I’ve said before that John Kerry the candidate doesn’t particularly enthuse me, but this Salon interview left me feeling pretty good about him as a candidate.

The flooding that has caused hundreds (perhaps over a thousand) deaths in Haiti and the Dominican Republic can be attributed almost entirely to the problem of deforestation. The Slacktivist explains how you can help reverse this problem. It’s as simple as knowing which charity to support and supporting them.

One of my favorite weblogs, INTEL DUMP, has moved from BlogSpot to a site called PowerBlogs that I hadn’t heard of until Phil Carter mentioned moving his site there. PowerBlogs is basically the same thing as TypePad, except that the prices are a bit higher and the bandwidth and disk space limits are much higher. They also have their own weblog software that appears to be written in Perl. I have no idea how many customers they have or how much room there is in the weblog hosting business, but it appears to be growing.

What this really proves to me is that an ongoing failure of vision continues to plague me. When I first started blogging in December of 1998, I hand edited my HTML. There was no such thing as Blogger or GreyMatter, to say nothing of Movable Type or other more recent entrants in the market for weblog software. I quickly realized that I was going to need software to manage this stuff, so I wrote some (I still use that old crappy software). Had I, at that point, thought that this weblog thing was going to be a big deal, I could have packaged it all up and earned fame as the author of the first open source weblog software, or eventually started up some kind of a hosting gig like the ones we’re seeing today. I opted to do nothing and toil in obscurity. Such is life.

Interestingly, even before I had a weblog, I realized that PHP was going to be a big deal. I suggested to my publisher that they pay me to write a PHP book. They declined. I went to O’Reilly. They said they already had a PHP book in the works (it was never published). I contacted an agent and they pitched PHP books to everybody. No takers. I just did an Amazon.com search: 2,037 matches in books for PHP. So sometimes even when you have the vision, things don’t work out.

So, all the way back on December 17, 2003 I complained that the GPRS service for my Cingular-supplied mobile phone wasn’t working. I griped again on December 18, and again on January 19 and February 17. The ugly truth though is that since the second complaint, I just gave up on calling Cingular and started waiting for the service to start working on its own. I’m going out of town for the weekend, and I’m going to need access to baseball scores, so I finally worked up the energy to call Cingular and work the problem out. I called the customer support line, went through some steps, and it didn’t work, so they told me to call tech support. I did that. We did some stuff. They told me to call back on a land line. I did that. We did some stuff. They transferred me to another group (data communications, I think). We did a bunch of stuff. Still didn’t work. They turned off my service. They turned my service back on. Things started working, and I am now GPRS enabled. Unfortunately, now my phone seems to be getting corrupt text messages from somewhere every few minutes. One thing at a time, I guess.

McSweeney’s: PROS AND CONS OF JOHN KERRY’S TOP TWENTY VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. Hi-larious.

If you’ve ever done much programming in Perl, you’ll get a laugh out of this periodic table of Perl operators. (It’s a PDF, but it’s still worth checking out.)

Why did the White House trot John Ashcroft out before the nation yesterday to warn us about an attack that may occur at some point in the future somewhere in America? Not, I think, because they want to scare people into supporting President Bush. Rather, because of the 9/11 Commission. The message of the public hearings was that you’ll get smacked around after the fact if you don’t let people know before the fact that you’re on the terrorism beat. Somebody wrote a PDB with a title like “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the United States” or something, and the administration reacted by sending John Ashcroft to let us know that something might happen. Not helpful, but not surprising, either.

I’m a big fan of Eric Sink’s weblog. He runs a small software company and is very knowledgeable when it comes to running a software business. His company makes a well-regarded replacement for Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, which everyone knows is an utter piece of crap. On Monday, he posted about Microsoft’s announcement that they’re tired of leaving the source control market to anyone who makes a product less crappy than SourceSafe. I’ve actually known about this for a long time because some former coworkers of mine are working on the Microsoft team here that’s developing Hatteras (the version control system), and I had wondered what Sink would say about it when the news broke. He says that Hatteras is aimed at ClearCase, which I think is true. He supposes that it’s going to be really expensive. That’s not the impression that I get, but I do think it will be more expensive than Vault.

Interestingly, Hatteras was in development when Sink wrote this last April:

In one sense, we followed this philosophy when we decided to build SourceGear Vault. In this case, our “big and dumb” competitor is SourceSafe. At first glance, this may seem ridiculous, since SourceSafe is owned by Microsoft. Clearly, Microsoft is quadrant three, big and smart, the worst possible combination to be found in a competitor. However, Microsoft is big enough to be very multi-faceted. For the products that are most important to them, Microsoft is very big and very smart, but SourceSafe doesn’t seem to be one of their top priorities. SourceSafe’s owner might be quadrant three, but this product effectively functions in quadrant one. (In borrowing Barksdale’s intentionally humorous terminology I mean no offense to SourceSafe fans. But we’re very familiar with SourceSafe and its various problems. In fact, our SourceOffSite product continues to sell very well as an add-on which addresses one of the big problems with SourceSafe.)

Whoops.

Every day, new stories break about Americans torturing Iraqis, dead detainees, and collective punishment. A common argument from supports of the war, or the administration are that these acts are committed by rogue elements of the military and are not representative. The argument from many people on the left is that the political and military leadership should not have set the conditions that encouraged this behavior and should have paid attention to make sure that it wasn’t happening. I’m here to tell you that what set the conditions for these actions was invading and occupying another country. They’re part of the package. America has the best trained soldiers, probably ever, but it doesn’t matter. All of the awful things that are happening in Iraq are completely consistent with the history of warfare and occupation, and were as inevitable as the sun coming up this morning as soon as the decision was made to “liberate” Iraq. I wonder how many people would have supported invading Iraq if the President had given a speech in March, 2003 saying that it is part of our duty in the holy fight against terror to have American soldiers play the role of brutal occupiers, detaining, torturing, and killing as many Iraqis as necessary in order to pacify the country. What’s really depressing is that I’d be willing to bet that the architects of this war didn’t think that’s how it would turn out, and if you’re that naive, you have no business starting wars in the first place.

Check out what Trent Lott said about the torture at Abu Ghraib. What’s really scary about Lott’s sentiments is that the victims aren’t even black.