Posts

Zimran Ahmed has created an RSS feed for his site. Very nice. I especially like it when people who don’t slavishly update their sites every day add RSS feeds so that I can know when they’ve posted something.

I just found a guide to getting sub-pixel font positioning (in Microsoft-speak, ClearType) working on under XFree86 4. Needless to say, I’m going to be walking through this one when I get to work on Monday. My laptop running Gentoo desperately needs it. (If you’re a Windows user, then ClearType is a good enough reason to upgrade to XP. It’s heavenly on laptops, but helps out on CRTs as well. I find systems that don’t have ClearType to be jarring to use now.) ...

Here’s my new desktop picture on my Windows box.

I read this post today on Scripting News, and found it a bit irksome, because in essence it accuses me (and plenty of other people) of joining a mob. Let’s pull some quotes: It was the world vs Erin Clerico. There were so many people savaging him, I didn't see anyone looking for a way out of the dispute betw Erin and blogger Dave Johnson. For some reason I got a lot of email about this. Here’s some background. On Thursday night, Dave Johnson sent an email to a small mailing list that I’m on, asking what to do about this letter he got from Erin Clerico at Weblogger.com asking him to cough up his domain name because Erin had the term “weblogger” copyrighted. The simple fact is that this pissed me off. Erin was wrong on the law, was wrong to treat Dave that way, and was being a bad member of the community. There was no mob at this point, and as far as I know, I was the second person to even talk about this on their blog after Dave himself. I don’t know Erin, and at the time I didn’t even know who ran Weblogger.com. What I did know is that some business was picking on a little guy (with the threat of legal action) who happens to be a friend. The next day, Erin sent an even tougher email to Dave, so in addition to railing on him a bit more, I sent email to Dave Winer, who hadn’t mentioned the situation on his weblog and who has a business relationship with Erin. I thought (rightly so, as it turned out), that people who work with Erin might be more likely to put an end to the insanity than I would be. Moving on: ...

I found myself much in agreement with Ted Neward’s weblog piece on the downside of EJB. As an application developer, I have a strong negative reaction to anything that wants me to dump SQL and use some alternate layer. Perhaps for people who aren’t used to working with SQL, these abstraction layers are a good thing, but I know SQL, I like SQL, and I work with a DBA who’s a SQL master. To be honest, my job for the past three years or so has consisted almost entirely of writing web apps in Java, and I haven’t seen the need to learn EJB yet. I’m still waiting to be convinced. (I found this link over at Karl Martino’s weblog.) ...

The other day, I linked to a NYRB article that discussed the lack of a coherent foreign policy vision from the Bush administration. Coincidentally, today the Bush administration released its national security plan, which establishes America’s foreign policy stance, at least until President Bush comes up with a new one. I need to think about it more before I comment on it. The document itself is available at the White House web site: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. ...

I don’t know whether you watched Survivor last night, but the producer, Mark Jacobs, did something really interesting. They always pick some older people as part of the cast, and they often get voted out near the beginning (with a few notable exceptions). Anyway, as a sociological experiment, Survivor is fairly interesting. Usually, the behavior of the “tribes” is pretty primitive – the sick and old are voted out rapidly, just as they’d be taken to the edge of the village in ancient times to be eaten by animals. So last night, the producer took the two oldest people and made them team captains and let them choose teams. Anyway, it built in some immediate respect for the oldsters. I wonder whether it will lead to them sticking around longer? They’re certainly being treated like leaders by their tribe members currently. It should be interesting to see. ...

The brief but tawdry saga of Weblogger.com versus Roller Weblogger has come to a peaceful end. I don’t take back any of the mean things I said about Weblogger.com because I feel that it’s assinine to threaten people with a lawsuit right off the bat. I expect that kind of boorish behavior from law firms on retainer to corporate conglomerates, not from small businesses that depend on being a member of a community to succeed. Most of us doing this whole blogging thing are hobbyists who don’t earn a dime from it, and who don’t have a thing to gain other than perhaps some respect and attention from our peers. Dealing with the idea of going to court over a specious claim to your domain name adds an unneeded level of stress to anyone’s life, and I blame Erin (the guy who runs Weblogger.com) for making Dave Johnson miserable for a couple of days. That said, Erin has since apologized and from what I’ve read elsewhere, he runs his business well. There’s no grudge on my part, and no need for anybody to take their business eleswhere on general principle as far as I can tell. Erin’s apology is online here. ...

Sometimes it’s worthwhile to perpetuate a good thing.

A reader sent me a useful site called U.S. Bombing Watch that keeps track of all of the US (and allied forces) bombing attacks on Iraq. It’s commonly forgotten that we bomb Iraq on a pretty regular basis, and have been since the end of the Gulf War. This is another reason why the current situation is utterly unstable.