and contact
info; back: track listing and mini-literature), and half-page folded
literature insert. This package is designed with cost and bulk as the
primary concerns. It will be cheap to print and easy to carry.
Costs
According to CD manufacturing quotes I looked up on the web, the cost for
10,000 is approximately $.75 per CD ($7500).
This breaks down as follows (these figures are from
ACME CD Manufacturing):
Audio CDs: $.49/each
Mini-jacket (2 color): $.10/each
Insertion: $.10/each
Since the campaign will be manufacturing 5 to 10 million CDs, I believe
these costs can be reduced to about $.50/each for a total cost of $2.5 to
5 million. If the cost stays at $.75 each, the total cost will be to $3.75
to $7.5 million..
CD manufacturing companies will also list your CD on Amazon.com for free.
I do not know if it is legal for a campaign to sell items of this nature,
but if so, it would be another distribution channel for the CD.
Distribution
Distribution would be handled primarily by voter-to-voter contact. Tablers
would give away the CDs to interested voters. Door knockers would carry
the CD with them with their pile of lit. It would be passed out at
Meetups, rallies, and fund raisers, always with the mantra: "Copy this and
give it to a friend." Duplication of the CD would be heavily encouraged,
perhaps by using a Creative Commons license
for the CD.
MP3s of the audio would be available for download from the candidate's
website, along with PDFs of the printed material for the package. The
audio should also be shared on file sharing networks like Kazaa.
The CD could also be mailed AOL-style to potential supporters.
If legal, the campaign could also sell the CD online at their own store
and Amazon.com.
By sharing the audio on the internet and encouraging widespread
duplication, voter contact with the Audio for America CD can be doubled or
quadrupled with no cost to the campaign. Therefore, the total number of
voters exposed to the CD could reach 10-40 million. That's a significant
fraction of the voting population getting the campaign's message directly
from the campaign instead of through the filter of the so-called liberal
media.
Postscript: Variations
There are several variations on this idea that could be very successful.
What follows is my plan to reach up to 40 million voters without the
filter of the mainstream media at a low cost of $7.5 million or less by
directly distributing an audio CD package to millions of voters and
encouraging them to copy it. This plan was originally developed with
Howard Dean in mind, but I think whoever the Democratic nominee is, his
campaign should utilize this idea.
Posted at 10:00
Permanent Link
Bushkakis
The landing on the carrier will be remembered as the day the Bush
administration jumped the shark.
Posted at 18:22
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Mom Finds Out About Blog This actually happened to me, but I think my site was too nerdy and boring
for my mom to keep reading it. I don't talk much about personal stuff
here...and there's a damn good reason.
The Onion, as usual, rules.
Posted at 17:46
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BREAKING NEWS: Kerry quits Kerry campaign
Kerry's campaign has hit a rough spot lately and his campaign staff are
dropping like flies. On that note, check out my story about Kerry quiting
his own campaign, over
at my Daily Kos diary: "John Kerry's campaign for president is in turmoil
following news that Kerry would quit the campaign."
Posted at 14:42
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Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD
Ohhh...pretty.
Posted at 12:28
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Paris Hilton Sex Tape Aparently, she's some kind of model
or something.
I'm a nerd. When I heard about this "Paris Hilton sex tape" that is all
the rage, I figured it must be someone famous having sex at the
Hilton in Paris.
Posted at 09:50
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Nazi Spam
Damn, I just got spam from "Nazi Online". Ugh.
Posted at 07:45
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Quick Links Wow, free Movable Type hosting.
Finally! I found out the Emacs equivalent to Pico's Control-J justify
command. It's Meta-q ( California (well, one town anyway) just elected a new reason to be
nationally mocked. The small town of Bolinas passed a resolution
which states (in its entirety): "Vote for Bolinas to be a socially
acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out
of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not
hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save
life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it
beautiful." (via
Michael D's Daily Kos diary).
AP:
Personal Web Surfing Can Benefit Workers. Whew!
fill-paragraph). See
Explicit Fill
Commands for more info.
Posted at 15:49
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Flag Flap But Dean did not articulate that point well, and in the process, managed
to offend blacks and Southerners at the same time! This is doubly
disappointing for me because Dean is consistently not doing as well as he
should be in the debates. He should've been ready for this, and he wasn't.
If he doesn't get better in the debate format, how is he going to defeat
Bush one-on-one?
Below is a summary of commentary on the flag issue.
Jack Balkin:
Dean and the Guys with the Confederate Flag on their Pickup Trucks. "I
would rather that the Democratic party be more populist than it currently
is. Let me be clear: I don't particularly like Dean's way of exemplifying
the working class Americans he wants to appeal to: the Confederate Flag,
after all, reemerged into popular consciousness as a symbol of massive
resistance to Brown in the 1950's and 1960's. But I do think that it is
important to show people who have a gun rack on their pickup trucks-- to
change the metaphor-- that the Democratic Party is working in their
interests."
Dan Conley: Rock the Vote.
"But no one's claiming Dean's a bigot, we're claiming he's an arrogant ...
I don't want to say it but it rhymes with trick."
Hesiod:
Block the Vote. "It's time for the Democrats to stop Howard Dean."
jgkojak, Daily Kos: Debate
comments/flag flap. "Howard Dean has had his sister souljah moment- and
then some."
LiberalOasis: Dean
Can Stop Dean (after yesterday's
Can Anyone Stop
Dean?) "Oops. Less than 24 hours after LiberalOasis said Howard Dean was
'barely scraped' by the confederate flag flap, he got pummeled by it."
Nathan Newman:
Dean and
Confederate Flag. "This is not an argument for pandering to racism; it's
an argument that if poor white voters aren't given a real economic
alternative, they'll retreat to frustrated scapegoating."
John Nichols, Capital Times:
Rebel
flag flap shows media failure. "What isn't being reported is this
reality: Every single presidential candidate who is now expressing concern
about Dean's remark has sat in meetings where political operatives,
pollsters and consultants have discussed strategies for winning the votes
of white working-class males. These voters, whose economic interests would
be at least somewhat better served by Democratic policies but who tend to
vote Republican for social and cultural reasons, have fueled the rise of
the GOP in recent years. And Democrats are obsessed with figuring out how
to reach them."
William Satelan, Slate: Confederate
Flog. "The headline coming out of this debate is the pounding Howard Dean
took for saying he wants the votes of guys whose trucks sport Confederate
flags. It's a bum rap."
Emory Walker, Daily Kos:
The High Road To
Dixie. "I lived in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee for
more than 20 years, including all of my childhood prior to high school.
The notion that confederate flag-bearing, gun-toting truck drivers make up
the better part of that population is nonsense--the kind only a
carpetbagging yankee could conjure. That is why that phraseology will
ultimately come back to haunt Dr. Dean. There is a New South, and it
looks nothing like cotton plantations and tent revivals."
Joan Walsh, Salon:
Confederacy of dunces. "Howard Dean's Democratic rivals are willfully
misrepresenting the candidate's reference to the Stars and Bars -- and
writing off the pickup-truck vote."
At last night's
Rock
the Vote debate, Howard Dean got his ass kicked trying to respond to
criticism of his statements that he wants the votes of people with
Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. As a Dean supporter, it was
really disappointing to see his performance, because I believe the point
he's trying to make -- when not distorted by the PC police -- is right on.
A lot of poor white people in the South (not to mention the rest of the
country) are voting against their interests, divided by emphasis on
symbols, "gays, guns, God, and the Flag". To win, Democrats need to reach
these people and get them to vote for them.
Posted at 14:01
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Draft Boards Being Formed, part 2 Now the blogosphere is roiling with speculation that a draft is imminent
because of a
recent Salon article about the
administration's
recent plan to staff the draft boards. Salon quotes some experts who feel
the draft is a real option because we don't have enough troops to replace
those currently in Iraq nor really control the country:
I really don't think anything will come of this because the draft is
political poison and everyone knows it. It'd be much easier to "declare
victory" and get the hell out of Iraq after setting up a puppet
government.
Nevertheless, this article has spawned some good commentary about the
draft and Iraq.
Nick
Confessore at TAPPED explores our options and suggests a national service
program for all college students.
Melanie over at Daily Kos
thinks that the draft is the only option, but will be withheld until after
the election since it's politically radioactive.
Steve Gilliard explains why he thinks the draft won't work and
Atrios points out that all you have to do to get out of it is say you're
gay.
Back in November
2002, I linked to a story that said draft boards were being formed. The
reality was probably a little more mundane. The Defense Department likes
to make sure Selective Service boards are fully staffed at all times in
the event a draft becomes necessary.
"The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics," says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you'd need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.
"The only reason you aren't hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now," Peña adds, "is that you couldn't come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don't want to talk about that."
Posted at 18:46
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Luskin and Atrios resolve dispute "We both regret a series of misunderstandings that have resulted in
something that neither of us intended. We have discussed our differences,
and both of us are confident that such misunderstandings will not occur
again in the future. As a result, Mr. Luskin is retracting his demand
letter of October 29, 2003. We congratulate each other on having quickly
achieved an amicable resolution. We are both glad to have put this behind
us."
Common sense prevails!
Posted at 14:31
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Matrix Revulsions I'm one of the few who liked Reloaded and so I am disappointed that
Revolutions is tending towards suckiness and a pat ending. I'm not going
to see it opening night because of some time conflicts but I'll probably
catch it this weekend. Maybe at the matinee.
The Matrix Revolutions is coming out tomorrow. The Star Tribune has a
review savaging it
and a piece where they
ask local sci-fi book store staffers to explain the story. It doesn't
surprise me that the employees at comic book stores liked the Matrix
Reloaded and plan to see Revolutions immediately, whereas the employee at
Uncle Hugo's thought Reloaded sucked and plans on catching Revolutions
at the dollar theater.
Posted at 13:29
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Quick Links John Kerry is running a
nice ad on
Escanton and
Talking Points Memo. I like to see
all the Democrats get clued in about the web and blogs, but it does
raise some ethical questions.
Josh Marshall and
Atrios discuss this.
theoria:
Dinner with the Enemy
and Breakfast with the
Enemy, plus Bear Balls.
Andy Rooney rips Bush a new one
(
video).
Slashdot interview with Neil Gaiman. I recently read his book American
Gods which won the Hugo and the Nebula. I thought it was good, but I
didn't really "get it". I didn't know he wrote the script for Princess
Mononoke. Gaiman recommends M. John Harrison's
Light as the best SF book he's read in the last 5 years. Unfortunately,
it's not in print in the US and the Minneapolis library doesn't have a
copy. Harrison is the author of
The Centauri Device which I've also heard is good.
Technology Review:
Everyone's
a programmer. Hasn't this been tried before? It does seem to me that if
you could create a system where users could edit their own domain logic
assuptions it would solve a lot of problems that now require going back to
the programming team and getting a recompile and redeployment. Maybe all
Intentional Software's system does is put a friendly, standard face on
that type of thing.
Collection
of 26 Beanie Babies from Ex-Wife (via Jenny!) "Final Notice and
Disclaimer: I know nothing about these stuffed Beanie Babies. I offer no
proof of anything. It is a stuffed animal, get over it! I don't think my
ex-wife was in the Black Market Beanie Trade..but then again, I didn't
know she was having an affair either! Thus no gauruntees! All have theior
little Heart Shaped tags on their ears." Heh heh. He's got another auction
where you can
buy him a beer and a website.
KOMPRESSOR has
destroyed X10!
Burlington Free
Press: How did
Dean surge to the front?.
Posted at 16:57
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Quick Links Calpundit on Lakoff and
framing.
NYT: Microsoft and
Google: Partners or Rivals? My biggest fear with the Google IPO is that
Microsoft or some other unsavory player will try to take control of
Google. My second biggest fear is that as a publicly traded company,
Google will lose its laser-like focus on user experience, engineering
excellence, and non-evilness. The Economist also has an article on this:
How good is
Google?
Of the First is a
student at the U of M who is recording his experiences with the AFSCME
strike on his Daily Kos diary.
David Weinberger:
Trademarked
registered copyright. It's public domain, so here it is:
Interview with the hosts of Outrage Radio,
a new liberal talk show with a bad name. The left still needs better
branding...:) (via Joho).
The Swing State Project moves to its new,
permanent home: http://www.swingstateproject.com/
The Earth Is Not Moving. I can't tell if this
is a joke or not (via
The Early Days of a Better Nation).
New Get your war on!
Over at
Atrios's comment board, they've come up with a new slogan for the Bush
administration: "OMISSION ACCOMPLISHED!"
I didn't know Mena Trott supports Howard Dean
(are you required to support the first presidential candidate who uses
your weblog software?). Looks like she even made her own button:
Prospect Magazine (UK):
Interview with Karl Marx from beyond the grave. My philosophy teacher in
high school used to say that "FDR saved capitalism". "Marx" takes a
similar track in this "interview".
Posted at 17:45
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Dean Blog calls it quits Obviously, I disagree with Dan Conley about that, but I will miss his
unique take on the Dean phenomenon. Fortunately, he'll still be providing
commentary about a wider range of issues at his new site.
[I cross-posted this
to my Daily Kos diary where it has spawned a decent discussion.]
Dan Conley (a former speechwriter for former Virgina Gov. L. Douglas
Wilder) has closed down his critical
Dean Blog (motto: "Some positive, some negative,
some completely off-the-wall comments that have nothing to do with Howard
Dean"), because he feels Dean's nomination is "both inevitable and
depressing" because Dean will lose to Bush. Over at his new site
Dan Conley's Journal, Dan provides
more a detailed analysis
(link broken at the moment) of why he feels that way. This is even more
critical of Dean -- Dan doesn't even think Dean would make a good
president. He closes with "Dean needs to be defeated, for the good of the
party and the country".
Posted at 17:24
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Debugging CSS I'm working on a new project that is 100% CSS and I've finally got enough
CSS knowledge to make it work for me.
Today I learned a new trick for debugging CSS that will probably be old
hat to all web designers, but that I wish I'd learned earlier.
When designing using tables, it's common to set border="1" to see how the
page is laid out. You can accomplish much the same with CSS by defining
these rules:
div { border: 1px solid black; }
span { border: 1px solid black; }
This will show you where your DIVs and SPANs are ending up.
CSS is all the rage these days and it lets you do some amazing things. But
it's got a steep learning curve and it has taken me a long time to get a
hang of it for 100% CSS layouts.
Posted at 10:51
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Quick Links Ryan Lizza, TNR: At His Service.
Dean is close to getting the endorsement of SEIU, the nation's largest and
most progressive union. Lizza takes a close look at what that means.
Interesting union politics.
A long, lonely
road between ambition and the Oval Office. Excerpts from One-Car
Caravan, Walter Shapiro's look at the trials of earliest stages of
running for president (via PoliticalWire).
Salon.com:
Psst? Wanna get a look at some vote-counting software? Sequoia
touch-screen's vote-counting software WinEDS left on a public FTP
site for two years. The code is compiled but includes the SQL statements
which could allow an attacker to re-create a Sequoia database.
Salon.com:
"There are leftists, but there is no left" interview with retired
In These Times publisher James Weinstein
about his new book The Long Detour about the Left in America and how it
all fell apart after WWI and the rise of communism. I think I might pick
this up because I've been interested in the history of American socialism.
In a clever visual pun, the Dean campaign has brought back the "bat":
The first 10,000 people to give $31+ dollars get a special Halloween
button:
This is kind of cool. They put this up and rake in a cool $300,000 over
the weekend.
Philip Gold:
The Conscience of an (ex-)Conservative. Gold laments the lack of a
conservative intellectualism. I read this a while ago, but
Dean Nation recently linked to it again.
I've since read Blinded by the Right which has much the same story as
this article.
Sodipodi
International Flag and Civic Heraldry Collection is a collection of
public domain flags in SVG format (via Lessig).
DNC:
President Bush's Halloween Fun Guide Costume Ideas.
Voting
Patterns by County. Shows history of party loyalty, flip flop voting, and
voting for the winner.
I think I am going to start doing these more often because I often find
articles which I think are interesting but don't have a lot to say about.
Posted at 18:12
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Luskin is a tool Even though Luskin calls himself a stalker in the
National
Review!
This is simple, baseless intimidation on Luskin's part. His SLAPP
lawsuit is designed to threaten Atrios with losing his anonymity.
I don't know if Luskin is a literal stalker. But I do know that he's a
thin-skinned loser.
Don Luskin is a tool. He didn't like it when Atrios called poor little him
a "stalker". So now he's
threatening to sue Atrios.
Posted at 14:53
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Quick Links The Game
Canon and
The 300 Games Every Game Developer (and Gamer) Should Know.
Andrew Leonard, Salon:
Musical
snares. Leonard gets screwed by proprietary DRM music formats (AAC versus
WMA).
Me: Swing states at a glance. After
yesterday's post on
swing states I whipped up this table to show an overview of swing states
as defined by the Swing State
Project.
Edwards campaign:
Interactive electoral vote map.
Pam Pelluck, New York Times:
Libertarians
Pursue New Goal: State of Their Own. Some of the
Free Staters are already moving to New
Hampshire. I was just reading some of their
escapist freedom porn
when this article came out.
Bush lies about the
"Mission Accomplished" sign. Ooh, you are
so busted!
Filmmaker Greg Allen looks at the White House's carefully produced
photo-shoots. White
House Stagecraft: Will this be on the DVD?
Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt
(via
Slactivist). Wow, Mark Romanek has some cool
music videos available online.
Jesus, was the censored version of
Closer that fucked up? I don't
remember the crucified monkey.
New York Times graphic
on presidential fundraising (fair-used).
Space.com:
Major Flare Today: Sun Kicks Up Biggest Storm in Years. It's coming right
at us! Cool pictures.
Posted at 21:41
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Bush in 30 Seconds To enter, you actually have to make a video so I guess that leaves me out
of it. I don't know jack about that. However, they've got an
idea swap where you can suggest ads. This is
something I've wanted to create for a while: a collaborative political ad
creation forum, where people could suggest scripts, then create them
together. The main site would showcase the final product, along with
high-quality scripts and links to other organizations' creations.
This is cool. Bush in 30 Seconds is a
political advertising contest by the
MoveOn Voter Fund to create a 30 second anti-Bush ad (...except for
telling people not to vote for him, which would be illegal!). The contest
will be judged by a number of liberal artists and activists and the winner
will be shown on TV during Bush's State of the Union address.
Posted at 14:25
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BOHICA
One of the great things about the internet is all the interesting new
things you learn. I recently learned a wonderful new acronym, BOHICA:
Bend Over Here It Comes Again.
Posted at 17:26
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Targeting the Swing States With razor-thin margins like this, the election comes down to turnout:
increasing your voters' and decreasing the other guy's. Hence Get Out The
Vote (GOTV) campaigns and negative campaign advertisements.
Despite the way the President Bush has governed and his war-boosted
popularity ratings, America is still a 50/50 nation. The 2004 election,
like the 2000 election, will probably be very close and be decided based
on turnout in a few key states. So it's nice to know there are at least
three organizations out there gearing up to take on the Bush machine,
which is aiming to raise a record-breaking $200 million.
These are the only swing state efforts I know of now, but there will be
others -- not to mention the conservative counter-efforts.
For in-depth analysis of the political situation in the swing states,
check out the Swing State Project.
They include the following states based on the formula (Gore + Nader) -
(Bush + Buchanan) = +/- 10 points. That's a broader group that ACT is
targeting. It includes: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa
Louisiana, Maine (2nd CD), Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New
Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia,
Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Because of the unique nature of the American electoral system, votes in
certain evenly matched states have extra power. No where was this more
clear than Florida in 2000 (25 electoral votes), which was ultimately
declared for Bush by 537 votes, giving him the election even though he
lost the popular vote by over half a million votes. However, the race was
also extremely close in
New Mexico (5 electoral votes, won by Gore by 366 votes),
Wisconsin (11 electoral votes, won by Gore by 5708 votes),
Iowa (7 electoral votes, won by Gore by 4144 votes), and New Hampshire
(4 electoral votes, won by Bush by 7211). For more data and analysis,
check Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S.
Presidential Elections and the new
Swing State
Project blog.
Posted at 15:33
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TinyURL In my introduction, I wrote, "it's even more than that, should they choose
to have URLs with unique identifiers of between 1 and 6 characters".
Reading this made me wonder: does TinyURL do this? And if so, what's the
first TinyURL? http://tinyurl.com/0 doesn't exist (so subtract 1 from my answer ;-) but http://tinyurl.com/1 does. It is kind of fun to check out all these other
people's URLs. http://tinyurl.com/z is pretty amusing.
I also realized that TinyURL's identifier is basically just counting in
base 36. Ah, the ease of constructing unique IDs if they don't have to be
hard to guess. 1...2...3...4...5...6...
I was just telling someone about TinyURL and it
reminded me of some math I did to
calculate the number
of unique identifiers they can create with the 36 alphanumeric characters
they use for various lengths of IDs
( check out the
context of that comment).
Posted at 21:55
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Social Sharing Clay Shirky has a recent piece called
File-sharing Goes
Social. He writes, "[t]he RIAA has slowly altered the environment so that
relatively efficient systems like Napster were killed, opening up a niche
for more decentralized systems like Gnutella and Kazaa. With their current
campaign against Kazaa in full swing, we are about to see another shift in
network design, one that will have file sharers adopting tools originally
designed for secure collaboration in a corporate setting."
Meanwhile, Philip Greenspun
proposes that
portable MP3 jukeboxes are home audio recording devices, and sharing
music between them with your friends is legal:
This idea makes me want to get a 40 gig iPod
and synch it up with all my friends' music collections to see how much
music I could get, and whether or not I would want any of it. That would
be an interesting experiment. Maybe someone will pay me to write an
article about it. Then I could afford the 40 gig iPod. :)
Back in August, I wrote about
semi-private networks. I suggested that they would not take off unless
the RIAA succeeds in limiting the value of open networks like Kazaa. I
also suggested some empirical research into whether or not this was
actually happening.
Consider this scenario. You are sitting at Starbucks and see a friend. He is not inside your Starbucks but across the street in the other Starbucks. You walk across the street. Both of you happen to have your MP3 jukeboxes your pockets. He says "Have you heard the latest Britney Spears song? It reminds me so much of the late Beethoven Quartets with some of Stravinsky's innovative tonality." You haven't? Just click your MP3 jukeboxes together and sync them up. Any tracks that he had and you didn't you now have. You're using a digital audio recorder; the device won't do anything except record music. You're not paying each other so it is noncommercial. Under Section 1008 what you're doing is perfectly legal in the United States.
Imagine having a party at your house in which 30 people show up. By the end of the evening every person has the union of 30 personal music collections.
Posted at 12:44
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Space Ladder Yes.
Josh Marshall reacts to one of the suggestions in
Rumsfield's memo
about the progress of the "war on terror":
Couldn't we just build a super-strong ladder up into space instead of using those rockets?
Posted at 09:02
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How you can support the union Here are some things you can do to help.
AFSCME 3800 is conducting the
first strike at the University of Minnesota in 50 years. I wrote many
people and on my weblog to ask for support for the strike.
Posted at 20:46
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The future of blogs
David Weinberger has an interesting set of predictions about what will
happen when blogs
get really popular.
Posted at 17:02
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RIP, Elliot Smith That's sad. I have many fond memories of listening to his music.
Musician
Elliot
Smith has died at 34 of an apparent suicide.
Posted at 09:39
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Defending "The Left" As far as I can tell, he has four:
Let's take these one-by-one.
Overreaction to the DMCA
This is really more of a civil libertarian issue, not a Left issue.
Furthermore, it's isolated mostly among cyberliberties activists.
MY TAKE: I'm punting on this issue for next year's election. I don't care
enough at this point to support a single issue candidacy on the DMCA.
Overreaction to the PATRIOT Act
You could argue for this. The PATRIOT Act is widely demonized by
Democratic candidates (even those who voted for it) and is much-hated by
The Left. However, most issues don't see
Americans for Tax
Reform standing shoulder to shoulder with People for the American Way.
MY TAKE: Everyone hates the PATRIOT Act. There a few things in it that may
be necessary and constitutional, but it needs to be throughly reviewed
if not outright repealed.
Overreaction to proposed FCC regulations
I assume Aaron means the proposed relaxation of ownership rules. Again,
opposition to these regulations was unusual for its bipartisan nature.
Senators Byron Dorgan and Trent Lott held a
joint press
conference surrounded by stacks of MoveOn petitions opposing the
measure. The regulations were opposed by groups as diverse as MoveOn, EFF,
and the NRA. It was supported by big corporations. Congress rebuked
Powell's attempt to deregulate local media by a huge margin.
MY TAKE: This is the way it's supposed to work!
Overreaction to the Valerie Plame scandal
This is the only one you can solidly pin on The Left. Conservatives are
definitely not overreacting to this! Check out the
DNC's ad to see The
Left's "overreaction".
MY TAKE: It's not overreacting to point out that at least two
senior members of the Bush administration committed a felony. Using that
fact to go on a $70 million dollar fishing expedition and then impeaching
Bush for lying would be overreacting...oh wait, that would be karmic
justice.
Seriously, I do not think The Left is overreacting. The FBI under Ascroft
cannot impartially investigate the Bush Whitehouse. Democrats will wait
until the FBI finds "no wrongdoing" in a few months, then scream bloody
murder.
In my opinion, this issue is not particularly important in itself. But it
represents a good example of the kind of dirty tricks the Bush
administration is willing to play, and helps show the pattern of
deception surrounding Iraq and pretty much everything the Bush Whitehouse
does.
I don't really claim to be a representative of "The Left". But I will take
a crack at Aaron Swartz's complaints
about "The Left's" overreaction.
Posted at 19:30
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Gay Bishops are Just Like the Rise of Hitler In the comments,
"Dr. Nick" snarks:
Heh heh.
Atrios has a post called
Gay Bishops are Just Like the Rise of Hitler about a
Salon
article about a married (at least as far as that goes) lesbian couple in
a small California town. The whole article is really interesting, but
Atrios quotes part of it where the womens' Episcopalian church parish has
a meeting to talk about the national church confirming an openly
homosexual bishop and allowing local dioceses to bless same-sex unions at
their discretion. One woman is upset with the new rules:
"There's no comparison [to female priests]," she says, "between the ordaining of a moral woman and a twice-divorced man who's been living with another man. We've got to protest. I remember Germany in the '30s and nobody protested and you know what we got from that."
Oh great, the dawn of the Gay Reich! Run for the hills! The Axis of Fabulous is upon us!
First they came for the poorly dressed, and I said nothing. Then they came for the soccer moms, and I did nothing....
Posted at 18:26
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The Common Sense Party Class warfare! (Actually, this is quite close to the conservative
position, with a little fudging about who gets the cuts.)
Socialism! Communism!
Weak on defense! Unpatriotic! War on Terror!
Big Government regulations interfering with ordinary Americans' right to
do what they want with their property! Anti-business! Free market!
Immorality! Anti-family agenda! God! Christian nation!
Weak on defense! Unpatriotic!
I recommend reading
Moral Politics by George Lakoff for more insight on the conservative and
liberal psyche. Here's a short
synopsis.
The Common Sense Party wouldn't be able to win over the hard core
conservatives, because it violates their strict family morality (it's not
tough on crime, abortion, censorship, and personal responsibility). With
their huge money advantage, the GOP would paint the CSP as dope-smoking
hippies intent on destroying everything good about America.
Sort of like what they do to the Democrats.
If you support a third party, I encourage you to join the Democratic Party
(motto: "We're not really that bad!") and advocate for instant runoff
voting. Only when we get election reform will third parties matter in
America.
Aaron Swartz proposes a Common Sense
Party (which, incidentally, sounds a lot like the Democratic Party). He
thinks it'd be a real winner. Ignoring the fact that third parties are a
dead end in the American political system, here's what the right wing
would do to his party.
We're for severely cutting, if not eliminating, taxes on you, the average American. (We'll pay for this by raising taxes on the rich and cutting wasteful government programs like the military, but we don't have to tell you this.)
We're for giving you increased benefits. You're an American! You should get free health care, free education, free food, free room and board -- whatever you need. This will save you money.
We're for a strong economy. We're going to lower the deficit and stop going to war with weird countries so that you get a good job and make more money.
We're for strong environmental regulations, so that you have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. We're for strong corporate regulations, so that you don't get your money stolen from swindlers like Enron again. We're for safety regulations so you don't die in a car crash or from some poisonous product.
We're for personal freedom. Does it make sense to spend your money on preventing people from having an abortion? To go after pornographers and copyright infringers? To pay food and board for thousands of drug addicts? Rehab is much cheaper! Imprisonment is a waste of your money!
We're for common-sense security. Does it make sense to attack Iraq and then spend $87 billion of your money rebuilding it? Does it make sense to slow you down at the airport when the terrorists had valid IDs and box cutters? Does it make sense to go on a war against terror when you're far more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a terrorist attack?
Posted at 18:26
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Support University Workers Please consider a donation to the
U Clerical Hardship Fund for striking workers who need help meeting their
expenses.
We are fortunate that we won't need to draw from this fund...but a lot of
other AFSME workers are not. A lot of them support their families on
$12/hour jobs at the University. They can't afford to strike, but they
can't afford their health care costs to go up, either.
It is true that University funding has been slashed by the state
government, and the U has to make ends meet somehow. But why should the
least among them bear the brunt of the pain? Like the grocery store
strike/lockout in California, this is a
fight to keep working people in the middle class.
I hope you will support this strike however you can. Check out the
union's website and
UWorkers.org for more information about how you can help.
AFSCME Local 3800 clerical union is
on strike for fair wages and health care (read what
they're fighting for).
This is Jenny's union and she will be out on strike fighting for a fair
contract. We could use your help (and if you work for the University of
Minnesota, you'll be helping yourself: any health care concessions the
union wins will be available for all University employees).
Posted at 21:04
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Vermont is Hell LOL.
An actual Vermonter rips
Jonah Goldberg on Common Dreams.
Posted at 14:18
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Presidential Candidate Humor Wish I would've seen it!
Sounds like Dean and Kerry had some
pretty funny
back-and-forth at the latest presidential candidate forum:
The bickering gave way on occasion to better-natured bantering, particularly between Kerry and Dean. When an audience member asked about a middle-aged workers' crisis, Kerry quipped: "I am 59, and I am looking for work folks." "Actually, Sen. Kerry already has a job and I think he's very good at it and should keep it," Dean shot back.
Kerry raised his successful battle against prostate cancer and used it to take a shot at Bush, saying, "Some have asked how a man without a prostate can be president and I want to make it clear that we've had Republican presidents without a heart." Dean, a doctor, chimed in:
"John was very nervous when he had his prostate exam that I would be doing the test," he said.
"No, I was worried you were going to do the anesthesia," Kerry replied.
Posted at 07:52
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Reactions to China's Manned Launch China
launched a manned spacecraft today
(
photo of launch). China joins the USSR/Russia and the USA as the only
nations able to launch their own manned spacecraft. However, the US's
shuttle fleet is grounded.
I think congradulations are in order for the Chinese space program.
This is a pretty impressive feat.
What does the launch mean?
Brian Berger:
China
Launch Won't Ignite New Space Race, Analysts Say
BBC readers: How
important is the China space mission?
The Chinese have ambitious plans for their space program. I hope the
international community can work together to futher space exploration and
exploitation.
Posted at 09:45
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Lost Books Here's some I've read:
This looks like a really cool site. The author metions another Robert C.
O'Brien book I've read, Report from Group 17, which I also loved in junior
high school. I can't remember much about it now, but it was about mind
control experiments. Man, this brings back memories. I had no idea these
books were so rare...
While searching for information about Earth Abides, I found
Lost Books, a catalog of higly rated but little
known speculative fiction. There's some good stuff there.
Posted at 20:49
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Nigeria Starts Space Program
Developing Nigeria Embarks on Space Program:
What's it going to be powered by, 419 spams?
I recently read in the Slashdot comments that Nigeria started a space
program. It's true.
Nigeria, one of the world's poorest countries, is to launch its own space program in the form of an agency that will develop rocket and satellite technology...
Posted at 09:09
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Coming Out Day and Marriage Protection Week If that's not a coded message, I don't know what is.
National Coming Out Day was October 11th and was celebrated by GLBT people
and their friends and family across the nation. But not at the White
House, which declared the week of October 12-18th
Marriage
Protection Week.
Posted at 08:12
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No Shit, Sherlock Will tomorrow's WSJ report that the sun rises in the East?
From the "no duh" files, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the
wealthy are less worried about the economy than the rich.
The Note
has the story:
The Wall Street Journal's Jon Hilsenrath reports that "while many average Americans remain wary about the economy, wealthy Americans feel more confident. The University of Michigan's monthly surveys of consumer sentiment show that confidence among the top-third of income earners in the U.S. is up 24% since February. Confidence in middle-income households is up 10% and in the poorest households is down 2%."
Posted at 11:50
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Breaching the Fuck Barrier According to Steve Gilliard,
the FCC has OKed "fuck" -- as long as it doesn't refer to "sexual or
excretory activities". The ruling was in response to U2's Bono saying it
at the Golden Globe Awards in January. The FCC said that while the word
was crude, he was using it for emphasis, not to describe a sexual
activity.
So I guess you can say something is "fucking awesome", but not "fuck you".
One of my idle speculation involves saying the naughtiest of naughty words
on television. When will "fuck" be said on non-live prime time television?
"Shit" was said on NYPD Blue sometime around 1999, though many local
stations bleeped it. Back then, I guessed that "fuck" would be said in
2005. Maybe that was too early, but an important milestone for saying
"fuck" on TV has been reached.
Posted at 08:53
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What happens after the oil peak? Now, I'm a card-carrying member of the Belief in Scientific Progress
Society, also known as the Technology Will Save Us Movement. This school
of thought (very popular with libertarians and conservatives) believes
that when oil is no longer economical to produce, less viable sources will
be tapped or alternative energy sources will be developed. For liberals,
the idea is typically that wind or solar power will be used for
electricity generation and some sort of hydrocarbon will be used for
energy storage. (I once lost a junior varsity debate in high school
because I let my ideology get the better of my sophistry after my opponent
claimed my case would lead to ecologic catastrophe. "Of course not," I
claimed. "Economics dictates that we would find new energy sources after
we ran out of oil. And besides, there's always the other planets to go to
for resources." He turned it around on me, painting a story of a solar
system of wrecked planets discarded like so much refuse. I was so angry.
Moral of the story: during debates, leave your personal beliefs behind.)
Neither liberals nor conservatives typically envision the need for any
sort of energy cut backs after switching to a post-oil economy. But common
sense indicates that this is wrong.
Let's say a barrel of "conventional" oil, to use C.J. Campbell's term for
oil that is economically viable to extract today, costs $30 a barrel, and
obtaining the equivalent amount of energy from wind/hydrogen,
turkey offal, oil shale, or
whatever costs $50 (actual cost of US light crude oil on Oct. 10:
$31.97/barrel).
The economics of this are pretty simple. When the cost of oil exceeds $50
a barrel, it becomes cheaper to get energy from the alternative sources.
But the price does not go down. When you've got an economy built around
the availability of $30/barrel oil, paying 67% more for energy is not going
to be sustainable. Something will have to give. I had not considered this
problem before.
Someone who has is James Howard Kunstler,
suburban sprawl curmudgeon. In an
interview
with Global Public Media on the oil peak, Kunstler lays out what he
thinks will happen in post-oil peak America. When I listened to this a few
months ago, I thought he was being overly alarmist. Technology will save
us. Now, I'm not so sure.
Many Americans require a car to live their daily lives. We live in a one
car per adult society. How many people are going to be able to afford to
drive when the price of gasoline goes up 67%? As Campbell points out in
his lecture, hitting the oil peak is not the end of the world. Prices may
stay at the same level for quite some time, then only being rising slowly.
Unfortunately, America may end up like the frog that got slowly stewed and
didn't notice until it was too late.
We need real leadership to get ahead of this problem now. We need to
research energy conservation and alternative energy sources. We need to
raise CAFE standards and promote hybrid vehicles. But there will be no
escaping the fact that alternative energy is going to cost more than
pre-peak oil. Our cheap energy lifestyle is going to have to change.
We're going to need more urban density, more local food production (to
offset transportation costs), less petro-chemical based fertilizers, more
public transportation, more biking, and more walking.
All the things I've written are no surprise, and are quite popular with
environmentalists. But they touch one of the many third rails of American
politics, the cheap energy lifestyle. Even equalizing CAFE standards for
cars and SUVs is tantamount to socialism here. But the oil peak is coming,
soon. The only questions are: when; and will we be ready? Howard Dean
frames energy independence as a defense and national security issue, and I
think that's the right way to get started.
I am beginning to think that this is the most important issue of our time.
Over at Daily Kos, guest blogger Meteor Blades has a great post about
the consequences of
not having an energy policy. MB talks about the Hubbert Peak, when oil
production peaks, and starts to decline. The peak represents the turning
point for our modern industrial civilization: after the peak, oil will get
only more expensive. Many geologists believe we have hit or are about to
hit peak production. A fascinating lecture by petroleum geologist C.J.
Campbell on the
oil peak was linked to in the comments. You can also watch it in
Real Player
format (The video of the lecture could provide the text for a whole
nother topic: how to nearly ruin a presentation by using Power Point).
Posted at 22:50
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Bush Blog RSS
George W. Bush has a blog. But that's
not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about his
RSS feed. Apparently, in the
Winer-verse, a
100% valid RSS 1.0 feed is a
"total
mess". Whatever.
Posted at 17:22
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GOP/Libertarian Split One interesting fact in this article that I didn't know is that
the Libertarian Party is getting the most votes of any third
party since the 1948 Progressive Party in congressional
elections. Does that make the Libertarian Party, not the Green Party, the
real party of "grassroots democracy"?
Noah Shachtman has an article on the alienation of libertarians from the
GOP:
Liberty Island. While it might better be titled "A couple bloggers and
this guy from Cato don't like Bush", it does present some interesting
questions: will libertarians bolt from the GOP in 2004? And will it
matter?
Posted at 15:11
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Cover Songs Database
Cover Songs Database. This site
is pretty cool if you're looking for who covered what by whom. I like the
UI too.
Posted at 14:36
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I love San Francisco
This is why I love San Francisco:
Posted at 11:47
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Howard Dean's NAN Things like this are why continue to support Dean, even when he does
idiotic things like attack Wesley Clark.
The Dean campaign just announced an interesting program: the
Net Advisory
Net (stupid name) which will work with the campaign to develop opinions
on internet policy, starting from a set of
principles. The first topic the NAN will address is bridging the digital
divide. Interestingly, not every member of the group has endorsed or
supports Dean. Members of the group include Joi Ito, Hal Abelson, Lawrence
Lessig, David Reed, and David Weinberger.
Posted at 16:06
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Revisionist History This is an alternative narative construction of the Iraq war and its
aftermath constructed entirely of quotes from the Bush administration
(tenses have been changed for clarity).
What would be really cool is a web-annotated version of this article with
links to the sources as footnotes.
The Revision Thing: A
history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies (via
Atrios).
Posted at 11:26
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Tech Interview
Nothing like reading Tech Interview to
make you feel stupid.
Posted at 21:00
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New Portfolio
I updated my portfolio.
Posted at 19:32
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Luke Spam _lukefictitious.__
give us a L
give us a U
give us a K
give us a E
WHAT DOSE THAT SPELL? CAN'T YOU GUESS? LUKE! LUKE! YEA!!!!!!
2 4 6 8 who do we appreciate
1 3 5 7 9
who do we know is great and fine
NOW MORE THAN EVER WE LOVE FICTITIOUS!
And thats why we are putting up our very own fan site for
Mr. Fictitious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
we are even giving you this special notice in advance!!!!!
congratulations to you!
have a nice day
P.S.
We only send this letter to people who we feel would enjoy this
we decide this by the way of our physic ability.
please be nice to us
and visit our fan site once it's up
IF YOU EMAIL THIS LETTER TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS
YOU'LL HAVE GOOD LUCK AND BETTER FORTUNE COOKIES!
And maybe win the lottery {if you play}
just try finding our fan site
p.s. its not the official lukefictitious site
which you can find with www.msn.com
its our own fan site that the search engines hide and won't let anyone see
they are real sneeky bunch of mofos
but nothing can stop our love for the great fictitious things in life
I guess it's for some techno band called
Luke Fictitious, which even has a
no spam policy: "This is
a temp page to ask whoever please Do not send spam!"
My friend Bridget sent me this awesome Luke spam. It is not every day you
get spam about how awesome you are. Here it is:
Hi we are Luke's secret following we love
Posted at 16:38
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Automatic Garages These computerized, automatic parking garages are cool. I can see a lot of
utility for them in revitalizing urban space. Much of downtown Minneapolis
was razed for parking, and now the city is dependent on the spaces,
despite their ugliness. I'm always saying that parking lots should be torn
up and replaced with buildings -- but automatic parking garages make this
feasible.
New York Times:
Space-Age Garages That Save Space (via
Slashdot).
Posted at 16:47
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Slactivist Moves I don't mention bookmark changes much, but I mention this because
Slactivist is one of my favorite blogs, and I've been meaning to plug it
for a while. It's not updated much, and the old version was about as
simple as you can get (check out that 1993
retro design). But Fred Clark's writing is great and very thoughtful.
He's a progressive Christian, a voice I don't hear much from in my
day-to-day life. From that perspective, he provides excellent analysis of
Bush's Christian references that I find very interesting.
Slactivist moved to TypePad. His new URL is http://slacktivist.typepad.com/
Posted at 16:52
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Diebold Security Flaws -- unbelievable I haven't been following the electronic voting controversy aside from
"voter-verified good, no audit trail bad". This Salon interview with Bev
Harris blows the doors right off this scandal. Harris uncovered
internal memos
that show that Diebold knew about security flaws two years ago and didn't
fix them. Most unbelievable is that Diebold's centralized vote database,
GEMS, is easily hackable over the internet! (What do you expect: it
stores the votes in a Microsoft Access file.) And since GEMS counts
optical scan ballots as well as Diebold touch screen computer ballots, not
even voter-verified ballots are safe (though you can do a hand recount
with optical scan).
These people need to be stopped.
Salon:
An open invitation to election fraud.
Posted at 10:38
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Anti-Bush Commericals
The Village Voice has a piece on
fighting
commericals against Bush. I'm thinking of starting a website for this
kind of thing.
Posted at 14:55
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What if cartoons were real?
This Fark thread on what it would be like if
cartoons were
real is pretty farking hilarious [via
Oliver
Willis].
Posted at 14:53
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Dean Primer
The Dean Primer is a
good summary of Howard Dean's positions, changes in positions, and, uh,
"nuiances". It's by a Dean supporter, but seems pretty blanced to me. For
a more negative take, check out
Waffle Powered Howard, which is run by a Kerry supporter...but I think
it's kind of funny.
Posted at 14:51
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Published!
I'm proud to annouce that I am now a published author! My article
Running Individual Test Cases from Ant was published by O'Reilly at Sun's
Java.net site. Check it out, I think it is pretty
good.
Posted at 19:28
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Global Rich List I found it interesting that someone making $200,000 or more a year is
among the top 108,000 richest people on Earth. That's a pretty small
number of people
Everyone knows that Bill Gates is the richest person on Earth. But where
do you fit in? The Global Rich List will
tell you what number you are in the rich list, and how many people are
poorer than you.
Posted at 14:14
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Hidden costs of American Programmers // several lines deleted for clarity
StringTokenizer ziptk = new StringTokenizer(zip, "-");
int zipcount = ziptk.countTokens();
String zip1 = null;
String zip2 = null;
switch (zipcount) {
case 2:
while (ziptk.hasMoreElements()) {
zip1 = (String) ziptk.nextElement();
userBean.setZip(zip1);
zip2 = (String) ziptk.nextElement();
userBean.setZip1(zip2);
}
case 1:
while (ziptk.hasMoreElements()) {
zip1 = (String) ziptk.nextElement();
userBean.setZip(zip1);
userBean.setZip1("");
}
}
The poster has a hilarious deconstruction of this code in
his comment, but I
read it and said, "Hell, we've got worse code in our software, written by
American programmers!"
Check it out. This code parses American-style dates from the web.
God knows my own code isn't perfect, but there is just no substitute for
knowing the libraries of the system you're using -- where ever you're
from.
Slashdot recently had an article on the
hidden costs of
outsourcing programming work overseas. One of the posted an example of
some god-awful code that his company got from their H1B programmers.
You get what you
pay for. Ignoring for the moment that H1B's aren't actually outsourced
contractors, let's take a look at the code, which is supposed to parse ZIP
and ZIP+4 zip codes (apparently coming from a web request):
String zip = new String(req.getParameter("ZIP"));
int day1 = 1;
int month1 = 0;
int year1 = 1970;
// Parse start date
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(fromDate, "/");
if (st.countTokens() == 3) {
Integer i = new Integer(st.nextToken());
month1 = i.intValue();
month1--; //months are numbered from 0 to 11
i = new Integer(st.nextToken());
day1 = i.intValue();
i = new Integer(st.nextToken());
year1 = i.intValue();
}
GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar(year1, month1, day1, 0, 0, 0);
Date startDate = cal.getTime();
int day2 = 1;
int month2 = 0;
int year2 = 1970;
st = new StringTokenizer(toDate, "/");
if (st.countTokens() == 3) {
Integer i = new Integer(st.nextToken());
month2 = i.intValue();
month2--; //months are numbered from 0 to 11
i = new Integer(st.nextToken());
day2 = i.intValue();
i = new Integer(st.nextToken());
year2 = i.intValue();
}
cal = new GregorianCalendar(year2, month2, day2, 23, 59, 59);
Date endDate = cal.getTime();
Posted at 09:37
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Weblog Spam But. No.
Weblog spam: pay bloggers to link to your product. Interesting idea. From
the email I just received:
I can pay you $20/month by putting 2 text links on your index or home page as our Advertiser. Please note that you have full control of your site on where to put the text links.
Posted at 13:41
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Two on Urban Planning Big
and Blue in the USA. Everyone's favorite suburb skeptic James Howard
Kunstler talks about the link between suburban, auto-dependent living and
obesity and depression. Apparently, Kunstler writes a column for Orion. I
love his books The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere.
Blame It on Canada: Vancouver urban planning guru preaches high-density
tower living in San Francisco. I thought this was interesting because it
talks about the similarities between San Francisco and Vancouver, and how
Vancouver solved their housing crisis. While informed by Jane Jacobs and
Christopher Alexander, they went with huge, dense towers amid open space
that sounds more like Modernism than New Urbanism. I would've liked to
have seen this presentation.
Posted at 16:06
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Two Krugman Interviews In the Liberal Oasis interview, Krugman makes an interesting point about
globalization. He's primarily pro-globalization, but aware that there are
problems with it, particularly in Latin America. He notes that until we
get America back on its feet, your postion on globalization is more or
less irrelevant:
I think this is a good attitude for all anti-Bush partisians to have.
Let's bury the hachet until November 2004. Then we can pick up where we
left off.
Here's two interviews with Paul Krugman, economics professor, Clark Medal
winner, and New York Times columnist. Krugman has a new book out soon:
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century.
Liberal Oasis: Are issues such as trade and globalization more relevant to the long-term effects of the economy?
Paul Krugman: I have to say those issues - they seemed terribly big issues a few years ago. And I'd like to imagine us back to a situation where they become top issues.
But at this point, they're really second-order.
The key thing, in terms of the state of the world right now, is that the United States has gone mad.
Let's get some return to fiscal and environmental and general governmental sanity in this country, and then we can talk about we manage globalization.
Posted at 15:57
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9/11 I thought of this passage when I heard the news:
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
When Words Fail Us.
The flat-topped identical twin towers, currently coholders of the runner-up distinction of being the second-tallest buildings in the world, are square-shaped and rise straight up without ornament to a height of 1,350 feet. Although in good weather they can be seen from up to fifty miles away, standing on the horizon like chimneys or milk cartons or salt and pepper shakers, depending on the distance, the towers are more tolerated than admired by New Yorkers, and the large plaza at the base of the towers is generally avoided in any weather. The two buildings create strong winds that buffet passersby, and when you get close to them they seem to loom over you in a way that sometimes makes me think of the colossal ruined statue encountered in the middle of a trackless desert in Shelly's poem "Ozymandias": "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone" somehow survived where "Nothing beside remains."
-- Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place, 1990
Posted at 14:45
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Underworld Update Is White Wolf right? Maybe, maybe not. I doubt the similarities are
entirely coincidental, but should White Wolf have a
monopoly on
vampires versus werewolves?
Remember that Underworld movie
I mentioned?
Well, White Wolf (publisher of the Vampire: The Masquerade and other
PRGs) is suing
Sony over the movie, claiming it rips off their universe. White Wolf has
identified 61
common points between the two works. In particular, they claim that
Underworld rips off a short story set in the While Wolf universe called
"The Love of Monsters". I've actually read that short story (my friend
Justin is into Vampire and he has the book). It's pretty decent, if
gothic horror is your sort of thing.
Posted at 15:25
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Bio
I just had to write an author bio for an article I wrote. Ugh! I hate
writing bios. It's even harder than doing a resume. How do you make
yourself sound good without sounding arrogant or like you are trying too
hard? I think everyone else has the same problem, because whenever I read
the bio of someone I know, I laugh.
Posted at 22:03
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What's the worst class in the JDK? My vote would be for
java.sql.Timestamp which extends
Date but
doesn't have a symmetric equals method and uses the underlying
Date.hashCode which means it can't necessarily be stored in Maps reliably.
Finally, the compareTo method doesn't seem to take nanoseconds into
account, which means Timestamps can't be sorted properly. It's also
impossible to use a DateFormat to format a Timestamp because of the extra
nanoseconds. In short, Timestamp inherits from Date, but really has
nothing in common with it. The documentation says as much ("Due to the
differences between the Timestamp class and the java.util.Date class
mentioned above, it is recommended that code not view Timestamp values
generically as an instance of java.util.Date. The inheritance relationship
between Timestamp and java.util.Date really denotes implementation
inheritance, and not type inheritance.") but woe unto thee who does not
read that warning very carefully.
What's your vote for the worst class in the JDK?
We were recently having a discussion about this at work. What's the worst
class in the JDK?
Posted at 12:29
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Aren't Right Wing Blogs Great?
Matt Welch can't get
enough of them. He even praises
Little Green Footballs, the best thing about which I can say is at least
they aren't crypto-racists -- it's right out in the open. Does he quote a
single person here who isn't a conservative or a libertarian?
Posted at 12:38
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Candidate Weblog Tools But his sixth piece of advice,
Choice in tools, is totally bogus.
Dave knocks the Dean campaign for getting into the software business (and
rumor-mongers about the Edwards campaign for the same; in fact,
Edward's new blog is based on Slash).
This is total nonsense.
There are two custom software projects the Dean campaign has developed (to
my knowledge).
The Dean campaign weblog is based on
Movable Type.
The software that Dave specifically knocks the Dean campaign for
developing is a weblog package called
DeanSpace. But DeanSpace is just a module on top of
Drupal, an open source content management system.
It's essentially an aggregator plus a weblog, which can post items from
the aggregator. Hmm, sounds like a certain commerical product I'm aware
of. More specifically, it provides some nice features for running a
campaign weblog/site: an events calendar, personal endorsements, and
forums. All of this is tied together with RSS.
I customized Movable Type to do some of this for the
Minnesota for Dean site -- but it was a
lot of work! That's why it's nice for local groups who want to set up
weblog-style campaign sites to have this software available. None of the
weblog products on the market fit all of their
requirements.
Furthermore, DeanSpace is developed mostly by volunteers and is open
source. The founder of the project, Zack Rosen was recently hired by the
campaign (see
interview with him by Lisa Rein).
Dana Blankenhorn has more on the
argument for
custom software development, and a follow-up for Dave about
what tools the
campaign is using (I would note that most of the tools that Dana lists
were not developed by the Dean campaign, which seems to be Winer's gripe).
Dave Winer wrote some
advice
for candidates about weblogs (nice title there, by the way, Dave). Most
of it is pretty good advice. I got into a discussion over at Ed Cone's
blog about the
ethics of including independent bloggers (who pays? will the bloggers act
like journalists?).
Posted at 09:47
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Underworld What could possibly go wrong with that?
Underworld = vampires + werewolves +
The Matrix + Romeo and Juliet
Posted at 07:30
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Two Beautiful Things Mike May: 'The
trees were a deeper green than I imagined, and so tall'. A man learns to
see after 40 years of blindness.
Billmon: Dream Time. Billmon
Talks about growing up in the segregated South, and his struggle to
overcome his racist upbringing: "The world of my childhood dies with
me."
Posted at 15:28
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Semi-Private Networks The advantage of open networks for file sharing is that the amount of
files available is simply huge, and nearly everything anyone wants is
available all the time. A network like Kaaza probably represents one of
the largest and most complete music libraries in the world. This is
because of the so-called "
Network Effect": the value of a network is proportional to the square of
the number of users.
Private networks don't have that advantage, because users only share among
their friends. If you want the new Dixie Chicks single, you have to wait
until one of your friends rips it from their collection.
What the RIAA is trying to do is scare people off centralized networks so
that their network effect is diminished. To see if this is working, you
would have to find statistics about how the number of files shared has
changed since the lawsuits began. If the RIAA is successful at knocking
people off the open networks, they will become less valuable and I think
then we will see people starting to move to semi-private networks.
In many ways, this would be a return to the pre-Napster status quo, where
people got their filez from private FTP servers, internal filesharing, IRC
channels and password protected web sites.
A reporter recently asked me for my thoughts on semi-private networks.
Here's what I wrote:
Posted at 09:13
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Free Culture This week, the BBC announced that it will
release
its enormous archive under similar terms. This is simply incredible, and
I can't wait to see what people do with this huge resource.
The MIT experience presents a major success for the free culture movement,
and the BBC's move will only accelerate our progress.
Two years ago, MIT announced it would release video recordings, problem
sets, and lecture notes for many of its classes online. Anyone is free to
use the MIT course materials as long as they don't try to make a profit.
The project is called OpenCourseWare and
it's starting to
bear fruit.
Posted at 16:55
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Dean using the Web Dean certainly isn't using the web as well as he could (who is?) but what
Winer says here isn't totally right. The Dean campaign has hired the lead
programmer of the DeanSpace project which uses RSS
syndication to allow supporters to create interlinked blog communities
(you can see a sample site at Seniors4Dean).
Furthermore, a lot of the good ideas in the Dean campaign have come
directly from the commenters on his weblog. They are listening.
Dave Winer continues his foray into political blogging by asserting that
Howard Dean
doesn't use the web very well: "The first candidate that helps voters
publish their own stories and ideas and drive the campaign is the one who
really captures the energy of the Web....I want a candidate to use the Web
to listen" (empahsis in original).
Posted at 15:24
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Two Million Against Bush The second is the Dean campaign which is
trying to match Bush's recent million dollar fundraiser. They've "brought
out the bat" and are shooting for a million before the end of Dean's
Sleepless Summer tour on Tuesday.
Well, I'm off to see Dean in
Milwaukee. More when I get back.
Two orgainizations are currently trying to raise a million dollars against
George Bush. The first is MoveOn which is
raising money to protest Republican efforts to
redistrict Texas more to
their liking.
Posted at 09:52
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Longhorn UI Cruft Edward Tufte has this bit where he rants
about the operating system's administrative clutter taking over the
interface. With Windows, it's just getting worse and worse.
If these
screenshots are accurate, Windows Longhorn is well on its way to being
the ugliest, most crufty version of Windows yet.
Posted at 20:33
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DU funny Today, I read a great post:
"I think a Kucinich/Moseley-Braun team would be the ticket!" Before you
can say "what planet are you living on?", the second poster in the
thread replies: "I'm sure they'd find a few extra states for us to lose,
50 would not be enough".
Heh.
I don't know why, but I read the
politics forum at Democratic
Underground.
Posted at 20:02
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Total Waste of Life?
I don't know what's worse about Gabe's blog: that
it's incomprehensible, or that he never updates it.
Posted at 20:28
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Sobig Worm According to the article above, the worm is multithreaded which is why it
spreads so fast.
I wonder if anyone has ever thought of using a worm to collect email
addresses for spamming.
I got about 40 copies of
this worm today.
Posted at 13:34
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Defeating the Cafe Press Image Obfuscation System Turns out what I downloaded really WAS a spacer. They've got an image
obfuscation system set up to prevent you from saving or linking to images
on the site.
Fortunately, it's easy to crack, if you can do some simple math.
The link looked like this:
<script language="Javascript">e(2800703, 338, 400, 0, false);</script>
the function "e" is defined in common.js:
function e (z, h, w, b, g) {
document.write('<div style="width:'+w+';height:'+h+';background:white url(http://zoom.cafepress.com/'+(z%10)+'/'+z+'_zoom.jpg) no-repeat center center;"><img border="'+b+'" class="imageborder" src="/cp/img/'+(g?'zoom':'spacer')+'.gif" width="'+w+'" height="'+h+'"></div>')
}
It writes out a div with a background of the image you want.
Furthermore, they do some hax0ring to prevent you from guessing the
image's actual location.
In this case, z=2800703 and the URL is "http://zoom.cafepress.com/" + ( z % 10 ) + "/" + z + "_zoom.jpg"
So, to break the obfuscation, take z % 10 = 3, and plug that into the
function to get the URL: http://zoom.cafepress.com/3/2800703_zoom.jpg
Recently, I was trying to download an image from Cafe Press for the new
"Local Gear" page on the Minnesota for
Dean site. Right clicking on the image gave the name "spacer.gif". I
thought it was odd, but who am I to argue with CafePress's CMS?
Posted at 11:39
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BloggerCon Winer pioneered easy-to-use weblog software. He claims to have the oldest
continuously operating weblog, but I think the
Blue's News gaming site beats him (Blue's archives from before
July 1996 have been
deleted, whereas Winer's got stuff from
April 96. However, I think Blue had a Doom news site before it became a
Quake site); he also has a penchant for defining "weblog" to exclude sites
like Blue's News.
Dave comes from the more technical side of the blogosphere, concerned
mostly about talking about how cool blogging is and writing software that
does various stuff with XML. I think that explains quite a bit about this
conference, like why it costs $500 and why there's no liberals speaking
[Kevin Drum corrects me here: Josh
Marshall is speaking) and for that matter, why most of people speaking
are techies. Dave's out of tune with the political blogosphere, so
Instapundit's basically all he knows. A quick glance at the
Weblog Ecosystem would show
there's more diversity than that -- and that the techies aren't as
important as they used to be. So basically, you're going to pay $500 to
hear Dave Winer's friends (Glenn Reynolds, Doc Searls, Adam Curry, and Jim
Moore, for starters) tell you how cool blogging is.
My only question is, why hasn't Winer responded to any of this criticism?
Is he just trying to save face, or is he really that out of touch with the
non-technical bloggers?
[This post was adapted from a
comment at Kevin's blog.]
Dave Winer's throwing a little
party for bloggers. It's invite-only...and $500.
Posted at 14:27
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Political Update I watched Edwards's TV ads and I thought they were pretty good. The cheesy
music annoyed me, but the ads are slicker and more polished than Dean's
(they look "sleek", whereas Dean's ads seem sort of grainy). Aside from
the must-have mention that his dad was a mill-worker, his presentation is
very good.
I also like Edwards's website. Will he take off? Idunno. Fortunately, it's
not my job to predict these things.
Here's a couple things I think are interesting in the political world.
Posted at 13:17
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Ximian Bought by Novell Well, that's the frickin' kiss of death.
Just read on Slashdot that
Ximian has been bought by Novell
(
press release).
Posted at 08:37
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Presence of Head
Recently, an India van driver got in an accident which
nearly severed his head. He tied his head on with a cloth and drove
himself 30 km to a clinic. Wow. [via
Weblogsky]
Posted at 17:40
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Salon Premium I don't get anything for this, it's just a public service annoucement.
I subscribe to Salon Premium. Salon probably used to be
better, but I think it's still worth it to support independent journalism,
especially since you also get free magazine subscriptions (I get Mother
Jones and Utne Reader because of Salon). It's $30 a year, but the
price is going up at the end of the month. If you're interested in getting
Salon, now's the time, because current subscribers won't ever have to pay
increased prices.
Posted at 11:16
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Robotic Nation I thought the article was ridiculous. Not because I think robots won't
take over US jobs (how should I know?), but because of the fundamental
mistakes that the author makes.
Robotic Nation. I saw this
article about robots taking over half the jobs in America on
Slashdot today (there are some good comments...I love the guy who quotes
Russel and
Norvig).
Posted at 11:09
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Canoe Trip I didn't bring a camera or a GPS, so I'll just have to write about it. The
7 of us (me, Jenny, Ry4an, Cari, Natz, Letta, and Louis) left from the
boat launch at about noon on Saturday and canoed about 15 miles
downstream. It rained a little, but while miserable, didn't last long.
Oh man, were my arms sore. I think they've finally gone back to normal 5
days later.
We found a camp site after passing a couple occupied ones. It later turned
out to be apparently the crapiest one on the whole river: small, bug
infested (I got bites in places I don't really want to talk about), with
no easy way to get the canoes out of the water. There was even a
yellowjacket nest under the firepit.
It was really hot, but the bugs were unbearable, so we started a fire.
While we were in the brush and woods surrounding the campsite looking for
wood, I found a bunch of potatoes. I quickly became obsessed with the
potatoes -- how often do you find potatoes sitting in the woods? -- and
decided to eat them. Weird as it may seem, but after a long day of
paddling, those potatoes turned out really tasty with just a little salt
and pepper.
The bugs were so bad and we were so tired that nobody was really in the
mood to sit around the campfire. We pretty much just went to bed.
The next day, everyone (except Natz and Letta, who had an air mattress)
was incredibly sore. And the bugs were still there. Letta took charge by
gathering wood to get a fire going. I thought it was silly to start a fire
when we were only going to be a the campsite for a few more hours, but the
smoke really did help with the bugs!
After breakfast, we packed up and headed out. Paddling was easier the
second day, because we'd lost a lot of weight in water, ice, beer, and
food. Still, we kept getting stuck on rocks. Nobody tipped over, but there
were a few close calls.
I got to try out the kyack the second day. It's fun (you look and feel
like a water bug), but the upper arm workout is pretty intense. Its cool
being able to go places no canoe can because you're so much higher in the
water.
I think the coolest part of the trip was near the end, when we stopped at
the sandstone cliffs. There was a sidechannel that was shaded and perfect
for splashing about in. When we climbed up the cliff (there's a staircase,
we didn't scale it!) there was a family up there...and no one else was on
the river. I asked them, "How did you get up here?" Turns out there's a
parking lot not 75 yards away from the cliff!
We also learned some valuable lessons:
I think next time we do it, we'll canoe (or kyack) the part of the river
we took the second day and stay overnight at one of the nice, large
campsites we found.
Last weekend, Jenny and I went on an overnight canoe trip down the St.
Croix river through Wild River
Outfitters. It was a lot of fun. My friend Louis has
pictures of the trip
and Ry4an has GPS output of the
route we took.
Posted at 10:49
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When all you have is a hammer... I found this article really interesting because I'm doing the same thing
with the Minnesota for Dean site. The
whole site is powered by Movable Type, and although there are some
problems, overall it is working very well. Brad Choate's post was also
good, because it addresses one of the problems we've had: creating static
pages that no one can edit (without getting access to the templates and
knowing HTML, anyway).
I thought of a fun trick to try out on the Minnesota for Dean website. I'm
using category archives for all the sections, so items in the "Events"
category go in the /events/ directory and are viewable there: http://www.minnesotafordean.org/events/
However, some of the sections are static because they wouldn't do well in
a weblog style (like the
Volunteer section). These are handled using MT templates, pretty closely
to what's discussed in the articles above. However, this means I can't
create a blog category called "Volunteer" because its archive file would
conflict with the static template file. And I can't change the archive
file format because I want the other categories to keep working the way
they are now.
My idea is to change the welcome page order in Apache. I could create a
welcome page called mt-static.html which would go before index.html and
modify my static templates to write to that filename. Then I could have a
category called "Volunteer" and a static page rooted at /volunteer/
without any problems.
Why would I want to do this? Well, I could have site authors writing stuff
in the volunteer section, then include the title and excerpt on the static
Volunteer page (you'd have to remember to rebuild it). So the page would
still be mostly static and have a unique template from the rest of the
categories, but include MT content.
Am I being over-complicated? Email me and tell me the right way to do it:
look@recursion.org
Via CamWorld, I found Matt
Haughey's
article on using MovableType as a low-rent CMS to manage your site, and
Brad Choate's interesting
response.
Posted at 17:48
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Small Pieces, Loosely Joined
Looked up
Trinity and Beyond. Customers interested in this film were also
interested in these films:
28 Days Later. City Pages.
Showtimes.
Full Review.
Posted at 19:37
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Weird Spam Email #8741 Subject: Auction Education -->E B A Y<-- werlhof's disease
Huh?
According to dict.die.net,
Werlhof's disease is "purpura associated with a reduction in circulating
blood platelets which can result from a variety of factors".
Huh?
Purpura is "any of several blood diseases
causing subcutaneous bleeding".
Ah.
This subject jumped out at me today:
Posted at 13:07
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Office Policy Nazis But constantly we hear "Oh, we don't have a policy for that" or "Oh, but
that violates policy". Well then make something up! Be flexible!
Ugh.
I am tried of office policy nazis. I don't work at a Fortune 500 company
or a Big 5 consultancy (which are the five, anyway?). I work at a fucking
small company with fewer than 20 employees!
Posted at 08:31
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Bastille Day "The arc of history is long, but bends toward justice." -- Martin Luther
King, Jr.
Happy Bastille Day, everyone. A great day in the long struggle against
tyranny.
Posted at 18:18
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SoldierBlog
Turningtables is apparently the blog
of a solider stationed in Baghdad. It's very interesting to read. He can't
really comment on government policy, but he writes about what his
day-to-day life is like out there. Apparently, he's some sort of equipment
specialist, so he doesn't do any actual fighting (he keeps refering to the
infantry as "pukes"), but he's still out there.
Posted at 18:02
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WikiChump
Ry4an wrote another cool little program today:
WikiChump. It follows links on an
IRC channel and posts them to a PHPWiki page. Neat!
Posted at 17:57
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Metadata versus Google Brad DeLong:
The Gospel of Metadata. Brad plans on just using Google to search for
everything on his hard drive.
The cool thing about what Dan writes about is that most of what he
suggests could be collected automatically, and would work with a search
engine, not against it. I am convinced that tagging files with metadata is
a losing proposition versus content-based search. But passive metadata
would add to search without requiring any effort from the user.
Dan Hon: Inflection
Point. Interesting discussion of where to go with metadata and file
history (unlimited undo) now that we have such cheap storage space.
Doesn't mention
LifeStreams, though! I'm not sure if Dan Hon is recapitulating these
ideas or if he read them somewhere else.
Posted at 17:54
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The September that Never Ended, Part II Could this be the
September that never ended, part II? Or will "AOL Journals" just become
another LiveJournal-style blogging ghetto?
I welcome all people to the have weblogs, including AOLers. It will be
interesting to see how the weblog tracking tools handle the influx of new
people.
'AOL
Journals' To Bring Blogs To Millions
The "blogosphere" may never be the same after America Online releases free blog-publishing software to its 34 million members this summer.
Posted at 15:44
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The Lessig Primary Well, I guess I won't have to. Lessig just
announced that Howard Dean will be guest
blogging for him next week while he's on vacation
(
Dean Nation story,
Blog For America post,
Slashdot story).
Dean's tech-savvy continues to impress me. Now, can the campaign use it to
branch out to reach people who aren't online?
P.S.: I found this interesting. In the
comments on
Lessig's blog, Dave Winer writes: "Welcome,
nice to see a presidential candidate who has something to say. And thanks
to Lessig for beating the drum for citizen journalism." You can read this
more than one way, but to me, it sounds like more blogger triumphalism to
me. Winer thinks that only a candidate who blogs has "something to say"?
Anyone who reads blogs knows that having a blog doesn't mean you have
anything to say.
I've been meaning to write some comment up about the "Lessig Primary", or
obtaining Larry Lessig's endorsement. He's an opinion leader respected in
many circles.
Posted at 17:00
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Mechwarrior Retrospective Ah, what an awesome game.
I haven't read Kuro5hin in ages, but today I popped
on by because I was bored. What did I find, but this
cool article on the
history of the Mechwarrior computer game franchise. Well, cool is
relative, I guess. But Mechwarrior 2 was one of my favorite games of all
time. I spent the entire summer my first year back from college playing it
until I beat it on both story lines.
Posted at 17:44
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Ah, Summer
Ah, summer. The days when it's so hot, you spend $130 at the grocery store
because it's air conditioned and you don't want to leave.
Posted at 19:33
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Blogs in Government
I was surprised to learn that Eden Prarie, MN City Manager Scott Neal has
an official weblog.
That's pretty cool!
Posted at 19:32
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MovableType Wiki
Setting up a MovableType blog? You need to check out the
MT Wiki/Knowledge Base.
Posted at 21:13
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Silence is Defeat I particularly liked this bit from his opening statement (empahsis mine):
Silence is defeat. Join MoveOn and speak out!
Howard Dean's answers to the MoveOn
Primary Interview are now available. Take a look at it, then read the
other candidates' responses. I think you'll
see why voting for Dean is the best choice.
Join MoveOn today so you can vote.
Too many in my party have failed to stand up to this administration's assault on our country's ideals. Let's show them that the era of conservative intimidation is over. People in Washington worry about "electability"-but they forget why they were elected in the first place. Silence equals defeat. Victory requires educating, organizing, and convincing.
Posted at 18:09
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Vote for Dean in the MoveOn Primary! Why Howard Dean?
First and foremost, his
positions, but just as important is is passion. He doesn't just want to
win -- there's no point in that. He wants to take back America.
Watch him speak to
3200 people in Austin, TX -- the largest presidential rally yet this
cycle -- and you'll know why he's setting people on fire.
Dean is the only candidate using the internet to its full potential, with
a blog, high-resolution
video downloads, MeetUp, and
wireless alerts. Dean and MoveOn
deserve each other. Please sign up and
cast your vote for Howard Dean!
Online advocacy group MoveOn is having a vote
among their members on June 24 to endorse a presidential candidate.
MoveOn has over 1,000,000 members and raised over $600,000 in one day for
Paul Wellstone. If the Dean campaign gets a MoveOn endorsement, it could
be huge. You can still sign up to vote today. I ask you to sign up by
going to http://www.moveon.org/pac/reg/ and then on June 24, casting your
ballot for Howard Dean.
Posted at 21:19
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Luke Francl, Bike Commuter Adventures with GPS
I borrowed my co-worker's GPS unit to see how far my ride is. The route I
usually take to work is about 2 miles (it's hard to track because I lose
the signal when I get downtown). Going home that way is uphill, so I take
the senic route -- Cedar-Lake Trail to Kenilworth Trail to Midtown
Greenway. From trail entrance to exit, that's 4.6 miles. I estimate my
total trip home is about 5.5 miles.
Yesterday, Jenny and I decided to bike to Hopkins. It was a pretty nice
ride, though longer than I thought (make sure you're using the scale on
the correct side of the map!).
Now I'm interested in long-range biking. I think a nice start would be to
bike to Stillwater. There's a trail that goes there from St. Paul. It'd be
a nice weekend trip, bike up Saturday morning, relax, then bike back
Sunday afternoon.
It's also got me interested in buying a GPS unit for my bike. These things
are so cool. Unfortunately, there is no GPS maps for US bike trails! What
an obvious business opportunity. Do you use a GPS while cycling? Email me:
look@recursion.org.
I've been having a lot of fun -- and saving money and getting exercise --
by bike commuting.
Posted at 18:04
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Cool Cool.
Yesterday, Atrios
announced that Paul Krugman has a new book coming out. I
asked in the comments whether it was new material or just a collection of
his columns. Today,
Paul Krugman replies on his website (it's both).
Posted at 09:57
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Lessig's Birthday The email is below:
Hello person-whose-email-address-is-in-my-addressbook:
It is my birthday and I have a favor to ask.
If you are permitted -- by law or conscience -- to sign a petition, I'd be
grateful if you would look at: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/eldred/petition.html
This cause has taken 4 years of my life. I would be extremely happy if you
could consider signing it to help us push it along a bit more. If you're a
supporter, I'd be even more grateful if you could pester others to sign as
well. And if you're not, or can't, or don't know who I am, then sorry for
the intrusion.
It's Lawence Lessig's birthday, and all he
really wants is for you to sign a petition. Considering all he's done
for you...
Posted at 09:48
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Poor and Stupid It's like a visit to an alternative universe where black is white, up is
down, and 2+2=5. I read some other righty blogs and
NRO from time to time, but Luskin takes
the cake. Instapundit rarely goes on in detail about his beliefs, and
"fisking" is so tedious only immature
adolescents must read it -- let alone do it. Luskin, however, describes
the strange conservative tax-cuts-are-god philospohy in great detail. It
is a sight to behold.
Take this example where he
tries
to debunk Warren Buffet's attack on the Bush tax plan:
Note what Buffet wrote: "...she would be contributing about 10 times the
proportion of her income that I would..."
And what Luskin writes: "...still 144 times what the receptionist would
pay."
They are talking about different things. And unless Luskin has a 3rd grade
reading comprehension level (who knows, maybe he went to school in Texas),
he's misrepresenting what Buffet is saying in order to make his argument.
In other words, either he's an idiot or a liar.
There's more where that came from. Check it out, if you can stand it.
You should check out the Conspiracy to Keep
You Poor and Stupid by Don Luskin.
Now let's see how that would change if taxes on dividends were eliminated. Buffett looks at a scenario in which Berkshire Hathaway declares a $1 billion dividend (it actually pays no dividend currently), to which 31% stakeholder Buffett would be entitled to $310 million tax free. That would raise his total income to $360.3 million, on which Buffett says he'd pay an average tax rate of 3%. Buffett says, "And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly."
But 3% of $360.3 million is $10.8 million -- still 144 times what the receptionist would pay.
Posted at 12:37
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Orlowski kicks the beehive again I like what he's doing. I think blogs are great. I read a lot of them. But
the people who puff them up as a new world order are hyping. It's a
continuation of the libertarian/utopian dream of an independent internet.
As Lawrence Lessig's work has shown, this is an
illusion. The internet has great power to connect people, but it's what
they do with those connections in the real world that is most interesting.
That's why groups like MoveOn,
Meetup, and the
Howard Dean campaign are worth more than any number of "social software"
pundits. I'm tired of blogs about blogs. I don't fault the creators of
these tools for being proud of what they've made. But are blogs going to
lead us into the techno-utopia promised land? No. But it will help us use
the democracy we already have better.
Oh. And it provides a way for teenaged girls (of all ages and genders) to
share their daily events and thoughts with their friends. The digital
archeologists of the future will grateful for that.
Andrew Orlowski kicks
the beehive again.
Posted at 12:33
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Books
There's something about books that just makes me want more when I have
some. I've got a stack to read, and I'm feeling the urge to buy a new
stack already.
Posted at 11:27
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Zoe gets Boing Boing love
It's not often that I read Boing Boing and see
a picture of someone I know, but it happened today. My friend
Atomly's girlfriend Zoe was
on there today
for her cool clothing line. Congrats!
Posted at 21:56
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Libertarians and New Urbanism
It's said that every online conversation comes back to libertarianism. In
that spirit, check out this
conversation about the role of libertarian philosophy in New Urbanism
over at Planetizen.
Posted at 12:11
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Fixing the IE status bar Today I finally fixed it. After trying a few searches, I hit one that
works:
"internet explorer" 6 "new window" "status bar" disappears.
That took me to
this
Annoyances.org discussion about the very problem, which took me to
Microsoft's instructions on
how to fix it.
Now, why didn't I think of that myself?
The funniest part about this problem is that it's a side effect of IE
being "integrated" into the OS. I think screwing with the status bar
setting when using Windows Explorer affects the status bar setting of
Internet Explorer. But they sure showed Netscape, didn't they?
Everyone who uses Windows knows that after a few months, it starts getting
pretty crusty. Stuff just stops working. For me, one of those things is
the Internet Explorer status bar. When I opened a new window, it would
just disappear. For months, I've been opening new windows then going up to
"View > Status Bar" to turn the damn thing back on. I poked around Google,
but I couldn't find anything about this. I mean, how many pages are there
on the net about IE and status bars? A lot. The weirdest part about it is
that it didn't happen for Jenny's user. It worked just fine for her.
Posted at 20:26
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Rode my bike today I like spring.
I rode my bike to work today for the first time this year. It took about
the same amount of time, I saved $2.50 on bus fair, and I'll probably live
longer with the exercise too boot.
Posted at 19:46
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Quote of the Day This is definately the quote of the day:
"I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about 'man on dog' with a
United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out." --
AP reporter interviewing Seantor Santorum (R-PA) about his views on
homosexuality
Another Republican congressional leader has gone and embarassed himself
with his bigotry. This time it's Senator "Little Ricky" Santorum, R-PA
(the 3rd ranked Republican in the Senate leadership), with his views on
homosexuality. Not only does he think homosexuals should never have sex,
but he equates their relationships to that of molesting priests and
bestiality (paying attention, libertarians? These guys are not your
friends).
Posted at 13:52
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Come see Howard Dean April 27 in St. Paul I guess this also marks my official Just Looking outting of my
presidential candidate preference. Most people I talk to in Real Life
know already. So, expect to see some graphics or something on here
soon.
Here's the email:
I'm writing because I wanted to let you know that presidential candidate
Howard Dean will be in town on April 27. Dean has been gaining national
attention because of his principled stand on the issues and no-BS
presentation.
The 5 term former governor of Vermont and medical doctor who signed the
nation's first civil unions law, he's:
In short, he appeals to a whole lot of people. This guy's the real deal,
and I want to help him get elected.
Dean will be coming to the Twin Cities on April 27 to meet supporters.
We'd like to give him a big Minnesota welcome. I hope you'll read about
Governor Dean and if you like what you see (and I think you will), come
with me to meet the next President of the Unitied States!
What: Meet and Greet/Rally for Howard Dean
When: Sunday, April 27 8:00 to 9:30 p.m.
Where: 1399 Eustis Avenue St. Paul (plenty of parking)
URL: http://minnesota.fordean.org/Minnesota/events/rally042703.html
There's a $10-$20 suggested donation and contributions are not tax
ductible for Federal income tax purposes.
P.S.: If you can't make it or just want more information, check out these
links for more about Howard Dean and the grassroots organizing that's
going on here in Minnesota.
Official site: http://deanforamerica.com
Minnesota Grassroots site: http://minnesotafordean.org
Minnesota mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MinnesotaforHowardDean/
Unofficial blog: http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Official blog: http://www.deancalltoaction.blogspot.com
Meet other Dean supporters: http://dean2004.meetup.com
Audio/Video archive: http://www.rklau.com/dean2004/misc/video.html
I sent out the following email to some friends. Hopefully they are not
too annoyed with it. I figured I might as well put it up on my blog
for others to read and maybe they will want to attend, too.
Posted at 22:37
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Today is Weird People Day His site shows
that's just the beginning. He's got proof that
the timeline has
been altered, causing him
finacial
censorship. Truly bizare.
Perhaps weirder than the Time Cube guy...
Or, maybe, R. S. Tolley? Among other things, he
reveals the connection between Amy
Grant, John Madden, King Arthur, and the virgin Mary...followed by the
inexplicable inclusion of Dave Matthews lyrics.
Today is weird people day. My co-worker Jason sent out
this wacked
eBay auction. He claims to be selling a new compression algorithm...for
$30,000,000...and then it goes down hill from there: "APPLICATIONS: ...
Transportation Increase storage mass of any fuel, thus output of any
engine Space travel, space fuels that are compressed in mass thus reducing
to transport the fuel Space travel, space engines that are
compressed-teleported in bubbles, thus no need to actually carry the fuel,
fuel is streamed Medicine Increase mass of any medications without
increasing volume, thus facilitating augmentation of administration of any
medications of procedures"
Posted at 18:08
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Philip Greenspun has a blog! Now that he's rich, he cares less about changing the status quo and more
about using whatever Microsoft is offering and flying his airplane.
ArsDigita co-founder and internet hero of yore Philip Greenspun
has a blog. Philip is outspoken (is
that too mild a word?) on just about every topic, so his blog is sure to
be interesting.
Posted at 14:26
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Ry4an has a (un)blog! But now, he's got the upper hand, with Ry4an's
Un-Blog. It's not a blog -- it's a MHonArc template that looks like a
weblog. It even has an RSS feed (cough
which sucks cough ;).
Ry4an says "I still fail to see the difference between modern blogging
software and 1990s style vanity mailing lists." He's right. The famous
FoRK (Friends of Rohit Khare) mailing
list is considered one of the precursors to blogs.
His inagural posts include one which graphs the
perserverance of "annual" events using
Google.
Ry4an had a sharp critique of Gabe and my "Bleek"
mailinglist-to-blog software. One of these days, I'll print his email and
my response.
Posted at 14:19
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The War Must Be Over
STAR TRIBUNE HEADLINES RETURN TO NORMAL SIZE
Posted at 08:09
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Ken MacLeod has a blog! MacLeod is the author of the excellent Fall Revolution series of near (and
far) future political science fiction. He's also the author of another
series which I haven't got around to reading yet.
I found out about this from
a post
on Electrolite where Patrick Nielsen Hayden notes, "I have personally
felt like I was living in a Ken MacLeod future since sometime not long
after 9/11, and I wish he'd CUT IT OUT."
I've felt much the same way. I re-read The Star Fraction shortly after
9/11 and reading the Atlantic Monthly article
A New Grand
Strategy -- which suggests the US's interest in the Middle East lie not
so much in oil, but in preventing Europe from developing armed forces
capible of force projection -- and I was startled by the parallels. I even
thought of trying to track down Ken MacLeod and email him the article:
"Look! It's happening!"
I'm worried, but I'm glad I'm not the only one.
Oh, and I highly recommend all his books.
Sure, everyone and his mom knows that William Gibson has a blog. But I
just found out that my current favorite science fiction author, Ken
MacLeod, has a weblog!
Posted at 14:14
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Working Overtime Nerd Stuff
SQL to Prevayler Migration Micro-HOWTO
Rollback support in Prevayler. Uh oh, rationalizing the lack of
atomicity. Sounds like the MySQL syndrome.
Redhat Enterprise Content Management
System. Redhat shipped a new version of the ACS. It looks a lot slicker
than it used to, and they've ported it to PostgreSQL. I'm still interested
in this, because my company competes in this space, too.
Architecture
Christian Science Monitor:
Is that a daisy
growing on your roof?. Cool! Ecoroofs rock, if I buy a house I totally
want to build one.
The City of
Portland has more on their ecoroof program, including a
cool Q&A document
(pdf).
Politics
Two bits from the centrist New America Foundation.
Michael Lind:
America's Tribes
Phillip J. Longman:
The
Health of Nations. We've exhausted all the easy life expectancy gains,
and trying to push it further with is busting the health care bank. What
next?
Waxy.org: Bias
Affects Story Updates on Political Weblogs (via
soundbitten).
I'm working overtime, so here's some hot and tasty links.
Posted at 15:28
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Some Quickies Urban Growth Seen from Space (via
Planetizen)
David Horsey (who you'll find linked in my "Comics" section) won the
2003 Pulitzer for editorial cartooning. His paper put up the
cartoons which were included in his Pulitzer entry. My favorite is
A
Guide to Red and Blue America
Another fun editorial comic: Wartime
ABCs (via Tom Tomorrow)
The Campanile Movie, which served
as the basis for the Matrix's "Bullet Time" (via a Slashdot comment).
Seriously cool.
Here's some neat links.
Posted at 19:53
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I liked him better before he sold out. His latest episode is classic. He nearly gets suckered by a scammer, but
thanks to his blog, he's tipped off. Not wanting to believe, he lays a
cunning trap and exposes her -- with a bit of computational theory. Truly,
blogs save
lives.
And now he's #1 on DayPop. Well, you know what? I
knew him before he was famous. And I liked him
better before he sold out.
Joey has the worst luck with the ladies of any guy
I've ever known. It's not that he can't find dates...it's that the girls
he meets never seem to work out.
Posted at 15:38
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Googlewashed Orlowski takes a dim view on dimwitted "A-List" bloggers and their Google
power.
It's becoming clear that Google needs to tune its rankings so that
bloggers do not have undue influence in rankings.
Anti-war slogan coined,
repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days by Andrew Orlowski.
Posted at 19:09
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Last Chance for vi or Emacs reference mugs? I recieved an email yesterday saying that the proprietor was considering
shutting down the store (no, it wasn't an April Fools joke) and is closing
out his inventory. So this could be your last chance to pick up a fabulous
vi or Emacs reference mug. Currently, there's only 25 vi mugs left in
stock (vi geeks always did need more coddling than Emacs users ;-).
Since I've switched to Emacs myself, I'm thinking of picking up one of
those mugs so I'll have a matched set.
If you know me, you've probably marveled over my
vi reference mug, which I purchased a number of years ago from
GeekCheat.
Posted at 16:23
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IIS Sucks So, if you know how to set up subdomains (like foo.bar.com) as virtual
hosts in IIS, email me.
IIS sucks. Well, specifically, finding out how to do anything with it
sucks. That's one of the problems with commerical software. Even when it's
ubiquitous like IIS, not enough documentation is available online for
casual users.
Posted at 21:59
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A Conversation with Andres Duany New Urbanist Andres Duany talks with modernist Dan Solomon in this
interesting piece. Duany speaks to the need for standardized building
materials and building on tradition for successful architecture.
The Town Paper: A
Conversation With Dan Solomon and Andres Duany (via Planetizen).
Posted at 13:55
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Take Back the Government! Jesse at Pandagon links and
comments on this article on CommonDreams:
How to take back
America. "Marching in the streets is important work, but wouldn't we have
greater success if we also took control of the United States government?"
He hits a point that I've been making to whoever will listen: The US
political system only works with two political parties, because it's
winner takes all. I don't think the Framers intended it that way (many of
them were pretty hostile to the idea of "factions" to begin with), but
that's how our system has turned out. As a voter, you have to gamble on
voting for the person who is going to win.
If you're a progresive or you like civil liberties, there's only one party
you can realistically support: the Democratic Party. But the Democratic
Party is not perfect, and it can't be allowed to take our votes for
granted. That's why progressives and civil libertarians have to be active
in the Democratic Party.
Part of the Democratic Party platform should be election reform through
Instant Runoff Voting. It's mathematically more fair for every voter than
our current election system. Progressives and civil libertarians should
declare a "truce" with the Democratic Party until this is accomplished.
When it is, we can all part ways -- in a real democratic system.
Following a theme I've been after for a while, we need to take back our
government. Salon has an article today about what the anti-war movement
plans to do next:
Rage or reason. I talked about translating the
anti-war movement into
political will the other day.
Posted at 19:22
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George Bush Lookalike? We report, you decide.
Is George Bush
employing a lookalike to give his public appearances?
Posted at 18:30
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Regex Syntax Summary
This guy is my hero:
Regex Syntax Summary.
Posted at 08:27
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Translating Anti-War Protests into Political Will The chances of that happening are pretty well non-existent. But today
on Altercation I came across
an idea that has real merit and is easy to implement:
"[D]on't you think if the anti-war crowd started setting up voter
registration booths at every event, that might get Bush's attention?
Nothing else will." -- Matt, Pgh
Now there's an idea.
Here's the Minnesota voter registration form: http://www.sos.state.mn.us/election/98vrcard.pdf
I did some research about the legality of signing up people to vote, then
mailing the forms for them. It is, according to the
League of United Latin
American Citizens:
In the same vein, LULAC says the forms can be photocopied in many states.
We've got the forms and the laws. Now all we need are some volunteers and
clipboards.
I've been trying to think of a way to translate the anti-war protests into
political will directed at getting Bush out of office in 2004. My ideas
usually center around taking the mike at a huge protest and winning
everyone over with my rhethorical skills, or writing a compelling essay
which is widely disseminated on the internet.
Q: Can my organization mail the completed Forms we receive in our registration drive, or do the individuals need to mail them personally? If we can mail them, do they have to be individually stamped or can they be bundled?
An organization may mail completed Voter Registration Applications to the appropriate election office(s) individually or in a bundle. The Department of Justice interprets the cost of first class postage to fall into the realm of "facilitating" voter registration, and not as an attempt to induce an individual to register to vote by giving something of value, which would be prohibited by the "vote buying" provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Q: Can the Form be photocopied?
Yes. However, please be aware that photocopied voter registration applications will not be accepted by all 50 States.
The following states accept photocopied voter registration applications: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Posted at 21:21
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War Worries I'm worried about the way the war is going. Our soldiers are meeting heavy
resistance, even in Southern Iraq. The Iraqis are switching to guerrilla
tatics to harras our long supply line. American and British soldiers are
dying.
I'm also worried about the Iraqis. There's a pseudonymous Iraqi blogger
named Salam Pax who I've been reading.
Salam doesn't want to be bombed, but he doesn't like Saddam, either.
"Support Democracy in Iraq" is all he asks of us (an Iraqi-American with
relatives in Baghdad
says much
the same thing. Heartbreaking.) He hasn't updated for 3 days. His last
update: "2 more hours untill the B52's get to Iraq."
I don't know him, but he is putting a personal face on the war for me. I
worry about his safety and I hope he lives. The first step in convincing a
nation's people that they must attack another is to dehumanize the enemy.
Maybe someday the net will connect us so much that such dehumanization
becomes impossible. But considering the way my coworkers seem to be
salivating over the webcast war porn, that seems pre-mature.
It's still too soon to tell, but I think the American people were sold a
bill of goods.
Posted at 21:23
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Sex Ed letter to the editor The letter is below:
I applaud your sex education editorial of March 22nd. As our nation's
attention is focused on the war with Iraq, it is important to keep an
eye on what is going on back home.
However, your editorial failed to mention the most crucial reason why
comprehensive sex education must be offered to all students: everyone
has sex someday. If we assume for a moment that abstinence-only sex
education actually works and prevents young people from having sex
until they're married, what then?
Unlike the Monty Python sketch where "every sperm is sacred", American
couples generally do not want to have child after child. They need to
know what options they have for birth control and how they work, not
platitudes about staying chaste. Comprehensive sex education is the
best way to ensure that Minnesota's young adults get the information
they need.
I sent a letter to the editor to the Star Tribune regarding their
recent editorial
about comprehensive sex education. Sadly, the space prevents me from
touching upon the importance of comprehensive sex education for gay and
lesbians.
Posted at 15:57
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More Republicans like this, please Yes! We need more wack-job Republicans like this, so they will nominate
extreme right wing candidates with no chance of getting elected in
Minnesota. Keep up the good work, Mr. Williams.
We need more Republicans like this. Check out this
hilarious letter to
the editor from an enraged Republican. Enraged because Norm Coleman
tested his leash by voting against drilling in the Artic National Wildlife
Refuge.
Once a Democrat
I donated to Norm Coleman's Senate campaign. I thought he was a Republican who would support our president.
I was wrong and I will never donate or vote for another Democrat who changes parties. Once a Democrat, always a Democrat.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is nothing but tundra. Period. There is not one tree there and I would like to hear from any Minnesotan who has ever been there. Tundra, period.
The Native Americans who live there want the oil companies to develop ANWR and anyone who is against them is dooming them to life with no electricity, running water and other amenities that these protectionists enjoy every day of their lives.
Shame on them.
Michael B. Williams, Jacobson, Minn.
Posted at 14:22
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Where do we go from here? What do we do next? Protests every day seem silly to me. This isn't
Vietnam. God willing, our troops won't be bogged down in Iraq for 10
years. Indeed, part of the reason this war is so unjust is that it's an
unprovoked attack by the world's greatest power on a third world country.
Once the war is over, the anti-war movement needs to hold Bush's feet to
the fire over his promises. He must not be allowed to sell out the Kurds.
He must provide money to re-construct Iraq. He must fully commit to
building a strong democracy in Iraq. And we must work with the global
anti-war movement to show the Europeans and Arabs that not all Americans
are insane.
The anti-war movement failed this time, but we're growing in strength. We
must and we will stop the next war before it starts. It's no secret that
the ultrahawk neo-conservatives in the Bush administration have designs on
the entire Middle East: to reshape it with pro-American democracies with
the barrel of a gun. Who will be next? Syria? Iran? Saudi Arabia?
Most of all, we must never let our eyes off our number one goal: to get
Bush out of the White House. We have to translate our marches and protests
into concrete political power. Now is not the time for fractous disputes
on the left. We have to unite to defeat him. Democrats, independents,
Greens, Libertarians, and moderate Republicans all stand to gain from his
defeat. Millions of Americans said no to this war. Bush didn't listen to
us. We must show him the price of his arrogance: utter defeat in 2004.
Let's keep our eye on the prize, fighting Bush every step of the way until
November 2004.
The war has started. If you'll excuse my hyperbole, the first pre-emptive
peace movement failed to stop the first pre-emptive war. Where do we go
from here? Obviously, those who wished for no war at all wish that it will
be as short as possible with little loss of life -- on both sides.
Posted at 22:29
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Weird Day I woke up without my alarm at 9:30. I'd forgotten to set it. So no shower
for me.
Then at work, I get a call out of the blue from some British guy. Turns
out he's a recruiter looking for people with Content Manager experience to
do contract programming in Europe. Heh, sounds pretty cool to me.
Then the anti-war protest. About 500 people showed up. I didn't like it
much, because it was run by chanting idiots with an overly loud sound
system. As an aside, does anyone think the "Hell no, we won't go" chant is
kind of obsolete? We don't have a draft any more.
After milling about for a while, I walked around the crowd checking out
people. There was a student walk out, so there were a lot of young kids.
Some cute chicks dancing to the improptu music. Maybe 10 or 20 black bloc
anarchists with their black and anarcho-syndicalist flags. I hadn't seen
any anarchists at previous protests.
Today was a weird day.
Posted at 21:56
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Dub Side of the Moon I might buy this album (in fact, I'm bloggings this so I don't forget
about it) because I really liked that song. It'd been a while since I
listened, and I was struck by the fleeting nature of life (made all the
more timely by our incipient "shock and awe" bombardment of Iraq). As the
Blogcritics review said, that song is "many, many a teen's first
intimation of mortality".
Maybe I'm just getting older, but for some reason, the feeling of
mortality came on strong today.
And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death Live for today.
While trying to pull myself out of bed this morning, I heard an
interesting song on the fabulous Radio K. It was a
cover of one of my favorite songs, Time by Pink Floyd. A reggae cover. It
was from the album Dub Side of the Moon by the Easy Star All Stars
(here's a
review on Blogcritics).
Posted at 22:33
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The Bush Peace Plan
I've figured out Bush's plan for peace in the Middle East:
Posted at 09:04
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English Sans French
English Sans French
is pretty funny. So what if I found it on Day Pop.
Posted at 11:59
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Dear Nader Voters
Ouch.
That stings.
Posted at 10:49
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More on the Mail/RSS gateway Gabe notes that we made quite a
bit of progress, and we did. A seasoned Python programmer would probably
be done already, but that's not what we are. We pair-programmed XP-style,
which was kind of neat.
It turns out that the project is going to be easier and harder than I
anticipated. It turns out that there is a Python API for reading mail
boxes. It was right under my nose in the standard library:
mailbox. Gabe
also found a nice
sample
script which shows how to read and write an mbox file. The mailbox API
means we'll be able to support a number of mailbox formats, including MBOX
and maildir.
I also found out that the
XML-RPC
libraries we need are a standard part of Python 2.2. That's great news.
Discovering the Python
Library Reference was a great boon. I had previously been using the
anemic module index, which doesn't serve as any kind of reference for the
built in functions and exceptions. One of my major complaints about
Python's documentation has disappeared. Now if only the API reference was
as good a Sun's JavaDoc...
The bad news comes from the weblog front. I examined the
Blogger API more closely, and it
turns out to suck rather a lot. You can't even title posts. Blogger also
has no concept of "below the fold" which I wanted to use. To provide
metadata for weblog posts, Dave Winer came up with the
Meta-Weblog API. It provides a
struct (basically, a hash) for posting. This is nice because you can
extend your server and client to allow custom behavior, but it also means
each weblog implements this differently (sadly, there doesn't seem to be
an implementation of the Meta-Weblog API in Python). The original Blogger
API is also implemented differently for each weblog, but in a simpler way.
Then there's the
Blogger 2 API,
which addresses the problems of the orignal, but isn't widely deployed
yet.
We decided to have the user configure which type of weblog they are going
to use (Blogger, Movable Type, Manilla, Live Journal, etc.) and we will
implement appropriate XML-RPC posting mechanism. We're going to start with
Movable Type because that's what we have and it has the best support for
what I want to do.
Finally, we need to implement the HTMLization of emails and threads. I'll
be working on that this week.
Ry4an sent me a long critique of the idea which I
will post soon. He respectfully disagrees that the software is worth
writing.
Gabe and I got together yesterday to work on our
email/RSS gateway software. He came up with a
list of possible names (the
most crucial part of any project). I liked the sound of "Bleek" and so
that's what we picked.
Posted at 10:19
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Balkin on Friedman He concludes:
I really enjoy Jack Balkin's blog. He
doesn't post constantly, but when he does, it is so well thought out and
intelligent. I would say his eloquence and thoughtfulness was a
consequence of being a law professor, if not for a certain other blogging
law professor who does not share Balkin's qualities. If you don't read
Balkinization, you should. His latest on Tom
Friedman,
Hey
Tom, Wake Up and Smell the Napalm is excellent.
For those readers who think that the reason we should fight this war is to rid the world of a despicable tyrant and replace him with a vibrant democracy, I salute you. I applaud your idealism and your commitment to making this a better, freer world. But you need to realize that your agenda is not Bush's agenda. Your motives are not his motives. He is playing you, and all of us, for fools. Don't be taken in. He isn't serious about making the long term commitment that will be necessary to secure a democratic state in Iraq. And, as a result, he is going to make this world an even bigger mess, and an even more dangerous place than it was before he became President.
God help us. God help us all.
Posted at 09:46
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WMD
Find: Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Searching....
Posted at 08:53
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Word Unmunger 1.3 P.S.: While you're at Freshmeat, check out what might be the most useless
software known to man:
aEGiS nanoweb. It's an HTTP
server with CGI and FastCGI support, virtual hosts, server side
includes and more...written in PHP. Does that make
sense to anyone?
There's a new version of the
Word Unmunger available.
I fixed a crashing bug related to Python's Regex library (Perl's still the
champ here, I guess) and added a --debug option and improved the
robustness of command line argument handling.
Posted at 22:44
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Weblogs for Mailinglists Here's the features I'd like to implement in this software:
Initally, I want to support MBOX format, because that's what I use. To set
up a weblog for a mailing list, you'd subscribe to the mailing list and
filter the subscription to an MBOX file which would then be monitored with
this tool. You could even use this to make an automatic weblog out of your
filtered spam!
One important detail is how to determine which items have been posted to
the weblog already and how to post follow-ups to the entry they belong to.
RSS generation will be handled by the weblog tool the software posts to
using the Blogger API. However, it may turn out to be easier to simply
generate flat HTML and RSS for the weblog. But I'd like to leverage
existing tools if I can.
There's some existing workon this:
Why is my idea different?
Here are some challenges I foresee:
For challenge #2, we can look into supporting maildir instead, but that's
in the future. My mail server doesn't use maildir so I'm not too
concerned. Another solution is to periodically delete old threads from the
archive file. However, I envision this for smaller mailing lists right
now. If it becomes popular enough to be used on a big mailing list, we'll
try to fix the problem.
For challenge #3, I have a decent solution. The program will generate the
HTML for each thread in a cache directory (one file per thread) and save
it. Thread files are generated from what JWZ calls "first princliples"
every time the script is run. It will also save a database containing file
names and sizes (or SHA1 hash, but that's total overkill). If a thread
file changes inbetween program invocations, the weblog post corresponding
to that thread is updated with the contents of the file.
Challenge #6 is really the most serious. I need a catchy name!
Writing the software:
I want to write this in Python. It's just the right size for a good
learning experience, but not too big for me to get discouraged. I'm trying
to convince Gabe to help me write it and learn
some Python-fu at the same time. Hopefully, there's a library for reading
MBOX format. I might try to convince Don Marti to lend me his
implmentation of JWZ's algorithm; otherwise I'll write a Python library to
do that. For the database, I'll pickle a dictonary. Finally, there should
be a Blogger API module floating around somewhere we can use.
Update: I found an
implementation of JWZ's algorithm in Python. There seem to be a couple
Blogger API implementations, including
PyBlogger from
Mark Pilgrim. Surprisingly, no MBOX API yet.
Update 2: Gabe told me that procmail can output maildir format. So I
might support maildir first instead of MBOX.
Not sure about the license yet. GPL or BSD most likely.
I've been kicking around an idea lately for a gateway between mailing
lists and weblogs. Having a weblog for a mailinglist would make it easier
to follow on a casual basis. There's a number of mailing lists I'd like to
follow this way, like Minnesota Issues and the Chandler development
mailing lists.
Posted at 19:17
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Top 50 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Here's the ones I've read:
25 out of 50's not bad! I'll have to read the rest of them sometime. I
would probably pick a little differently (Snow Crash above The Stars My
Destination and Stand on Zanzibar? And only two "hard" SF books --
granted, two of the best.) but overall I think that's a pretty find book
of science fiction. I wonder how much overlap there is with
David Pringle's 100
Best Science Fiction Novels which covers 1949-1984. I haven't got time to
figure that out now, unfortunately.
The Science Fiction Book Club released their list of
the
Top 50 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the last 50 years
(1953-2002).
Posted at 15:05
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The PATRIOT Act Bears Fruit Should those words be enough to arrest a man in a public library?
William Rivers Pitt asks that question in
Arrest Me. And it's not
hypothetical. Andrew O'Conner was arrested in a public library and
interrogated by Secret Service agents. Using the Patriot act, the police
monitored his internet chat session at the St. John's College Library in
Santa Fe.
This isn't some paranoid conspiricy theory bullshit. It happened. The
American
Library Association confirms it. So does the
Santa Fe New Mexican. It happened. And it's going to keep on happening
until the PATRIOT Act is repealed like the Alien and Sedition Acts were.
It must be repealed. Join the ACLU and help us
fight against it.
"George W. Bush is out of control."
Posted at 14:53
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On this day...
On this day in
1982, Ayn Rand died. She was 77. At her funeral, there was a six foot
flower arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign.
Posted at 19:11
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Worst UI. Ever. Hey, that UI's even worse than some of ours...
How not to do UI Design in Just
Three Widgets.
Posted at 22:44
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REST REST, if you don't know, uses the semantics of HTTP to access objects and
perform actions on them.
We need an API so that a third-party order entry system can access our
data and display thumbnails and metadata and that sort of thing. The
options my boss laid out were:
When he said #3, I yelled out "REST!" to a roomful of blank stares. I
explained a little about how REST works and then I sent out an email with
some tasty REST links.
Now I hear people walking around the halls saying stuff like "SOAP or
REST", so the meme is spreading. I'm not sure if it did any good, though,
because my boss really, really likes EJBs. Give him a problem, and he sees
EJBs as the solution.
REST is nice, though, because it can be used with very little knowledge
about the rest of the system, which you can't say about EJBs and is less
true with SOAP.
I tried to spread the
REST gospel at
work yesterday. Surprisingly, I think it may have had some impact. REST is
so simple that's it's hard to ignore. But my boss seems to have other
ideas about what a "real API" is.
Posted at 14:25
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Clinton tapped for Jury Duty How'd ya like to have President Clinton on your jury?
Hah, this is funny.
Ex-President Clinton Tapped for Jury Duty.
Although Clinton's name was never revealed at a hearing in federal court in Manhattan on Friday, his answers, read aloud in the courtroom, provided the giveaway.
Under previous jobs held, the respondent answered President of the United States. He also wrote that he thought he could be fair and impartial, despite his "unusual experience with the O.I.C.," or Office of Independent Counsel
Posted at 10:54
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Planetizen Links
Preservationists Fear for Havana's Future. I feel the same way. I've
never been to Havana, but it's always seemed somewhat romantic to me that
there's a little bit of the world with almost no US influence. No fast
food chains, no strip malls, no SUVs...When the embargo is finally lifted,
all that could come crashing down.
Why
the SUV Is All the Range is a pretty even-handed treatment of the
controversy over SUVs, including rollovers, light truck fuel efficiency
standards, and crash compatibility. For more on this, I highly recommend
High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher.
Christian Science Monitor has a nice series on America's shrinking
frontier states. The
dwindling heartland: America's new frontier (part 1) and
Un-plain ways to
reinvent the Plains (part 4) are both really good. This is an amazingly
far-reaching problem. These states recieve huge federal subsidies relative
to their tax output, and will continue to do so as their populations
shrink, because they can never have less than three electorial votes no
matter how few people they have. As more and more people in the populous
are represented by fewer congresspeople (the number of representitives is
capped), our representitive democracy will become less democratic. The
Atlantic Monthly had some thoughts on
the problem with
democracy and how to repopulate the plains states in their 2003
Real State of the
Union issue.
Give DPZ
a Chance is an article about New Urbanism taking off on college campuses.
Check out the hilarious faked dorm photo.
The
American Dream Does Not Look Like Sprawl is an article about those that
aim to bring down the New Urbanism.
It's been a while since I've visited Planetizen (their sad lack of RSS
feed doesn't help). I should visit more because they have some great
links. Here's some good ones.
Posted at 15:56
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World's Largest Roadside Attractions Since everything is on the internet, there's a website to track the
World's Largest Roadside Attractions.
Here's some I've visited or seen:
I think it would be awesome in that cheesy way to have a World-Wide
"World's Largest" Tour to see as many of these things you could visit.
One of the more peculiar things about small towns is their insistience of
having the "World's Largest X".
Posted at 15:12
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Welcome to the Blogosphere, Gabe
My friend Gabe has a new webblog, Total Waste of
Life. Not much there yet, but I'll keep an eye on it for you...
Posted at 10:11
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Mr. Rogers, RIP Then I got an email from my dad...
RIP, Mr. Rogers.
I was going to say anything about this because I didn't feel there was
anything for me to add. I remember being sad when I heard a few years ago
that Mr. Rogers was retiring. Like most American children, his show was a
part of my childhood.
It's not the honors and not the titles and not the power that is of ultimate importance. It's what resides inside.
- Fred Rogers
Your Mom reminded me of your reaction to Mr. Rogers when you saw him on TV at the age of 3 and heard his famous song about being neighbors. "You're not my neighbor!" Was it because we lived out in the country at the time (Portageville) or did you think he was a dork?
Posted at 08:59
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Artifical Stupidity
John Sundman, author of geek techno-thriller Acts of the Apostles, has a
two part article about the Loebner Prize:
Artifical stupidity. Just about everyone involved is a nut...Part 1 is
especially humorous.
Posted at 20:20
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Back from San Francisco Friday, we tooled around Chinatown (cool), walked up Telegraph
Hill, and lay in the sun in Washington Square Park. Then we met up with my
friend Dennis to have food and margaritas at Tommy's. The margaritas were
great, but the food caught up with me later...ugh.
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were the conference. It was fun -- I'll be
writing more about it for infoAnarchy, so stay tuned.
We also ate at some pretty good restraunts. Sushi out there rules. Jenny
probably had more fun because she had all day to go sightseeing and
shopping.
I'm back from San Francisco and CodeCon. San
Francisco is great. We stayed downtown (right on Powell street next to the
cable cars), so I was able to experience more of the city than last year.
Posted at 20:06
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Woo! Free wireless
Checked into our hotel and the first thing Gabe and I did was break out
our laptops and start looking for open APs. We found the SHONAC WAP and
with a little fucking around by Gabe, got our IP address and gateway setup
right to use it, and now we're in business, baby!
Posted at 23:24
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F15 Anti-War Protest Photos Update: TBogg has a great term for the
oncoming war:
Operation Inigo Montoya.
You want anti-war protest photos, you say? How about
over 180 of 'em from all around the
world?
Posted at 22:26
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CodeCon 2003 If you're coming to CodeCon, look me up.
I'm leaving tomorrow for CodeCon 2003. I'm not
speaking this year, which is a relief, because now I can just hang out and
enjoy myself!
Posted at 22:05
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American Concentration Camps Journalist Dave Neiwert has writen eloquently about the internment of the
Japanese, its causes, and why it still matters today. See his posts
Inside the internment and
The roots of hate. When an extremely powerful Congressman like Howard
Cobel ignorantly says that the Japanese were rounded up "for their own
protection", we know that not everyone has learned from history.
History is dry for many people. That's why like like Masumi Hayashi's
somber photo collages of the ruins of the
American Concentration
Camps. These places are real.
Stylistically, they remind me strongly of David Hockney's multiple
perspective collages he created to illustrate
Secret Knowledge.
While the national discourse focuses on war and whether those who oppose
it are anti-American, I think it's valuable to reflect on some of the less
shining moments of our country, such as the internment of
Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.
Posted at 15:26
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Anti-war protest photos Erik has the other version up: Bush can't pronunciate! / How can he
diplomiate?
I'm not sure which I like better (we were chanting both). "Pronuciate" is
funny because it sounds like something Bush really would say. After all,
he doesn't really have a terrible problem with enunciation. But
"Enuciate" is a real word that rhymes with the made-up Bushism,
"diplominate".
Anyway, check out Erik's photos. He's got some really good ones.
Fellow anti-war protester Erik Mattheis emailed me because he stumbled
upon my
previous entry about the protest. He heard us chanting the
enunciate/diplominate line and used it as the subtitle for
his page of protest
photos. Woo, I feel vaugely famous.
Posted at 22:14
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Anti-War Protest The protest was great. We gathered at Lagoon and Hennipen, near the
Library. My group got there at about 12:30. I bought one of Women Against
Military Madness's "SAY NO TO WAR WITH IRAQ" signs (what can I say, I'm
too lazy to make a sign). People honked as they drove by to huge cheers.
Some cars were filled with protesters looking for a place to park. Other's
hurled epithets: "War is God's will!" shouted one. But most were positive.
I tried to get a feel for the number of people by getting up high, but it
was hard to tell. There was this one guy from Veterans for Peace shouting
obsence things about Bush. "I didn't serve 5 years on a nuclear submarine
fighting the communists to have the right wing turn into worse than
communists!" He was pretty cool. There was another Veteran for Peace who
wrapped himself in plastic and duct tape.
I did see a couple of counter-protesters with signs that said "Liberate
Iraq" and "Peace through Force / Support the U.S.M.C." But they were
quickly overwhelmed and I lost track of them.
Somehow, the word went out: We're marching! Everyone poured into the
street, trapping cars who were still going by. I was sure we were going to
get harassed by the cops for this -- did we even have a permit? But
nothing happened. I didn't even see any cops until the end of the march.
The orgainizers herded us into the right two lanes of the stree so cars
could get by going the other way. Even though we caused a massive traffic
jam, people were still honking for us. There was a fire truck driving
around with a sign on it that said "My Government, Not My War". We cheered
and waved at that.
When we got to the free way underpass, I again tried to get a sense of the
size of the crowd. The road slopes down there, so looking behind me I
could see a mass of people carrying signs. It was awesome. Our protest may
not have been as large as those in NYC or LA, but it was ours, and I was
proud.
The march ended at Loring park and sort of petered out. A lot of people
milled about in the street celebrating and dancing. Others tried to listen
to the speeches at the rally, but there were too many people to hear. We
lsitened for a while. It was the usually lefty stuff, but there was a good
speech from a lawyer from the Minnesota Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
Media coverage for our protest was positive. Star Tribune:
Thousands in
Minneapolis take to the street to protest war.
Favorite signs
There were a lot of really creative signs. I wish I could remember them
all. A lot of really funny signs used duct tape, satirizing the Department
of Homeland Security's advice to stock up on it. There were peace signs
made out of duct tape, signs worded in duct tape, people duct taping signs
to themselves. Just more proof that duct tape can be used for anything!
Duct Tape Bush
Draft the Bush Twins
Draft SUV Drivers
Atheists for peace
No more Bush It
Lick Bush, Stop War
George Bush: Rendering political satire obsolete since 2000
How can we pick the Iraqi government if we can't pick our own?
I came up with a chant that some people thought was funny:
Bush cannot enunciate / How could he diplominate?
I attended the Minneapolis anti-war protest Saturday, in solidarity with
millions of other people on seven continents
(
including Antarctica) opposed to Bush's unilateral war. With up to two
million protesting in each Spain and the UK, the total for the protest
could be around 10 million people. I think this world-wide outpouring for
a single cause is unprecidented, and really encouraging.
Posted at 18:19
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Wow! Very interesting!
Google buys Pyra.
Posted at 08:49
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Dolly the sheep dies Oh, New Scientist
says she died young:
New Scientist says sheep usually live to be 11 or 12 years old. Since
Dolly's DNA was taken from a sheep that was 6 years old, that means her
"total lifespan" was equal to that of a normal sheep. Disturbing
implications for cloning research...
I just saw this on Google News:
Dolly,
World's First Cloned Mammal, Dies. Dolly was 6 years old. I wonder if
that's normal for a sheep? I remember there was some debate about whether
Dolly would live as long as a regular sheep because the DNA that forms her
cells was already old.
Some cloned mammals, including Dolly, have shorter telomeres than other animals of the same age. These are pieces of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes and research has shown that they act as molecular clocks, governing the process of ageing in cells.
Posted at 11:24
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X Locks I could probably ssh in and fix it, but I use DHCP so I don't know my IP
address (nor do I want to know it).
I've switched to the blank screen saver. Hopefully that will solve the
problem.
My screen saver at work locks my X session about once a week ever since I
bought a Radeon 7000 after my TNT2 died. It's very frustrating. Ctrl + Alt
+ Backspace can't exit; Ctrl + Alt + Delete does nothing. I have to hard
reset my computer.
Posted at 09:10
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Gotta love the Bush Recession "Your personalized rate of return: 01/01/2002 - 12/31/2002 = -23.01%"
I got my 401K statement for 2002 today. Gotta love it:
Posted at 15:29
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Iraq War Metaphor Sounds about right to me.
Kos also has some really interesting thoughts about his
"nightmare senario"
for the Iraq war, which got
over 100 (mostly
thoughtful) comments. He collects the best in a
followup post.
Pretty sobering stuff.
Daily Kos has a story about
Howard Dean picking
up support in Iowa because of his anti-unilateral war stance. In the
comments,
people got to talking about the reasons for war. The best comment:
In fewer words, the rationale for Gulf War II is like the rationale for hitting a hornets nest with a stick and expecting candy to fall out.
-- RonK, Seattle
Posted at 22:38
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No. Fucking. Way.
No comment.
Posted at 21:07
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vi keys in Galeon I don't use vi, but you've got to admit that's really cool.
Now if only Control-W didn't delete a word and close the window.
I think I realized that my life had become complete when I accidentally
triggered the vi keys in Galeon. 'j' scrolls down, 'k' scrolls up,
'h' scrolls left and 'l' scrolls right.
Posted at 15:46
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Kevin Meets the DMCA Sucky.
Kevin Burton finally got in trouble with the
long arm of the law for violating the DMCA:
DMCA Takedown Notice, Scientology, and PacBell.
Posted at 20:52
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Interesting Links New York Times:
Turning a Digital Database Into Local Radio.
RuminateThis: Fascists
Redux. Bush forces the UN to cover Picasso's anti-war masterpiece,
Guernica.
Boston Globe Magazine:
A
Nation of Voyeurs: How the Internet search engine Google is changing what
we can find out about one another - and raising questions about whether we
should.
Posted at 18:43
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Massoud, the Afghan Star Tribune:
'Massoud' sheds light on a global hotspot.
Sounds interesting. I may try to go.
The U Film society is showing a documentary about Ahmed Shah Massoud, the
Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated by the Taliban a few days
before Sept 11. It's playing at 7:15 through Thursday.
Posted at 16:00
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Imbricate
I learned a new $5 word today, thanks to
JasperReports:
imbricate. It means
"to overlap in a regular pattern".
Posted at 09:13
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Fuck you you fucking fuck I started looking for a simple Windows IMAP client (no way I would let
anyone use Outlook Express of my own free will). Why aren't there any free
ones? I found exactly one semi-decent free Windows IMAP mail reader:
Pegasus Mail.
Pegasus is OK for a 10 year old freeware product. It's IMAP support sucks,
though. First of all, every time you click away and then back to the IMAP
folder, it downloads alllllll the messages again. Every time. Second, it
doesn't support IMAP over SSL. Which is what the U of M uses. So that's
out.
Then I found out that Eudora has a "lite" mode without ads. Fine. I
installed it, but this one can't even connect to the U of M's server. It
keeps setting the mail server back to "localhost" and the login name to
"login/original mail server". WTF? I tried this a few dozen times,
reseting it, asking Jenny to type in her password again, reinstalling
Eudora, setting up the account again, asking Jenny to type in her
password, switching to POP mail, asking Jenny to type in her
password...and on and on. I read the help documentation. I read the U of
M's documentation. I searched the internet for "Eudora localhost" and
found some fascinating resources on setting up an SSH tunnel with
Eudora...but nothing related to my problem.
Finally, I searched the Eudora knowledgebase for "localhost". I found this
page: Norton Antivirus
2000 is changing my settings: "After an error message when checking or
sending mail, I notice that my settings have changed and my login name is
now my login name with my mail server appended to it and my incoming and
outgoing mail servers are both set to 127.0.0.1."
That's exactly what's happening, except the outgoing mail servers aren't
affected, and the incoming mail server is set to "localhost", not
"127.0.0.1". Oh, and one other thing. I don't have Norton Antivirus
installed on my computer. However, I do have
"PC-cillin 2000", some Taiwanese anti-virus knockoff. It came with my
computer and I never paid much attention to it.
Navigating through the terribly worded and confusing antivirus software
screens, I attempt to turn off everything possibly related to email or
real-time scanning, then reconfigure Eudora and ask Jenny to type in her
password (again). Lo and behold, it worked.
Fuck.
So...a big 'fuck you' to the University of Minnesota for their webmail
program that constantly loses her messages; to Windows for sucking; to
Pegasus mail for not supporting IMAP SSL; and to my god damn virus
checker.
I just spent all afternoon trying to install an IMAP email client for
Windows for Jenny. I just have one word for this experience: fuck.
Posted at 15:44
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Cato Jackass You helped him get there, jackass. Libertarians: your money, or your life?
It's time to choose. Which party cares about your civil liberties more?
Or do you just not care, because you're not an Arab?
I hate the Cato Institute.
David Boaz, executive vice president, Cato Institute:
Democrats and the Right
to Choose - What?
When a Republican president is holding U.S. citizens without a court hearing, implementing a Total Information Awareness program to compile information on all citizens, and spending more taxpayers' money on every nook and cranny of the federal government, it's great to hear leadingDemocrats talk about freedom, trusting people to make their own decisions, and limiting the power of the state. It would be even better if they applied those noble principles to more than one, and only one, issue.
Posted at 21:54
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More Java Persistence So it sounds like Torque is pretty similar to Hibernate, though in Torque,
the XML files are the driver which is used to create the database schema
while in Hibernate the database schema is primary and you use XDoclet to
generate the mapping files.
In other Hibernate news, the first beta of Hibernate 2 was released
yesterday. It sounds like this is a ground-up rewrite with a lot of new
features.
McClain also told me a little more about the
Prevayler project he's working on:
I was concerned about migrating old data when you change your objects.
Marcus Ahnve (who is actually using Prevayler in an XP development
environment) has an interesting post on
schema
evolution. I'm intrigued by Prevayler, but using a relational database as
your backend does still have a number of advantages.
Earlier this
month, I asked if anyone knew of a comparison between
Torque and
Hibernate. My former coworker and Ancept
refuge McClain emailed me about Torque:
i read about hibernate on yer blog, and it does indeed seem quite similar to torque, though (the last time i saw it) torque relies on shell scripts and the like to generate the db tables.
mappings, relations and mutation are created in much the same way, via xml files.
Torque is actually the persistence layer for Turbine, though (last i checked) the turbine project was trying to componentize all of theirsubsystems so that they can be used independently.
my prevayler project is coming along pretty well (speaking of persistence). My prevalent system is mind-bogglingly simple: a map of catalog entries whose parent-child relationships are managed by a javax.swing.TreeModel (!).
Using the tree model has been a huge boon, as all of my relationships are managed consistently, and catalog entries are never duplicated, even with cross-linked nodes, multiple parents etc. All of this came free with the treemodel, which i vote should be moved into the collections package. If you ever have to do quick hierarchical crap, I highly recommend it.
Posted at 21:54
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The Bad Touch Sadly, I think Rael is missing the point of keeping the original date:
Blosxom bases the URLs for your entries on the date. If you edit the post
after it's been published, the edit "rises" on the page -- and so does the
permanent URL! It's not very permanent if it changes every time you edit
the damn post.
Thanks to blosxom, I've become a
Shaolin
master at the creaky semantics of touch(1).
Some guy
came up with a Perl wrapper script for editing your Blosxom posts which
sets the file's mtime back to what it was before you changed it.
Rael
links to it saying, "While I tend to be an 'let alterations rise'
type..."
Posted at 23:01
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Blogspot RSS Rant Now for the rest of you BlogSpot Pro users: TURN ON YOUR DAMN RSS FEEDS!
It makes life so much simpler for your (technically-savvy) readers -- and
it increases your readership because we read your site every time you
update it. You paid for the right to use RSS. So use it.
Atrios finally turned on his RSS feed.
Hurray! He moves into the regular column of links in the blogroll.
Posted at 22:52
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Lying with Averages Why is Bush's "average" bogus? Because it uses the arithmetric mean,
not the median.
Excerpt from Chapter 2 of How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff --
figures adjusted for inflation!
How to Lie with Statistics Like George W. Bush: "Darrell Huff warned us
about people like this president."
Not
your ordinary averages by Bryan Keefer.
Slactivist uses Darrel Huff's classic
book
How to Lie With Statisitcs to show why Bush's tax plan spin that the
"average American" will save $1,000 on their taxes. A few days later,
Spinsanity reiterated the same message, but without the great excerpt from
How to Lie With Statistics (which is a a really excellent book, and
quite cheap. You should pick up a copy.).
Posted at 22:49
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Java Blogs On a related note, I'm now subscribed to over 50 channels using
AmphetaDesk. AD is really starting to creak under this amount of data. No,
the code is doing great, but the UI just cannot handle this amount of
text. It sucks, I need a way to delete posts I've already read. Morbus
told me that feature would be in AmphetaDesk 1.1. Hopefully soon, this is
getting ridiculous.
What's that you say? Switch to a client-side news aggregator? Never! How
would I read my news from everywhere?
I've been playing around with Java Blogs for the
last couple of days. I'm subscribed to their RSS feed, so I get this huge
amalgamation random posts, cross-posts, quotations and freewheeling
discussions from all the blogs in the community -- all without any context
whatsoever (you can't really tell who's saying what). It's pretty cool, if
a little overwhelming. Their faq says
they're going to play with collaborative filtering for the front page.
Posted at 22:48
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Iraq Explained
Now it all makes
sense...
Posted at 19:57
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Filesystems Suck I'm a huge fan of this approach. Combine Tufte-esque task-based UIs (he
says the OS is just "clutter"), extended filesystem attributes for
metadata, pervasive search ("Google on the desktop"), aggressive caching
of running applications in memory (so starting and switching to them is
effortless) and get rid of this "file" concept as such.
Then, we will have the perfect computer.
Or, at least that's what I think.
Filesystem Sacrilege.
Preach it, brother! Or as, wmf would say:
"
Lifestreams lifestreams lifestreams".
Posted at 11:12
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Ads in RSS feeds? Imagine: the top item of Wired New's RSS feed: "This channel brought to
you by XYZ". Or Blogspot could sell text advertisements for its free users
(who currently don't have access to RSS feeds).
I can't find anything in Google about this, but with more and more people
reading websites using RSS, can advertisements in RSS really be far
behind?
Just a thought: how long until we start seeing advertisements -- text only
or otherwise -- in RSS feeds? I'm not expecting that this will happen in
personal weblogs (like this one), but what about news organizations or
weblog hosting farms?
Posted at 10:32
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New Resume Update: I added some bullet points to my resume to break out the text a
little better in my Ancept section, and I think it broke the mighty unmunger!
I get an "maximum recursion limit exceeded" error now when I try to process
my resume. So for now, the version up on my homepage is the unadulterated
Word version. I'll have to look into this more this weekend -- this is a
pretty critical error.
I spent some time tonight cleaning up my
resume and moving it to its new home on luke.francl.org. I used my
Word Unmunger to help
with this. Despite being created nearly 4 months ago for exactly this
purpose, this is the first time I've used the Word Unmunger to work on my
resume. Fortunately, it's had lots of testing and it worked flawlessly.
Posted at 23:28
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The Return of Kara Actually, Kara, it seems to happen to me about once a week.
I got another spam from "Kara", the online spam temptress. This one was a
bit more "natural" sounding and realistic (Paul Graham notes that these
types of spam are very hard to
filter.) I loved this bit:
I noticed your profile online and figured I'd drop ya a line....I bet that doesn't happen to you everyday!
Posted at 20:57
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Redundancies imply Errors Jeff linked to Engler's new research paper
Using Redundancies to Find
Errors which I found fascinating. Engler found a high correlation between
redundancies in code (such as assigning a value to a variable but never
using it again, assigning a value to a variable twice, and dead code which
is never executed) and errors, including crashing the system (his data is
mostly from the Linux kernel). Engler suspects that redundancies usually
imply an inexperienced programmer who isn't sure of what they're doing.
This ties into the PMD static code analysis
tool I've been playing with lately. I don't think much of what Engler is
doing is possible with static code analysis, but some of it ought to be.
Maybe I'll take a crack at implementing some of his rules in PMD. God
knows that Ancept's code could use it.
[Jeff Darcy] has some great links today to the research of
Dawson Engler. Engler has developed
meta-compiler tools which locate bugs in real software.
Posted at 20:42
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Never Again
I just hauled a 24 case of bottled beer and 20 pounds of kitty litter 2
and a half blocks from my bus stop. Ugh. Never again.
Posted at 19:00
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Play 'Gulf War 2'
Even better than the original, it's
Gulf War 2! Can you
defeat the radical Islamists? [via #infoanarchy]
Posted at 21:12
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My first patches The author of PMD has put me on the
credits page which also makes me
feel good.
Hurray for free software!
PMD
PMD (doesn't stand for anything) is actually a pretty neat tool. It's a
static code analyzer for Java (sort of like JLint) written in Java which
means writing new rules is possible.
I thought it was pretty stupid when we started using it, but after tuning
the rules a bit it gives you some useful information. I know that using
an ArrayList instead of a List is stupid, but PMD points out every
instance of it in the code. PMD isn't going to help you refactor your
architecture, but it gives some decent tips to help you avoid truly awful
code. If you've come onto a project that's been under development for a
while and has gotten crufty (not that I would know anything about that),
PMD can help you pinpoint stupid areas of your code.
I've gotten my first patches accepted to an open source project. It's just
some tweaks to PMD's HTML renderer to make it
a little easier to read. But I still feel pretty good about that. Instead
of complaining about the lack of a feature, I did something about it.
Posted at 17:03
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Google Alert Oh well. Having ideas is good, but you actually need to execute on them, a
trait which I usually lack.
Damnit, I was going to write this. Googlert
emails you when the results to a Google search change.
Posted at 10:58
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Hibernate I'm going to see how it works with PostgreSQL.
My boss loves EJB and it's container-managed persistience, but I'm
interested in the more light-weight approach of Hibernate. EJB's learning
curve is so steep, I'm afraid to touch it, especially for the simple stuff
I've got in mind.
Java Persistence Resources:
Java Persistence Engine
(Object-Relational Mapping) by Julian Harris.
Object Relational
Mapping Tools by Anthony Berglas.
Announcing
Hibernate 1.0 Open Source O/R Persistence Tool by Gavin King plus
discussion on The Server Side which includes a number of the criticisms of
O-R mappers. It's a little old and it seems that Hibernate has fixed a lot
of the criticism.
survey of O/R tools thread on jug-discuss mailinglist.
Torque another approach to O-R
mapping, from the Jakarta Project. If anyone is aware of of comparison of
Hibernate and Torque, please let me know.
ObJect Relational Bridge also
from Jakarta. This implements JDO. I think.
Hibernate looks like a really nice
persistence framework for Java. It takes the grunt work out of the
OO-Relational mapping (at Ancept, we all this the "relay" layer) while
still giving you control over the database schema. Plus, unlike some
other solutions for this I've seen, it has great documentation. It's
amazing what a difference that makes for me in wanting to try something
out (and I'm guilty as well -- Eikon has zero
docs and no mailing list).
Posted at 19:21
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Daypop adds 3,000 sites...but I'm still not in it. Sigh. I've been trying to get into Daypop for a while, because the world
deserves to know what I'm saying! This shit is golden.
Ahem.
I guess I'll try again in a few days. Maybe I just haven't been spidered
yet.
Daypop has added 3,000 new
sites to its index...but I'm still
not in it.
Posted at 17:07
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Dilbert Tries Extreme Programming
I thought this was pretty funny:
Dilbert tries extreme programming. There's three strips.
Posted at 16:12
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Zoe under a Creative Commons License!? Ugh. This is not good. A number of people have criticized the CC licenses
because "We don't need any more open source licenses!" but the Creative
Commons licenses were
never intended to be used for software:
Now some software developers are making the complaint true.
I think there are three types of open source licenses you should use:
Using other licenses or creating your own -- in most cases -- just creates
confusion and prevents other people from utilizing your code.
Zoe is the first piece of software I've
seen released under a Creative Commons
license. It's under the
Attribution-NonCommercial License.
We want to complement, rather than compete with, these existing efforts to ease online sharing and collaboration. Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works.
Posted at 12:51
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2002 State of the Union
Bush's 2003 State of the Union address is coming up soon. Why don't you
check out his 2002 address to find out how
he's done on his promises?
Posted at 14:41
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Protest Turnout You can blame Louis Farrakahan if you want to:
But one protester made a good point:
Too bad Bush wasn't there to see the protest with his own eyes. He was at
Camp David. Does the man ever work?
Here's an interesting article about why no one can agree on how many
people attended yesterday's protests:
Numbers Unclear for Protest Turnout.
For 30 years, measuring crowds rested on the shoulders of the U.S. Park Police, which divided the Mall into sections, used aerial photographs to determine the density of the crowd and issued a headcount. The numbers often were disputed. After officials estimated the Million Man March in 1995 was more like the 400,000-Man March, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakahan threatened to sue. Congress later mandated that the Park Police, an arm of the National Park Service, bow out of the counting business.
"I wish we wouldn't get so hung up on numbers," said Morgan, from Takoma Park. "It's false to assume that if you have a million people on the Mall you're somehow more right than you are if you have 200,000 people on the Mall. The message doesn't acquire greater value."
Posted at 14:38
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Take action to limit copyright terms It's time to take action.
Siva Vaidhyanathan says
after
the copyright smackdown, the real fight is yet to come.
Op-eds against the decision are coming out in the New York Times and
elsewhere. Reason has an
interview with Mickey Mouse from
copyright jail. The
message is spreading.
Erik Möller has posted his manifesto
Renaissance Now: Save
the Public Domain! and started the
ACTION mailing
list to plan what to do next.
Larry Lessig isn't standing still either. Besides his work with the
Creative Commons, he's proposed the
Eric Eldred
Act (see also his
New York Times op-ed) to enhance the public domain through a minimal tax
to keep copyrights registered after 50 years.
My own contribution is to keep plugging the
Lessig Challenge. Stop giving
money to the copyright barons! Fight back by funding the public domain and
legal and legislative action.
The real fight has just begun.
So. Yeah. We lost. The Copyright Term Extension Act -- which passed
Congress unanimously yet will cost the American public billions of dollars
over the next 20 years -- is constitutional. What's next?
Posted at 11:49
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Daisy: they don't make 'em like they used to Wow. The new "Daisy" (5.6 Meg
MPEG) ad from MoveOn is pretty intense, so I decided to see if I could
find the original.
The Living Room
Candidate has all the ads from the 1964 election, including the
original Daisy.
Damn, why don't they make ads like that anymore? Johnson's ads are about
50% negative, but even when they are, you believe them, because Goldwater
was a fanatic. I really like the closing line of all of Johnson's ads:
"Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for
you to stay home." None of Johnson's ads are defensive, but a number of
Goldwater's address misconceptions about him -- that he wants to demolish
social security, that he is a warmonger, that he's impulsive. Are you
convinced to vote for a man because Ronald Regan says: "Do you honestly
believe that Barry wants his sons and daughters in a war?...Of course
not....Vote for Bary Goldwater."
Update: Salon has
thoughts on the new Daisy ad from 4 media critics. They don't like it
very much.
MoveOn released their "Daisy" anti-war ad this
week. It's a remake of an ad from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign which is
one of the most famous (and infamous) political ads of all time. From
MoveOn's
press release:
THE ORIGINAL DAISY AD The original "Daisy" TV ad was produced by Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964. The ad implied that if Goldwater were elected he might take the United States into nuclear war. It ran only once.
The controversial ad began with a little girl in a field picking petals off a daisy, counting. When the count reaches ten, her image is frozen and a male voice begins a militaristic countdown. At zero, we see a nuclear explosion and hear President Johnson's voice: "These are the stakes, to make a world in which all God's children can live, or to go into the darkness. Either we must love each other or we must die." Fade to black. White lettering. "On November 3rd vote for President Johnson."
Posted at 23:52
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Stupid Days 5: Friday They kept calling Trevor all day, frantically trying to get some demo
working. First he gets laid off, now he's invaluable. I'd be so pissed if
that was me. "Give me $150/hour for consulting, or I'm not going to help
you any more."
Garrick was still there today, cleaning out his desk and burning CDs of
cartoons and MP3s. Did I mention he had a lot of crap? He filled up his
minivan with boxes of it all. I'm going to miss him. He's probably going
to move to Texas to live with his wife (she works for the oil industry
down there).
More unnatural quiet at work. I wonder when I'll get used to the number of
people we have now? I got vaguely depressed thinking about all the things
McClain set up (our wiki and continuous integration tools, for starters).
Posted at 23:21
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Stupid Days 4: Thursday Garrick has so much crap that he's back in the office today packing up
stuff all day. That's a little strange.
Amazingly, I manage to get some work done.
The morning after. The office feels unnaturally quiet. There's some
gallows humor about surviving the layoffs.
Posted at 22:17
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Stupid Days 3: Wednesday Eldred Loses
Wherein I am upset and cannot concentrate on my work.
Layoffs
Wherein two of my friends are canned while other worthies are spared.
My company now has only 6 programmers.
This day is the inspiration for my "Stupid Days" series.
Posted at 22:46
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Stupid Days 2: Tuesday I got
High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher and
The Gormenghast Novels. I purchased the Gormenghast book on a whim of a
whim. I saw a short review of it on Karl
Schroeder's site after it was linked to from Boing Boing (the hilarious
vintage pop-sci magazine articles:
" Can We ATOMIZE the
ARTIC?"). But I couldn't find the book in Border's computer system. I
couldn't find anything else I really wanted, so I was trolling through the
SF section when there it was.
Supposedly it's like Dickens meets Tolkien.
My retarded "Employee of the Month" gift certificate finally arrived, so I
went to Borders after work to spend it.
Posted at 22:43
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Stupid Days I: Monday Productivity Burnout
My video card at work died. It was ghosting so badly I couldn't read any
text on the screen. After futzing around for several hours at work looking
for a working video card, they finally sent me to Office Depot to buy a
new one.
A Linux Miracle (Almost)
Where in plug-n-play works on Linux. Sort of.
Scenester action
Wherein an indie band stays at our house and I go see them and other bands
at a show.
Note: I'm going to tackle my back log in outline form which I'll flesh out
over the next few days...
Posted at 22:31
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Lots to say, no time to say it
I've got lots of stuff to write about, but I keep getting home so late I
am too tired to blog it. I'll try to catch up tomorrow...
Posted at 22:34
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We lost Eldred 7-2 More details available at my
infoAnarchy story.
In solidarity with
Cory Doctrow at Boing Boing, I am making my weblog black for the next
day.
Larry Lessig lost Eldred 7-2, but in a greater sense, we all lost.
Posted at 09:27
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Axle of Evil
I forget where I saw this, but The New Republic has an article up called
Axle of Evil about SUVs. It's a book review of
High and Mighty which is high up on my list of books to read.
Posted at 17:28
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I wish Java had a map function
Not for the first time, I wish Java had a map function. I'd like to call
the same method on every element of a Collection and return the result.
Posted at 17:11
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Check out TeleRead Here's some posts I liked recently:
Internet
search engine blackout of Dan Jackson Software (the guy who cracked
Microsoft's ebook format has dropped off the search engines)
Milllionaire politicians: Too rich to empathize?
I'm an occassional contributor to TeleRead, but you can thank David for
this great coverage. Check it out!
Update: David emailed me to note that it was Jerry Justianto who posted
about Dan Jackson Software. I regret the error.
If you haven't been checking out
TeleRead, you should. David
Rothman has had some great posts lately. Nominally, TeleRead is about a
national library system for ebooks, but the blog ranges from e-Books to
copyright to technology to DRM to politics.
Posted at 18:18
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Added Nathan Newman
I've added Nathan Newman to my
blogroll. Nathan is Vice
President of the National Lawyer's Guild and he runs a fantastic blog.
Posted at 18:13
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Welcome to the Blogosphere, Jarrett! Also, he adds an item to my
list
of things that suck about OS X: "why in the hell is the CVS integration
in Developer Tools so shitty?" I don't know because I've never never
touched the OS X dev tools.
My old debate chum Jarrett Wold has
joined the blogosphere. Welcome!
Posted at 12:56
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Shades of the Fall Revolution In the Fall Revolution books, there is a a former Soviet ministate called
the International Scientific and Technical Worker's Republic which has set
up a Trotskite communist system and sells nuclear deterrance policies.
This Transnistria place reminds me of that because of their proud
communist heritage and their arms dealing.
This story about the Soviet Republic of Transnistria reminds me of Ken
MacLeod's Fall Revolution series.
Welcome to Transnistria, which according to Interpol is the powder-keg of Europe. This self-proclaimed Republic, with a name that seems to belong to an animated cartoon, the only Soviet Republic remaining on the face of the earth, is the largest weapons bazaar in the world, including conventional and non-conventional weapons. In this stretch of land between Moldova and the Ukraine, huge amounts of non-conventional material (chemical, radioactive, and even nuclear substances) are stockpiled, of the sort used for terrorist attacks and military operations.
Posted at 22:19
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Very Gross Weight On the side it said: 19,5000 Pounds of Very Gross Weight
While I was riding the bus to work today, I saw a Biff's truck. Biff's is
a Minnesota portapotty company.
Posted at 08:18
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MacWorld Announcements (and OS X experiences) The coolest thing I saw is that Apple has finally released a laptop in
the form factor I like -- the
12 inch PowerBook. At 4.6 pounds, it's still heavier than my 2.9 pound
Sony Vaio, but it has an integrated DVD drive. That's nice. The only
reason I didn't by an Apple laptop was because there was nothing as small
as the Vaio.
The other cool thing is that the new Safari browser has integrated spell
checking. I wrote this last summer: "It's 2002. Why doesn't my web browser
have a spell checker?" Now it does -- if I'd switch.
Since I'm talking about Apple, I'd like to share some thoughts about my
love/hate relationship with OS X.
My dad has a TiBook and my sister has a 15 inch flat screen iMac. Like the
new Apple computers, these are amazing machines. While I was in
Pennsylvania I got plenty of time to use them. OS X looks amazing.
Everything is very smooth and polished looking. But I hate using it.
On Linux, I know nothing will work, so I'm pleasantly surprised when it
does. On Windows, everything mostly works as I expect, and I get pissed
when it doesn't. On Mac OS X, I expect perfection, and I get upset when
the OS doesn't follow through.
Why don't I like using OS X? Let me count the ways...
If Apple fixes 1 and 2, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I can live with (or
hack around) the rest. But damnit, if I'm going to pay premium prices for
software, I expect perfection.
Everyone's talking about Apple's recent MacWorld annoucements (as
Mattew Thomas points out,
that's mindshare, baby).
Posted at 21:53
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The Detriot Project Arianna Huffington had the
crazy idea that maybe some other comodity -- like, say, oil -- had more
to do with supporting terrorism than drugs. She hatched an idea for spoofs
of the anti-drug adds which had the same message, but blamed SUV drivers
instead.
And now, the Detroit Project has
launched! You can watch the videos, or donate to help get them on the air.
Remember those terrible anti-drug adds implying that buying drugs supports
global terrorism? I can see that argument for heroin (the Taliban used to
be a big supplier), but all drugs? It was outrageous.
Posted at 09:31
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Is the Treo Ideal? An Owner Responds I have a Treo 180, and I would have to say no.
It is a fine little device and I enjoy using it. But it has two major
faults. The number one problem with it is that you cannot use it in the
dark. The
Treo 270 and 300
correct this problem with a backlit keyboard, but they are quite a bit
more expensive than the Treo 180.
The other big problem with Treos is their rampant failure rate. If you hit
the message boards over at Treo Central you'll
find plenty of people who're complaining about their Treo breaking. Why do
I know this? Because I started reading the message boards there after my
Treo broke. The speaker just stopped working one day, which means I have
to use the hands-free kit just to use the stupid thing. It sucks. I have a
Best Buy warranty on it, but I haven't returned it yet. I'm planning to do
that this month, hopefully for a Treo 270.
Why am I sticking with the Treo? It's big and stupid looking as a cell
phone, and I never had a PDA before I bought it. It was also my first cell
phone. I'm something of a "late adopter". But I like being able to run
Palm programs on my phone and take notes with it. Arguably, the new
Microsoft smartphones or the Hiptop might be
better, but I don't like Microsoft and the Hiptop doesn't run PalmOS.
I got the Treo because we decided not to get a land line at our apartment
(I have a cell phone and cable internet access) and I wanted a PDA/phone
like the Treo. It was the best available at the time. But it's certainly
not ideal. If you've got the time, I'd wait for the second generation of
PDA/phones before buying.
Aaron Swartz wrote his requirements for the
ideal PDA (decent screen, cell
phone, web, ssh, etc) and got a lot of suggestions for the
Treo 180. He asks: is the Treo
ideal?
Posted at 20:29
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Long Blogroll I am truly impressed.
Update: James Capozzola of the Rittenhouse Review gives his blogroll at
"over 200 sites" and his total link count at over 600. That's even more
than I thought.
The Rittenhouse Review ("A Journal
of Politics, Finance, Ethics, and Culture") has the longest damn blogroll
I've ever seen. Not only does it list what must be over 50 blogs (no, I'm
not going to count them all) but also at least 100 newspapers and
magazines world wide. Add to that another fifty or so organizations -- not
counting the ones in Philadelphia.
Posted at 18:13
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Clean Underwear Um, thanks guys. It's good to know.
I've noticed that a lot of books at Amazon have
Clean Underwear as a recommendation. It says "Customers who wear clothes
also shop for:
Clean Underwear from Amazon's Target Store".
Posted at 16:01
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Numerology I don't write my dates that way. I use the ISO format: 2002-01-02. It's
unambiguous.
Also, Fred Gallagher over at MegaTokyo points
out that this year is evil leet: 666 + 1337 = 2003. Sweet. I read
MegaTokyo, but I didn't notice this until
Joey
pointed it out.
I've always been a sucker for numerology. Today (err...yesterday) is
interesting because in the US date style, it's 01/02/03...and a one two three!
Posted at 21:55
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I only read it for the articles, I swear I guess when you get right down to it, there's nothing really new here.
But as someone who's had a hard time finding a job in the past, I now
realize how important this type of thing is. I must've sent out hundreds
of copies of my resume when I was looking for a job (and I even wrote in
legible English.) But what I lacked was that personal touch (I eventually
got hired due to personal contacts inside a company). I've seen how
swamped the job market is, so I won't make that mistake again. Anything
that can put me above the competition is fair game.
Interestingly, since I've started my job, I pay more attention to those
"requres 3 years of experience with XYZ" qualifications in job
descriptions. Conventional wisdom among programmers is that this doesn't
really matter, and you can pick up what you need to know in a few weeks or
months. I'm not so sure about that anymore.
Inluminent has some good advice on looking for a job.
On Looking for a Job talks about get an interview and how to give a good
one. John also recommends a book
Knock 'Em Dead for advice. He follows up with tips on
how to get your resume read, which advocates the hard sell with lots of
personal contact and follow ups.
Posted at 19:07
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Happy New Year
I'm back from Pennslyvania. I hope you had an enjoyable New Year. I also
hope 2003 will be better than 2002.
Posted at 18:00
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