Remember when we helped some Afghan warlords “liberate” their country from the Taliban? After five employees of Doctors Without Borders were murdered yesterday by the reconstituted Taliban, the group has decided to suspend operations in Afghanistan.
Not for the squeamish: the submissions for the Vicious Instapundit Blogroll Contest. The nominees leave me depressed about humanity.
Must read weblog post of the day: Eavesdropping on the president (from the Slacktivist, as is often the case).
Russell Beattie posted some useful Tomcat tips on Monday. For what it’s worth, I nearly always run Tomcat 5 in the Eclipse debugger using the MyEclipse IDE.
So many bloggers now have Gmail accounts (myself included), and a number of them are posting feedback about Gmail to their weblogs (myself included) and probably aren’t submitting that feedback through the mechanism built into Gmail (myself included). Wouldn’t it be cool if Google set up a Trackback address that you could ping if you posted Gmail-related items? That would make it easy for the Gmail team to keep track of all of the Gmail discussion going on out here in blogland. ...
The other day I noticed that John Kerry’s most recent campaign slogan is “Let America be America again.” At the time, I thought it may have been taken from a line on The West Wing. A reader pointed out that the line from The West Wing was taken from Reagan’s 1984 campaign when, after losing a debate to Walter Mondale, Reagan’s advisors adopted the slogan “Let Reagan be Reagan.” I’m sure the Kerry campaign wishes that people were focusing on that, rather than on the fact that the line is taken from a poem written during the Great Depression by a communist sympathizer expressing his feeling that there never was an American golden age to get back to (a sentiment that I agree with, generally speaking, given that I’m no fan of nostalgia). ...
The subject of the John Kerry intern rumors, Alexandra Polier, writes about the origin of the rumors and how she figured out who spread them around for New York magazine. Cameron Barrett is mentioned by name in the article, and explains how he was involved as well. (In case you don’t follow the links, the original rumor was posted to a site Cam created, but he wasn’t directly involved.)
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. ...