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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: April 2007 (page 1 of 6)

3qd update on Katrina recovery

The article focuses on how volunteers are helping with recovery. Interesting stuff:

Recovery efforts across the Gulf region are almost wholly driven by volunteer relief and reconstruction agencies, some of them bootstrap operations that did not exist prior to the storm. Many are funded by private donations from churches and community non-profits across the country; others receive a mix of corporate one-time grants and government-stipended volunteer staffers for a few months at a time, who can serve the recovery effort to reduce their college tuition (Americorps and its affiliates: National Civilian Community Corps, Volunteers in Service to America). The most well-known volunteer agency working in the region is Habitat for Humanity, whose slow progress was the subject of a recent NY Times article.

As someone who works on disaster relief programs worldwide, I was invited to come for a month and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various projects in New Orleans and Biloxi, two centers of urban devastation. The experience thus far has been surprisingly positive and inspiring, an unexpected antidote to my entrenched cynicism regarding relief efforts in places like Darfur or Congo, where I typically work.

The spirit of volunteerism that was incredibly helpful in the immediate aftermath of Katrina seems to remain.

The MySQL conference

I almost never go to industry events, but next I’m really going to try to go to the MySQL conference. This year’s conference sounds like it was great, and MySQL seems to be the one constant in every project I work on.

New debate rule

I think that moderators of political debates of any kind should pass a rule banning the phrase “the real question.” As in, “Brian, I think the real question is, do I like puppies and ice cream? Yes, I do like puppies and ice cream.”

Define irony

The MIT Dean of Admissions who urged institutions to focus on factors other than lists of accomplishments when choosing which students to admit resigned today after 28 years at the university for lying on her résumé. Her success in spite of not having the credentials she claimed bears out her theory, as does the fact that she probably would not have gotten her job 28 years ago had she not faked her accomplishments.

Prototype, Internet Explorer 5.5, and select lists

This is basically a JavaScript related bleg/comment. The Prototype JavaScript framework attaches a useful function to form elements, getValue, which does exactly what you’d expect. It also has a convenient shorthand form, $F(), which does the same thing, given the DOM ID of a form element.

Unfortunately, thinks break down when you start dealing with the antiquated Internet Explorer 5.5. When Prototype tries to grab the value associated with a select list, it checks for the presence of the value attribute in the option tag, and if it can’t find it, it returns the contents of the option tag.

Prototype provides a method called hasAttribute, which is included to make up for deficiencies in the DOM implementation in Internet Explorer 6 and 7. It ends with this line:

return $(element).getAttributeNode(attribute).specified;

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 5.5 also doesn’t support the getAttributeNode method, either, so $F() won’t work in Internet Explorer 5.5 (for select lists, anyway).

I guess the easiest solution is to just skip Prototype in this case and grab the value of the select list manually. You can grab the value of the field like this:

$(‘mySelectList’).options[$(‘mySelectList’).selectedIndex].value

This works fine for my page, but obviously it’s not generic. mySelectList must be a select list, and I have to be using value attributes in my options for this to work. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a more elegant approach that could be integrated into Prototype.

Backing up to S3

My project to move my backups to Amazon S3 was derailed for a number of reasons, and lately I’ve been thinking in completely the opposite direction. I’m thinking instead of getting an Airport Extreme and attaching it to an external hard drive and backing up everything to that. The comments on the previous posts about the cost of S3 when you have a lot of data to back up kind of gave me pause, and then I found out about S3’s performance for myself. I’m passing for now, although there are still some “absolutely can’t lose” files that I’m storing there.

One Iraq prediction

Foreign Policy prints a piece by military analyst Peter Neumann analyzing the likely outcome of setting a withdrawal date for US military in presence in Iraq. Here’s the crux of his analysis:

If the United States announces a timetable for withdrawal, the only way this grim scenario will not come to pass is if Sunnis and Shiites miraculously learn to trust each other again. That’s becoming more unlikely every day. It’s not as if U.S. policymakers haven’t tried to get both sides to behave responsibly. Time and again, the United States has pleaded with Maliki to confront the sectarian elements within his own government. Time and again, the United States has leaned on Iraq’s Sunni neighbors to convince Iraq’s Sunnis to reject jihadism and throw their lot in with the political process. These efforts are ongoing, but so far, the results have been meager—so meager, in fact, that the U.S. military has begun walling off entire neighborhoods in order to keep Sunnis and Shiites from slaughtering one another.

In their quest to win the policy argument, those who favor heading for the exits in Iraq shouldn’t dismiss as mere political rhetoric the idea that a sectarian blood bath—not reconciliation—is the most likely outcome. Most importantly, though, U.S. political leaders should understand that the game is not over once a withdrawal date is set. On the contrary, getting out of Iraq without unleashing a civil war is likely to be as delicate an operation as getting into the country was in the first place. Let us hope that if the United States does leave, the planning is better this time around.

I’m in favor of withdrawal from Iraq, but I think it’s important not to assume it’s going to make everything better.

Subclipse won’t be part of Eclipse

Here’s a small glimpse of open source politics at work. License differences and philosophical differences seem to have lead this relationship to the shoals. It’s too bad, Subclipse is a great tool (I’ve been using it since it was not-so-great), and the fact that Eclipse supports CVS natively but requires third party plugins for SVN support seems somewhat anachronistic.

Anyone used Subversive? It’s an alternative to Subclipse that I haven’t used, but that does seem to have the blessing of the Eclipse project.

Update: Be sure to read Mark Phippard’s comment. He’s the project leader for Subclipse and elaborates, basically saying that moving under the Eclipse project offered limited value for a big hassle, given that a Subversion plugin won’t be making it into the main Eclipse package.

What’s next for the Bush administration

I suspect that Josh Marshall is on to something:

In the Roman Republic, particularly in its last century or so, as the system slid out of control, there was a key interplay between absolute power and legal vulnerability at the center of the political system. A consul had near limitless powers during their one year in office. But if they offended too many people during their term, they could be prosecuted for their acts once they left office.

So as they readied to leave office, consuls would try secure positions or dispensations that would protect them from their enemies.

Our system is different of course. But not altogether so. So as these various investigations move forward — how are Al Gonzales and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and a lot of other people … what arrangements are they making for their safety and immunity after January 2009? Immunity from prosecution in the US? Abroad? We should pay close attention to the details of legislation the White House puts forward over the next eighteen months. You may not be thinking about this issue. But they are.

Southern Culture on the Skids

Last week I downloaded a Southern Culture on the Skids album from eMusic, and in doing a bit of research, found that SCoTS is perhaps the band of the future. They’re already selling their music without DRM both via eMusic and via the Yep Roc Store. You can listen to their latest album via MP3 streaming right from their home page, without registering for anything.

They also have a liberal taping policy for their concerts. Anyone is free to tape, and they ask that if your recording is good, you burn a CD and send it to the band. Over at eMusic, there are four exclusive concert recordings available for download. I wonder if those recordings were submitted by fans?

Either way, it seems to me that Southern Culture on the Skids is embracing the Web music ecosystem rather than trying to resist it. I hope they’re making out like bandits.

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