A reader sent me this video from a documentary that features US soldiers confronting looters in Iraq (it’s a Windows Media video clip). After watching it, I was kind of torn between crying and throwing up. I’d tell you what happens, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. And this is what goes on when a film crew is on the scene documenting the behavior for posterity.
Anyone think this was the best $200 a spammer ever spent?
Fred Kaplan reports that President Bush is spending more on nuclear weapons than Ronald Reagan ever did. And that number doesn’t include the massive amounts of cash that we’re throwing away on a missile defense system that won’t really protect us from anything. In the meantime, requests for the money we must have to continue the mission in Iraq are being postponed until after the election to avoid bad press. Someone needs to take away the credit card. ...
In 2002, an NFL player named Pat Tillman made big news when he turned down a contract worth millions and left professional football to join the US Army along with his brother. He went to Ranger school and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and was killed in action on the hunt for the Taliban. In the context of this story, I find the Pentagon’s refusal to make public the photos of the flag draped coffins of slain soldiers to be disgusting and cowardly. If Americans who see those photos feel like the sacrifice made by these soldiers is in vain, it’s not the photos that are the problem. ...
Phil Carter: Comparing the junior officer evals of Bush and Kerry
I just noticed something odd: the book Programming Apache Axis, which Amazon.com says O’Reilly was to have published on March 1, isn’t mentioned anywhere on oreilly.com and is being reported as not yet released. (OK, I lied, the animal on the cover is mentioned on this page.) I’m hoping it’s a good book – I’ve been trying to do some stuff with Apache Axis, and both the docs and the library are pretty heinous. ...
Something to think about next time you head out to Wal-Mart for some household necessities. Really this is an article for people who think that organized labor is an outmoded concept.
Anybody know how to write a regular expression that matches only if something isn’t between to other things? For example, I’d like one that matches “Dick Cheney is incompetent,” or “Dick Cheney seems incompetent,” but not “Dick Cheney is not incompetent.” In other words, match all sentences that begin with “Dick Cheney” and end with “incompetent” but that do not contain the word “not." Update: Someone let me know that what I needed was a zero-width negative look-ahead assertion, described here. (They actually sent me the code to do it, I had to look up the name, and report it here due to its hilarious length.) Further update: Well, it looks like the technique mentioned before isn’t going to work for my actual case because I don’t know what the structure of the string is, other than that I know the beginning and end and one thing that might be in the middle. It’s going to have to be a two pass thing, it seems. To quote jwz, “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions’. Now they have two problems.” ...
The new Mozilla Thunderbird logo is very, very nice.
A java.net weblog entry today discusses RDD – Resume Driven Development. Don’t say you’ve never used this methodology …