Posts

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.

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.”

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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? ...

eMusic has released a preview of their new download manager, which looks like an attempt to provide features like the iTunes Music Store interface in iTunes. The current manager is just a helper application that I assume is primarily designed to only let you download the tracks that you have paid for. The new application is based on Fifefox and written using XUL. Slick.