Posts

The AP ran a photo of Lee Felsenstein setting up the Jhai PC for villagers in Cambodia this week. The caption mentions a software issue that’s preventing Web access though.

Oh, it turns out that the dude who sent the nation into a panic this week by describing some sort of plan for setting off a dirty bomb was lying. How do you keep terrorizing the United States after you’ve been taken into custody? Just start making up scary stories and telling them to your captors.

As much as I love Mozilla, I’m beginning to think that I can’t use it as my email client any longer. After I’ve been using it for awhile, it seems like it starts to break. On machines where I don’t use the email portion, it seems to work fine forever, but on the laptop where I use it to read my email, it has basically failed two times. The first time, it got to where it just hung on startup and wouldn’t load any more until I created a new profile. Now whenever I try to send mail it just hangs and starts eating memory like crazy. I like Mozilla’s email client, it’s really pretty decent (given that all email clients basically stuck), but if it’s going to crap out periodically and make me start over with a clean in box, then it has to go. Fortunately for this iteration I started using IMAP instead of POP so I don’t have to retire my old email or port it to whatever new client I start using. I also use mutt to read my email through a shell, so changing email clients won’t delay my email responsiveness any more than my general lack of reading email already does, but it is quite a hassle. There’s also the matter of finding something else to use. Pretty much every email client I’ve tried annoys me in some fundamental way. ...

Japan is getting tough with North Korea, threatening them with a pre-emptive strike if they believe that North Korea is going to attack them. Hard to believe that Japan is taking a harder line on the North Korea issue than we are.

William Saletan has caught Colin Powell in a big flip flop. In 2001, Powell claimed that Osama bin Laden didn’t give a crap about Iraq (or Palestinians), and yesterday he talked about bin Laden’s partnership with Saddam. The scary thing is he was the member of the administration that I trusted most.

My new favorite toy is the Digester from Jakarta Commons. I first used it to store some information that I had strewn about a number of property files, and now I think I can use it for everything. Today I wrote a simple system that lets you create email templates as XML files and then turn them into email messages using the Digester. The nice thing about it is that it makes it really, really easy to map XML files into Java beans (or even hierarchies of Java beans). Lately, I’ve been very impressed with all sorts of things I’ve found that are part of the Jakarta Commons project, the HttpClient works really well too. ...

Don’t be alarmed, but the CIA and FBI say that we may face a terrorist attack as soon as this week. One wonders how they can be so specific about when, but not who, where, or how.

Slate has a nice compilation of editorial cartoons about the Columbia tragedy. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. For some reason, this one hit me the hardest.

Obviously the big news of the day is the new Osama bin Laden tape. Colin Powell says that it proves the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. MSNBC originally reported that bin Laden called on Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, but has since amended the story. The BBC has a full translation. Here’s what bin Laden has to say about his “partners” in Iraq: First, showing good intentions. This means fighting should be for the sake of the one God. It should not be for championing ethnic groups, or for championing the non-Islamic regimes in all Arab countries, including Iraq.

I think I forgot to mention that version 1.01 of the XML::RSS module for Perl was released. My code that generates RSS 2.0 was included, but the other people on the project did most of the real work.