Posts

Iraq has agreed (on paper) to allow unfettered weapons inspections. The US strategy is certainly going to be to keep demanding more things until Iraq says no.

There’s a worm spreading around that affects people running outdated versions of OpenSSL that have an exploitable bug discovered in August. If you’re running OpenSSL, make sure you’re current. Linux has really hit the mainstream – it’s pervasive enough to productively write worms for.

The papers are all reporting that support for a strong resolution in the UN against Iraq is broadening rapidly, thanks to President Bush’s speech last week. That doesn’t surprise me at all – I thought the speech was very effective. Indeed, it was engineered perfectly to play on the egoes of the people involved, by pointing out that Iraq has done nothing but ignore UN resolutions for the past 10 years. I have to admit that my own opposition to going to war right now is wavering, mainly due to the fact that I think it’s inevitable. Furthermore, we have a huge amount of unfinished business with Iraq. We can’t maintain no-fly zones forever, nor can it be our permanent duty to protect the Kurds in northern Iraq even as we allow Saddam to brutally oppress everyone else in the country. ...

I was reading Slate this morning and saw this book advertised. Yes, it’s a repair manual for Mercruiser inboard boat engines.

Mozilla 1.2a is out. Here’s a link to the release notes. I haven’t installed it yet myself.

New York Times: Arafat’s Last Hurrah? I hope they’re right that Palestinians really are coming to reject suicide bombings and other forms of violence.

The two pilots who bombed Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of the four people who died. This seems strange to me …

A reader sent me this article which contains a point by point rebuttal (of sorts) of the Bush speech at the UN yesterday. Just as some of the points Bush made were better than others, some of the points made in the article are better than others. It has a lot of tiresome “we’re just as bad as Iraq” crap in it, but there are some more valuable points in it as well. ...

I think that the speech President Bush gave to the UN yesterday (transcript) made the best case possible for going to war against Iraq. I don’t know if it will be persuasive to other members of the UN Security Council, and I very much doubt the sincerity of the administration when they talk about the moral cause of liberating Iraqis from oppression, but overall I think it was a good speech. ...

Ted Neward has a piece at O’ReillyNet suggesting that Sun free Swing – turning it over to the Jakarta project. I would tend to agree that Swing is not core to Sun’s strategy, and Sun could also assign as many developers as it liked to the project. Furthermore, there are plenty of companies built in whole or in part around producing Java GUI apps. I imagine that they could improve both the performance and usability of those apps if they were able to both contribute changes to Swing and to edit Swing themselves to improve their products. The pace of innovation for other open GUI platforms (like KDE and Gnome) has been very impressive. I think Swing would evolve more rapidly if it were open. Would it cost Sun even a dollar in revenue to open it? ...