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Juan Cole reports that Iraqi academics seem to be getting the hell out of Dodge or assassinated at a worrying clip. When Iraq was invaded, the hope was that educated Iraqi exiles familiar with Western style democracy would flood back into the country, facilitating the rebuilding effort. Is the opposite occurring?

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Clay Shirky: Situated Software. Shirky describes a growing class of software — software designed and built for small audiences to serve an immediate need. One prediction Shirky makes that I don’t think will turn out to be true is that such software will often have a limited lifespan. He points out that software big, complicated [...]

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Did you know that PHP and Apache 2.0 are incompatible? That may be too strong a word, but the PHP guys do not recommend using them together in a production environment. I recently switched my server to Apache 2.0 so that I could easily run Subversion, which is incompatible with Apache 1.3. Threads [...]

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Jeremy Zawodny is switching to the Mac. It seems like all the cool geeks are becoming Mac users these days. And why wouldn’t they, with that Unixy goodness underneath? I’ve been a huge fan of the Mac for at least a dozen years now, but I haven’t used one on a day to [...]

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Today, the Washington Post has an editorial attempting to goad the Bush administration into getting Iraq into shape for the big handover at the end of June. The paper points out that the security situation sucks, this troop rotation is reducing our forces in Iraq by 20%, and there’s no real plan for the government [...]

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Daniel Drezner offers an explanation of the character of Richard Clarke, that of the perfect bureaucrat. Here’s the money paragraph:

That’s not bad. I’d make it simpler — Richard Clarke is the perfect bureaucrat. I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word. In the best sense, it’s clear that Clarke was adept [...]

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When the John Kerry campaign web site launched an ancillary weblog called the DBunker, I linked to it, thinking that it was going to be a very effective forum for refuting distortions of Kerry’s voting record and other misrepresentations made by Republicans and their media friends. Unfortunately, that’s not what it has turned out to [...]

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Earlier this month, Lance Arthur wrote an article about personal grooming, and Brad Graham posted his own list of recommendations. Both were largely lists of recommended products that fall into the category that I’d refer to as toiletries. I read them with somewhat detached interest, because my grooming habits don’t extend much past cleanliness [...]

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A UNC professor has conducted an empirical study that shows that the effect of file sharing on album sales is insignificant. Somehow I doubt that the copyright industry will give a crap about this study.

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One of the worst things about Windows is command.com. Even if you have Cygwin installed, using command.com as your shell stinks, if for no other reason than because copy and paste don’t really work. I just learned today that rxvt, an xterm-like application, is available as part of Cygwin. It’s a lot more flexible than [...]

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