Posts

I have high hopes for FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury’s entrant into the crowded field of RSS readers.

I’m going to bite on the issue of Google overvaluing posts on weblogs in its index. I think it’s a problem, but it’s not a huge problem. I look through my referrer log every now and then and see what sorts of hits I’m getting from Google (and I do get a bunch of hits that way), and in nearly every case my item has a link to something that the person who typed the query was probably looking for. In those cases, I think that items on this site are adding value to the index rather than muddling it. There’s also the unseen advantage of weblogs helping to set the value of other pages in the index. It may call for some adjustment to Google’s indexing algorithm, but I don’t think it’s really worth getting worked up over. ...

Eric Sink: Small ISVs: You need Developers, not Programmers. I’ve never worked as a programmer, and wouldn’t ever want to.

Lots of smart people seem to be convinced that with comprehensive unit tests, static typing in a programming language is not a key feature for maintainability. One of the things that really thrilled me about moving from being primarily a Perl programmer to being primarily a Java programmer was strict typing, and more structuredness in general. Maybe I’m behind the curve though. Recent commentors include: Bruce Eckel: Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing Robert C Martin: Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages? Tim Bray: Language Fermentation

Mozilla 1.4 Beta was released this week, and I installed it yesterday. It has some nifty new features, and the Alpha was rock solid. Unfortunately, when I installed the Beta under Windows, it was broken in a number of ways. Mainly copy and paste weren’t working right and I couldn’t use the cursor keys in input fields or to scroll the browser window. I did what’s probably exactly the wrong thing and downloaded and installed the latest daily build, but it seems to be working, so I’ll stick with that. ...

The best ideas seem obvious once you hear them. For example, it sure makes a lot of sense to think of spam as pollution.

After reading about LinkedIn in an item at Russell Beattie’s site, I want to try it out. Rather than signing up on my own and building my own network, I’d just as soon be invited by somebody. Looking for reader assistance here. (If you are going to invite me, please use the email address [email protected].) Update: I’ve gotten several invites. Feel free to invite me, though, so I can grow my empire! ...

I read yesterday in many, many places that Salam Pax’s weblog from Baghdad, Where is Raed?, had returned. Diana Moon posted a series of dispatches from the beginning of the fighting in Iraq to present day that Salam Pax had written, and I really appreciated the man on the street reporting. Diana would hate me for saying this, but after reading Salam Pax’s thoughts, I think that the best account of what was going on in Iraq from the perspective of Iraqis was provided by none other than Robert Fisk. There are a couple of passages that weren’t taken from Fisk articles, but very well could have been. ...

Dave Winer has heard that AOL has 400 people working on a weblogging package. That seems like about 100 times too many people to me. If you count in marketing and scalability issues, maybe it’s just off by a factor of 20.

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell laid out the administration’s case against Iraq on WMD charges in a UN speech: “My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, as well as Iraq’s involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of Resolution 1441 and other earlier resolutions.” The speech was taken as convincing evidence by many people. One attempt to analyze it was published in an Al Jazeera article. Unfortunately, the article only talks about the speech in light of what we knew before the war, and what I’m wondering about is whether things we’ve found since the war started would tend to confirm or refute the allegations that Powell made in his speech, so I soldier on. Back on April 26, Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post that none of Powell’s claims had been substantiated. I haven’t seen any other articles on the topic. The latest news is that a stolen truck that may be a mobile weapons lab was turned over to US forces. I still await the long article that will go over each of Powell’s claims and discuss them in depth. Was the al-Kindi company building mobile weapons labs? Where are the Iraqi officials and soldiers whose voices were featured in the recordings that Powell used in his speech? We have in custody at least one member of the “Higher Committee for Monitoring the Inspection Teams,” what do they have to say? Where are the secret files and prohibited items that were supposedly being hidden in private homes and concealed by being driven around the country? Where are the warheads armed with biological weapons that were dispersed to western Iraq? Why weren’t they used when we invaded? In his speech, Powell showed satellite photos of a weapons complex called Taji, including two bunkers he claimed were “active chemical munitions bunkers.” I’ve found stories reporting on looting of weapons from the Taji military base, and about troops that are currently encamped there, but nothing about those bunkers. Obviously if Iraq wanted to hide its chemical weapons, it would have completely scoured that base between Feb 5 and the end of the war, but I find it annoying that nobody has followed up. I found no mentions on Google News of the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, mentioned by name on one of Powell’s slides, nor the al-Musayyib Rocket Test Facility, nor Ibn al Haytham. It seems to me that part of the work of journalists should be to run down these claims. Also discussed by name in the speech is the Tareq State Establishment, allegedly a dual use front that claimed to be a legitimate enterprise but was in fact a chemical weapons producer. No mention of it in the news, unfortunately. The speech also mentions specific weapons programs, including a program to turn a fuel tank on a Mirage F-1 jet into a chemical or biological weapons sprayer and a program to turn Mig-21 aircraft into UAVs. Any evidence on that yet? What about the 1000 tons of chemical weapons that were supposedly in 6500 missing bombs from the Iran-Iraq war? Toward the end of his speech, Powell starts throwing around the numbers that are meant to really impress: ...