Did you know that PHP and Apache 2.0 are incompatible? That may be too strong a word, but the PHP guys do not recommend using them together in a production environment. I recently switched my server to Apache 2.0 so that I could easily run Subversion, which is incompatible with Apache 1.3. Threads are the problem for PHP, and some people say that threads are a problem, period.
Jeremy Zawodny is switching to the Mac. It seems like all the cool geeks are becoming Mac users these days. And why wouldn’t they, with that Unixy goodness underneath? I’ve been a huge fan of the Mac for at least a dozen years now, but I haven’t used one on a day to day basis for the past 7 or 8 years. I bought a laptop three and a half years ago and wound up going with a Toshiba because I wanted to play games and because the iBook that was comparably priced seemed underpowered. I’d love to switch, but I imagine it will be awhile before I spend $2000 to $3000 on a computer. ...
Today, the Washington Post has an editorial attempting to goad the Bush administration into getting Iraq into shape for the big handover at the end of June. The paper points out that the security situation sucks, this troop rotation is reducing our forces in Iraq by 20%, and there’s no real plan for the government that’s going to take over when Paul Bremer hands over the reins. The reality of how bad things are becomes clear when you look at the Washington Post’s recommendations. Here they are: ...
Daniel Drezner offers an explanation of the character of Richard Clarke, that of the perfect bureaucrat. Here’s the money paragraph: That's not bad. I'd make it simpler -- Richard Clarke is the perfect bureaucrat. I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word. In the best sense, it's clear that Clarke was adept at maximizing the available resources and authority required to do his job, given the organizational rivalries and cultures that made such a pursuit difficult. In the worst sense, Clarke was a monomaniacal martinet whose focus on his bailiwick to the exclusion of everything else is phenomenal. I actually think it’s complimentary and accurate. I think that explains why he wrote the book as well – Clarke is a proud (or, if you prefer, arrogant) man. He feels like if he had been in the same position he was in under the Clinton administration during the first 8 months of the Bush administration, he could have sussed out the plans for 9/11 and put a stop to them. He’s probably wrong, but you’d have a hard time convincing him of that. He reminds me a lot of the kind of star athlete who wants the ball with the game on the line, because they have supreme confidence that they’ll do what it takes for their team to win. If the coach doesn’t draw up a play for them, then they’re liable to gripe about it to reporters in the postgame interview. The griping is unpleasant, but you want such a player on your team, because someone has to make those crucial shots if you’re going to win. ...
When the John Kerry campaign web site launched an ancillary weblog called the DBunker, I linked to it, thinking that it was going to be a very effective forum for refuting distortions of Kerry’s voting record and other misrepresentations made by Republicans and their media friends. Unfortunately, that’s not what it has turned out to be. The site is just yet another outlet for generic campaign rhetoric. Campaign rhetoric is perfectly fine, but I was hoping that the DBunker would be focused on one thing – countering the lies and distortions that are slung at Kerry. Honestly, I rarely click through and read the items that are posted to it just because it’s more of the same. That’s too bad. Update: FactCheck.org polices the advertisements and claims of both candidates. ...
Earlier this month, Lance Arthur wrote an article about personal grooming, and Brad Graham posted his own list of recommendations. Both were largely lists of recommended products that fall into the category that I’d refer to as toiletries. I read them with somewhat detached interest, because my grooming habits don’t extend much past cleanliness (I do brush twice a day and floss religiously). Anyway, my own personal list of toiletries is boring – Crest toothpaste, Dove soap, Head and Shoulders shampoo, various brands of anti-perspirant. Like I said, I floss (I have no idea which brand I use) as well. One area where I have experimented quite a bit is in the shaving cream area. I hate shaving. In fact, I’ve had a goatee for years, despite my growing fear that they’re no longer fashionable. The main reason for the goatee is that it means I can get away with only shaving once a week. Were I clean shaven, I’d probably have to shave several times a week. Also, I shaved off my goatee last year on a lark but grew it back immediately because I didn’t like the way I looked without it, and nobody complimented me on its absence. Anyway, shaving has always left me with painful red marks on my neck for a couple of days after the shave, and I’ve tried to conquer this problem in a number of ways. I’ve used just about all the different razors and shaving creams (or gels) you can buy at the supermarket, with varying results. (For what it’s worth, the Gillette Mach 3 razor is the best, even better than the blue disposable razors I used for a long time, which I had chosen because have incredibly sharp blades.) I had even branched out from the supermarket to use some kind of Clinique gel stuff that you can get at any department store at the mall. The Clinique stuff may have been slightly better than Edge gel or whatever, but certainly was not demostrably superior. For what it’s worth, I’ve been using proper, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-approved shaving technique for about 10 years, after reading about it in some men’s magazine at a friend’s apartment in the distant past. Anyway, Brad recommended two shaving creams in his article, and of the two, the one I found online and discovered that I could buy locally was something called Anthony Logistics Shave Gel. The closest place to the house that sells the stuff is Sephora, which is a store I had only ever been to once. That time, my wife wanted to check out some expensive skin cream she had read about in a magazine. The stuff was ludicrously expensive, and came in a big glass jar that turned out to be made of thick glass and had an extremely concave bottom. She didn’t buy it, although she did say it was very nice. We went back to Sephora to buy the shaving cream. I couldn’t find the product on my own, so I had to talk to one of the salespeople. She was very friendly, but as I expected, she asked me some questions, like, “Do you prefer gel or cream?” I was, of course, immediately stumped, and after a short conversation I have already blocked out, wound up with the cream. She then tried to sell me some other products for washing your face, or rubbing on your face after shaving, or something, but I was getting dizzy and managed to escape with a “Maybe next time.” Getting involved in business transactions where I’m totally out of my depth induces panic rapidly. Anyway, the point of all this is to say that it was all worth it. This Anthony Logistics Shave Cream is great stuff – I’ve been using it for weeks and have not had any of the shaving related problems I have always been plagued with. I’m still not shaving more than once a week, but I could if I wanted to and it wouldn’t hurt. That’s pretty cool. In fact, I was feeling so flush from my success with shaving cream that I asked my barber to recommend a new hair product for me (the hair gel I had been using for years finally ran out), and he sold me some kind of expensive goop, and that works great, too. By this time next month I may be exfoliating, whatever that is. ...
A UNC professor has conducted an empirical study that shows that the effect of file sharing on album sales is insignificant. Somehow I doubt that the copyright industry will give a crap about this study.
One of the worst things about Windows is command.com. Even if you have Cygwin installed, using command.com as your shell stinks, if for no other reason than because copy and paste don’t really work. I just learned today that rxvt, an xterm-like application, is available as part of Cygwin. It’s a lot more flexible than command.com, and supports copy and paste like every other Windows application. It also supports X-style copy and pasting. Once you’ve installed it, change your cygwin.bat file (in the Cygwin home directory) to run a command like this one: rxvt -geometry 80x32 -sb -sl 10000 -sr -fn “Courier New-20” -e /bin/bash –login -i instead of this one: bash –login -i Update: Sadly, the MySQL command line client won’t run under rxvt. Nothing is ever perfect in life. Even so, using rxvt is well worth it. ...
File this article: Why Do Java Developers Like to Make Things So Hard? in the “lost on me” category. Yeah, there are some bad API designs out there in the Java world, but I’ve gotten to a point with Java where doing things in PHP or Perl is like pulling teeth. Right now I’m porting some PHP stuff to Java, and looking at the crufty, linear PHP code just makes me blanch. Most of this Web site is written using PHP and Perl, and I like them for one offs. The subscriptions page I created the other day that pulls the list of feeds out of the aggregator and publishes it as part of the site took me no time at all to do. But if I’m creating a system, I want the structured approach that Java demands. It just makes life easier down the road. Update: Russell Beattie concurs with the article. For what it’s worth, I’m definitely not a computer scientist. (I have a wimpy MIS degree.) I came from the Perl/PHP/ColdFusion world. The only way I’m going back is kicking and screaming. ...
Google is a bit different today. As a Firefox user, I rarely hit the Google home page (control-K to get to the search box built into the browser is much quicker) and I was surprised at the new results page. Froogle takes the place of the old Google implementation of DMOZ in the list of possible searches, which makes sense.