Posts

Documents of Freedom: “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”

Looks like I have a lot in common with these Iraqis. I want the same things for the United States that they want for their country.

There should be some sort of award for Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing post entitled “Please diagnose my tropical island skin sore.” As you might imagine, this one is not for the squeamish.

For awhile now I’ve been thinking that pair.com, my long time hosting provider, has been falling down on the job. The performance of this site has seemed rotten to me, and I assumed that it was a problem with the database server because static pages fly onto the screen as they should. I then realized that a phpBB installation that I’m running works perfectly fine. It was then that I realized that the problem was somewhere in my code. It’s a good thing I didn’t migrate to a different hosting provider over this (I had had considered it). The problem is that the code that displays the items on the home page pulled up all of the items I’ve ever posted and then grabbed the ones from past five days with posts. Pulling them all up insured that under no circumstances would I ever not have five days of posts on the front page, even if they were one year apart or something. Anyway, now that I have literally thousands of items in the database, that query was taking a long time, even though it never wants more than a few items. I set up the where clause so that it now only grabs items from the past 14 days, and that seems to have made things much better. Given the posting history for this site, users shouldn’t see any difference other than improved performance. ...

Eben Moglen: SCO Scuttles Sense, Claiming GPL Invalidity. Thank goodness that somebody is quickly evaluating and rebutting SCO’s spurious legal arguments. Update: Oh, and SCO has shown slides of some of the supposedly infringing code in Linux and the copyrighted source code it was cribbed from. Unfortunately, that code was released freely by none other than SCO themselves. Whoops. Update: There’s even more on this here …

There were a couple of interesting nuggets to be mined from Today’s Papers this morning, concerning Afghanistan. The first is that President Bush doesn’t seem to know that we have more troops in Afghanistan than ever and the second is that none of the major papers have correspondents in Afghanistan any more. It’s telling that even though we have 10,000 troops facing enemies in a foreign country and are halfheartedly engaged in a rebuilding project there that is crucial to suppressing terrorism (much moreso than our effort in Iraq), the media seems to have completely moved on. ...

According to MEMRI, this is a message from self-described members of al-Qaida claiming responsibility for the power outage last week.

From On the Verge: a guide for migrating from Internet Explorer to Firebird.

If you’re interested in a sneak preview of the sorts of obituaries that news services have in the can for Saddam Hussein when he meets his bitter end, take a look at the obituaries for Idi Amin that were published today. It must be quite an intriguing challenge for obituary writers to properly capture the sense of the truly evil and brutal in their final farewell. The Sunday Telegraph effort is particularly evocative. ...

Everybody knows that when it comes to online argument, claims by one of the participants that they’re getting lots of supportive email from people who won’t publicly comment are a sure sign of defeat. In the SCO third quarter earnings call, their CEO did the equivalent by claiming that the silent majority of the IT world supports SCO.