Now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections, they’re trying to rehabilitate their image in the western media. American-educated Mousa Abu Marzook has a piece in the Washington Post entitled, What Hamas is Seeking. Khalid Mish’al, another Hamas political operative, has a piece in The Guardian explaining that Palestinians knew good and well what electing Hamas meant for their relations with the United States and Europe, and did it anyway. The Washington Post piece is a lot more conciliatory than one in The Guardian.

I have no idea how to interpret the election or the aftermath, or to predict what happens next. I’ll be watching closely to see what transpires.

For the past 15 months or so, I’ve been a renter, after being a homeowner for about four years. When my wife and I owned a home, we spent many thousands of dollars on repairs and upgrades, used about half of the available space, and often felt angst about the housing market and stress about what sorts of things we needed to do next to keep our home in good working order. We then sold the house and cleared just enough money to pay the realtor’s commission. We rented a place much more to our liking, in a much more desirable location, pay less rent than we paid in mortgage, and lowered our home maintenance costs to a rounding error. (Contrast that to my home maintenance bills, which in the first year of home ownership added up to more than we paid in rent the previous year.)

Needless to say, I am much happier as a renter, and was gratified to read the following in Philip Greenspun’s guide for early retirees:

If you can rent anything decent, try to avoid buying property. Think about the most interesting people you know. Chances are, most of them are renters. People who rent talk about the books that they’ve read, the trips that they’ve taken, the skills that they are learning, the friends whose company they are enjoying. Property owners complain about the local politicians, the high rate of property tax, the difficulty of finding competent tradespeople, the high value of their own (very likely crummy) house or condo, and what kinds of furniture and kitchen appliances they are contemplating buying. Property owners are boring. The most boring parts of a property owner’s personality is that which relates to his or her ownership of real estate.

If you ever wondered whether Google keeps track of everything you ever searched for, the answer is yes. In other news, Google has launched a bookmarking feature. You can save pages from your Search History as bookmarks and apply tags to them.

Today you can read an article in the New York Times about how a group of conservative attorneys decided they wanted to take over the Supreme Court, formulated a plan, and have seen that plan come to fruition this year with the nominations of John Roberts and Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

For an example on the liberal side of the ledger, think back to the civil rights movement. Civil rights leaders had a goal, came up with a plan to achieve that goal, and succeeded through hard work and great sacrifice.

The story illustrates my biggest problem with the progressive movement in this country. Progressive ideals are great, but we lack a plan to turn those ideals into policies that will shape the future. I’d like to see less talk about progressive values and more talk about concrete plans. What are progressives doing today to prepare the ground for the world we want to see two or three decades from now?

Here’s the story behind the Firefly season 2 Web site I mentioned the other day. Never mind.

Google has been catching lots of flack this week for creating a version of their search engine for the Chinese market (at google.cn), and capitulating to the censorship demands of the Chinese government. They’ve explained their reasons for doing so at the Official Google Blog. I’ve been giving this matter a lot of thought this week, and the reason I haven’t had anything to say is that I am still not entirely sure what I think about this complex issue.

I don’t think that what Google did is evil. I don’t think it’s admirable, either. I think that it would have been evil for Google to censor the results from google.com for Chinese users. As it stands now, if a person in China can figure out a way to do so, they can see uncensored information from Google. If they use google.cn, they’ll see the results that the Chinese government deems OK. So Google hasn’t taken anything away from anyone by launching google.cn. I’m not proud of Google at this point, but I’m not angry at them either. I reserve the right to change my mind.

Like just about all software developers these days, I’ve done my fair share of XML wrangling. What I hadn’t done until this week is create DTDs or schemas to describe the XML I was generating. Then I ventured into the realm of XML schemas, and I have to say that I come away impressed. The schemas themselves are easier than you might thing to write, and there are a number of cool schema tools out there. My favorite is Microsoft’s XSD Inference Demo, which creates a valid schema for an XML document for you. Unless your format is very rigid, you’ll have to edit the schema that it produces, but it provides a great starting point. Once you’ve created schemas, you can run all of the documents you produce through them and make sure they’re free of defects. I found a bug in my code the first time I added schema validation to my unit test.

Anyway, I’ve been very much in the minimalist camp when it comes to dealing with XML. DTDs, schemas, namespaces and so forth have never been something that I bother with. I just grab the easiest library to use that I can find and covert the XML into data structures (or vice versa) in my application. Now I’m thinking that’s the wrong approach, especially when you’re producing XML rather than consuming it.

Just read it for yourself.

Here’s a personal note to Rick Santorum, courtesy of John Prine: Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven any more.

Google sampled over one billion documents on the Web to see how HTML is really used, and came up with a number of interesting statistics, including the most popular classes assigned to elements (“footer” is number one) and the average number of different elements used on a Web page (19).

The report is also interesting in that all of the figures are served as SVG files. The SVG stuff looks neat but the figures render incredibly slowly in Firefox 1.5 on my Powerbook.