The Death of bin Ladenism is a NYT op-ed piece by Amir Taheri, a writer for Arab News. His article makes sense to me, and I sure hope he’s right. Of course, over and above bin Ladenism there’s a deeper infection in the Islamic world that needs to be stamped out as well – rampant anti-Semitism, suppression of women, and intolerance of dissent all have to go if the Arab world is going to change for the better in the long term. ...
I’ve been trying to figure out the nature of my growing distaste for HTML, and I think I’ve got it figured out. At first I thought it was the drudgery and inconsistency, and indeed, it’s part of it, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that I’m a far better critic than designer. I have no trouble at all looking at Web sites (or other GUIs) and seeing what’s wrong with them in terms of aesthetics, usability, and also architecturally (in terms of how hard the code is to maintain), but I’m unable to translate that into improving my own meager design skills. So when I’m working with good designers, it’s easy for me to contribute to the process by making useful suggestions or pointing out flaws, but when I go it alone, I can’t visualize really well designed sites above a certain level of complexity, nor can I implement really complex designs. The thing is, I’m totally OK with that. I’m not one of these people who feels like they are great at everything, or that they should be great at everything. I know my own strengths, and being a user interface designer isn’t one of them. I know how much I dislike inadequate designs, so creating them myself is just utterly and completely frustrating. This as all come to a head on my current project, which I stepped into when it was about 75% done. It has a passable (but not great GUI) implemented in a way that’s sort of complex and hard to deal with. So working within the constraints of an existing GUI that I know could be better is annoying, and having to figure out all the wrinkles of how it was implemented so that I can get work done is even more annoying. Fortunately, I think I’ll be done today. ...
President Bush proposed that companies be banned from loaning money to their officers for the purpose of buying the company’s stock. This is a policy change that’s desperately needed. Oddly enough, Bush took advantage of these types of loans himself, back when he was failing his way through the corporate world.
The things we don’t know never cease to amaze me. A hominid skull 1 million years older than the oldest specimen previously known was discovered in Chad. At this point, there’s really no way of telling what the significance of this discovery is. Hopefully National Geographic will have an article on it soon.
A company called tex9 is writing an iPod interface for Linux. I really, really want an iPod, but I don’t have a Mac. I plan on buying a Mac sometime, but if I could go ahead and get an iPod and start using it, that would be awesome.
Recently, I’ve been developing a growing hatred for HTML. And XHTML. And CSS. And JavaScript. These days, I spend most of my time writing code in Java, or Perl, or writing build scripts using Ant, or doing other things along those lines. When I have to go back to the UI stuff and start hacking around to type up a ton of HTML, or worse, try to make things look right in several browsers, it makes me want to barf. I used to be a fair hand with PhotoShop, but now opening up any graphics tool just makes me grimace. I’m hoping that this is a phase. ...
Joe Conason has a daily journal at Salon now.
In Afghanistan, this qualifies as progress.
President Bush gave a press conference today, from which we learned that he doesn’t know what a hypothetical question is. Most of the questions were about corporate misconduct, and specifically allegations of Bush’s misconduct as a director of Harken Energy. It looks like he’s not going to skate on this whole Harken thing.
While I was thinking about Iraq this morning, I got around to reading Josh Marshall’s piece from last month’s Washington Monthly about the argument over invaiding Iraq. It’s extremely informative, and I encourage you to read it.