Posts

Microsoft has done something that happens to intersect with a pet peeve of mine. Here’s a page containing a reference for DHTML Objects, and its URL is: http://…/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/objects.asp The URL would appear to point to a perfectly logical file structure on the Web site. For example, you’d think that you could take objects.asp off the end and get the full DHTML reference, or take off reference/objects.asp and get to their DHTML page. Not so. Would it be too much trouble to make it easier on people who get there from a search engine by making that sort of thing work? Even if you don’t want to organize your URLs that way, it would be simple to set up redirects that sent users who hack their own URLs to the right place. It just boggles my mind that a company would pretend to organize their files so cleanly but then not go through with it. On a slightly related note, this is the must-bookmark URL. ...

The Houston Chronicle says Yao Ming is only going to do endorsements for products he uses. Does that mean he really is a Mac fan?

A reader sent along a link to jwz’s comments on the selection of KHTML over Gecko to serve as the guts for Safari.

Why did Apple choose KHTML over Gecko as the rendering component for Safari? According to this email, because it’s leaner and meaner than anything else they could find.

Joan Didion: Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History. Everybody should read this article and think about it (even if you find nothing to agree with in it, which is a very distinct possibility).

Good news! The Norwegian teenager who wrote DeCSS has been acquitted.

Today is MacWorld keynote day, which is exciting for Mac fans, and observed by pretty much everybody. The coolest thing I’ve heard so far is that Apple has released Keynote, a competitor to PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a miserable piece of crap, and I’ve been dying for somebody to come out with something better. I’m glad Apple finally had the guts to bring some innovation to this arena (assuming their product is innovative). It’s really amazing to think about how stagnant the market is for almost all productivity applications. ...

I’m kind of thinking that John Edwards must be scary to Republicans. One big issue for Republicans in general and our current President in particular is tort reform. I read a good article reprinted from Washington Monthly about John Edwards’ campaign being a great platform from which to oppose tort reform. Because John Edwards is the very prototype of the crusading attorney who fights for the bedraggled masses, he’s the perfect person to argue that tort reform would be a mistake. Now I see that the National Review Online is warning other Democratic Presidential candidates against taking John Edwards too lightly. Seems to me that the only reason the NRO would be dispensing advice to Democrats is that they’d much prefer to see Bush run against a Lieberman, Kerry, or Gephart in 2004 for than against John Edwards. The candidate who has most captured my interest is Howard Dean, but I’d prefer Edwards as opposed to any of the others I just mentioned. On the subject of tort reform, I’m against it for the most part. I hate frivolous lawsuits, but I haven’t seen any proposals for tort reform that would cut down on frivolous cases without also damaging the ability of people with meritous cases to bring lawsuits. ...

I am endlessly fascinated with articles that demolish conventional wisdom, even if I’m completely sold on the conventional wisdom being demolished. In that light, I recommend this Benjamin Compaine article on the dangers of media consolidation from Foreign Policy highly. (Link via winterspeak.com.)

One of our biggest foreign policy problems right now is our foundering relationship with South Korea. It’s bad enough that North Korea is behaving the way we’d expect a member of the “axis of evil” to behave, but it’s worse that we can’t count on South Korea to take our side when we try to bully Kim John Il into doing what we want. In one of those cases where small things make a big deal, I think that the race where short track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno won a gold medal after a South Korean was disqualified might have something to do with the growth in anti-Americanism on the peninsula. When judges disqualified the South Korean skater after a theatrical move by Ohno, the press in South Korea went wild about how unfairly they were being treated (it didn’t help that we were the home team for the ‘02 Winter Games, either). The incident inflamed the passions of the South Koreans, and I believe that some of the current resentment toward America stemmed from it. There’s nothing we can do about it – I just find it odd the way things work. Update: I realize that there are lots of other grievances that South Korea has with the United States, many of which involve the behavior of US soldiers on Korean soil. I just thought the connection between Ohno’s controversial medal win and our relations with South Korea was interesting. ...