If you have an interest in spirituality, or good stories, or just life in general, you probably ought to be reading the Real Live Preacher. The Preacher is a semi-anonymous, well, preacher from a church somewhere in south Texas. His weblog is really a rolling memoir of sorts, and his storytelling ability is cause for envy. Anyway, the dead trees world has figured this out and he’s gotten a book deal. Well deserved, I say. ...
Today is World Aids Day. The big news of the day is that the World Health Organization has launched a campaign to supply 3 million of the world’s poorest Aids patients with drugs by 2005. It’s going to cost a lot of cash, but I think this sort of aspirational project is the best use possible use of an international organization. They can address the problem on a global basis, and beg for contributions from all governments. Even if they fail to meet their goal, I respect the fact that they’re trying for something audacious. In the meantime, the Vatican has taken this occasion to once again tell people not to use condoms. ...
Matt Haughy is doing his part to kill email (as it is currently understood). I am becoming increasingly convinced that email as we know it is going away. I’m beginning to think that the best solution would be signing all of our email with a certificate that comes from a reliable authority (your company for professional email and a third party for personal), and then relegating everything that’s not signed to a “suspected spam” folder. First class email will be for people who want to confess their identity. As far as white lists go, the odds of my responding to a challenge from a white list system approach zero. Update: John Levine explains what’s bad about whitelist (challenge/response) spam prevention here. Also, for what it’s worth, I really don’t want to pick on Matt. Every time I read about someone signing up for these systems is another harbinger of total defeat. ...
Read it and weep.
Tim Bray has performed the service of posting a handy version of the Geneva Accord to his Web site. The Geneva Accord is a model accord reached through years of negotiations between nonofficial parties representing the Israelis and Palestinians. The goal was to demonstrate how an agreement could be reached that was acceptable to both sides. I think the accords are a triumph, not just for the content, but because they give the Israeli left a story to tell to Israeli voters. It seems like for the past few years, the only voice has been the Likud voice, which seems to say that the solution to the ongoing problem is to beat the Palestinians until they give up. That hasn’t worked. Hopefully Israel’s voters will cast a skeptical eye on the politicians that are denouncing the accords, and some movement toward peace will happen. (Needless to say, the Palestinians would have to accept an agreement and turn on their rejectionists as well for any progress to be made.) ...
Robert Martin has an interesting post about the danger of relying on a debugger. Any time I have to run code through a debugger, I feel like something has gone horribly wrong. Obviously, any code with a unit test almost never has a bug that must be found with a debugger, but a lot of the time I find myself working with other people’s code that doesn’t have unit tests, or with third party code that I don’t know enough about to delve into without the debugger. Those are unpleasant times. ...
Is it just me, or does this Bucket Boss briefcase look like the ultimate cheap laptop bag for a geek? The only issue is that it doesn’t have padding specifically for a laptop, but I wonder if a laptop sleeve is an acceptable workaround.
Not to be missed: Juan Cole’s brief synopsis of the Bush visit to Baghdad. Slate also has a description of the hush hush nature of the trip.
The Slacktivist has a guide to registering voters. Not only useful, but humorous. For example, step 7: Select a public location where people gather. If you wish to target a demographic that is more likely to vote for candidates from a particular party then you should factor this in your choice of location. If you are a Republican, try a local country club or a corporate trade convention. If you are a Democrat, try pretty much anywhere else.
Daniel Frommelt has written an article describing how he created a standards compliant version of the Slashdot home page. Compare the standards compliant version with the current version. Nearly indistinguishable.