Posts

Sometimes working in IT kind of sucks, but I’m glad I’m not a coal miner.

Is it a coincidence that Stewart Alsop has written a column on the coming CDMA takeover only a couple of weeks after Steven Den Beste posted his long technical explanation of how CDMA is superior to GSM? Far be it from me to be cynical, but I find it to be an odd coincidence, especially given that Den Beste’s piece was Slashdotted after he wrote it. If Alsop did read Den Beste’s piece, he probably should have credited him somewhere. Then again, who knows when Alsop actually wrote his column? It could have been a month ago, given the publishing schedules of magazines. For what it’s worth, I’ve been convinced of CDMA’s superiority for years. The first time I ever bought a cell phone (1996), I chose PrimeCo’s CDMA service (and a Qualcomm phone) because after reading about the various digital cellular schemes, I realized that CDMA was superior by far to others. It has not yet come to dominate the market, but I agree with both Den Beste and Alsop that it will. ...

Could it really be true that the prevailing opinion in Washington that the general purpose computer is a threat? I can say honestly that I would move to another country before I would give up having a personal computer (or three) that I could use in any way I choose. The bitter irony here is that it’s likely that it would be easier to outlaw the personal computer as we know it today than it would be to outlaw, say, handguns. ...

John Gruber has sunk his teeth into the Microsoft “switch” fabrication like a pit bull on a (insert inappropriate reference here). Superseding the usual level of journalistic effort among bloggers, he actually did research using the telephone. Personally, I never go beyond Google or perhaps the occasional email. Anyway, he has lots of new juicy details today that further up the embarrassment for Microsoft and their gang of PR flacks. Nice work, John. ...

Unsatisfied with simply copying Apple’s UI innovations over the years, Microsoft had decided to copy their Switch ad campaign as well. Slavishly holding true to form, Microsoft copied the campaign rather poorly, at least based on what I’ve read. The personal testimonial recounting how this person dumped their Mac in favor of that popular, hip new operating system Microsoft Windows XP Professional was obviously written by a PR hack. Microsoft has already taken the page down in shame. It hadn’t even had a chance to make it to the top of the Daypop Top 40 or be featured in a Wired News article yet, poor lil’ thing. ...

The current issue of The Economist has an outstanding article on Israel and Iraq, and their respective violations (or lack thereof) of various UN Security Council resolutions. The article provides the clearest explanation I’ve yet read of the various resolutions that the UN has passed concerning Israel and the Palestinians, and how those resolutions differ from those passed regarding Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait.

I don’t have much to day about the bombing in Bali over the weekend, other than that it was an utter and complete atrocity. Given Indonesia’s history of sectarian violence, it’s a shame that the Indonesian government didn’t get serious about cracking down on terrorist groups before something like this happened. Another unfortunate circumstance of this event (aside from the brutal murder of hundreds of people) is that it is going to cripple the Indonesian economy for the foreseeable future, which will no doubt to lead to more suffering and deaths in Indonesia in the long term. I’m not surprised to see that the head of Jemaah Islamiah, Indonesia’s leading Islamist terrorist group, accused the United States of the bombing. One wonders why the US would blow up a club full of Australian tourists on a Hindu-populated island in a Muslim country half the world away. ...

David Johnson wrote an interesting item yesterday on persistence frameworks in Java. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always been a write your own SQL kind of guy, but the more I read about persistence layers, the more interested I become. I’m particularly intrigued because on our last two internal projects, we’ve wound up creating our own simple persistence layers from scratch. If we can use an existing package to provide more robustness and take some of the gruntwork out of the project, so much the better. This snippet seems to hold much promise: ...

Larry Lessig has posted his own thoughts on the oral arguments at Eldred v Ashcroft. I agree with him that the case against extending copyright terms further is utterly obvious. What I find most interesting is that you have Larry Lessig posting his own notes on the case on a public Web page that will perhaps be read by the Supreme Court Justices, or more likely, their clerks. Perhaps his blogging could influence the outcome of the case. ...

The new design is live. The new layout uses CSS for everything, and I’m pretty sure all of the pages on the site are XHTML 1.0 compliant. (I figured if Wired could do it, so could I.) If you notice any problems or the pages look stupid in your browser, please let me know. One specific question I have is how to make the left column extend to the bottom of the page on short pages like this one. As always, feedback is welcomed. After spending a big chunk of time going through content of various vintages on the Web site, I can’t get over how much easier it is to do things with CSS than it is to hack around with font tags, and tables, and all that other crap that we used to use to make our pages look the way we wanted. This site will be about 10 times easier to maintain now. Oh, and if you haven’t used HTML Tiidy yet, I highly recommend it. It did a great job of fixing my crappy old pages so that I could bear to look at them. ...