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Send Back the Statue of Liberty does in fact turn out to be satirical in nature. Never mind my earlier fulmination.

The White House released the list of members of the coalition of the willing. I see that Afghanistan is on the list, I guess that means that we can count on Iraq’s support for our next overseas adventure as well.

At this point I really wish that Saddam Hussein would take up Bahrain’s offer and go into exile. It’s better than he deserves, but it would save a lot of lives.

I have trained SpamAssassin’s Bayesian filter to correctly identify spam from some art dealer and trash it. The only other spam that consistently gets through promotes various nightclubs in Las Vegas. Hopefully I’ve conquered that as well.

The New York Times: War in the Ruins of Diplomacy

I don’t know Python but I did see a couple of referrers yesterday that offered the Python version of my little example. Here it is: if depth: depth = depth + datadir.count(’/’) - 1 Now I know why Python programmers seem so smug.

As sort of an adjunct to the Greg Costikyan/Warren Spector conversation last week, I link to Salon’s profile of Dani Bunten, one of the most innovative game designers of the eighties. She was the creator of such incredible games as M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold. The article is also a lament for the sorts of games that Bunten created, and it dovetails nicely with Costikyan’s laments about the death of originality and risk taking in the game industry. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the reason games are hard to get made these days is the huge budgets required for sound, graphics, and other glitzy elements that the industry feels are de rigeur. But the question I have to ask is whether that stuff is really necessary to make a successful PC game. Snood is a blast, and it’s one of the ugliest games ever. Popcap makes fun games that don’t have impressive graphics either. Even Civilization and its descendents don’t have incredibly It seems to me that a game with compelling game play and a reasonable price point would do just fine right now, even if it didn’t have the graphics of Unreal. ...

brushstroke.tv is offering folding money in a contest for the best anti-war poster submitted. The contest isn’t right up my alley – maybe someone will offer a prize for the best anti-war shell script.

The Arrogant Empire, Fareed Zakaria’s wide ranging article on America’s place in the world, is a must read for, well, everyone. It captures so many of the themes that have been floating around, half formed, in my head, that I’m twice as glad it was written. This sentence confirms every suspicion that I’ve had about our diplomacy under the Bush administration: Having traveled around the world and met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it. Read the whole article, though. Zakaria recognizes that people will be more suspicious of the US because we are the lone superpower, but also clearly illustrates how it's the abuse of that power that has put us where we are.

Some people have reacted to my bit comparing Perl and Java from earlier today. I think that my piece came across as trashing Perl, which I didn’t want to do. I like Perl. I write a lot of Perl, and in the past have written a whole lot of Perl. Let me post my simple explanation of my problem with Perl for systems development. Perl gives you many ways to do most things, and many of them are incredibly concise. For the expert programmer, this is wonderful. A guy like Rael Dornfest can cram what would take a whole block of code in most languages into one tiny line of code. My problem is that on most of the projects I’ve worked on, some of the programmers were not what I would refer to as experts. The same goes for maintenance – in many cases, code written by an expert will be maintained by someone who’s not an expert. The more expressive a language is, the more likely it is that non-experts will screw it up. In some ways, writing code is a lot like speaking a language. Have you ever met that person who is always trying out new words that they saw used somewhere, and getting them wrong every time? The same thing happens with programmers, and a complex language like Perl provides people with a lot more vocabulary and grammar to butcher than Java does. You can butcher Java just as well as you can Perl, believe me, but the potential for doing real damage is greater with Perl. ...