Posts

There’s an RSS feed for the Daypop Top 40. (Via the The Shifted Librarian.)

I’m installing Trillian at home again. I’d been running only Yahoo instant messenger at home recently, but I have some friends on AIM that I’d like to be able to talk to when I’m not at work, so I’m going back to a client that supports multiple services. I also have MSN Messenger running because I run Windows XP, but I never use it.

Karl Martino: How I Got A Career. These are the sorts of stories I love. Karl’s story reminds me of another programmer I know who started out doing clerical work at a chicken processing plant in Arkansas and figured out how to automate her work on a fancy electric typewriter. She went on to get a master’s degree and cash in on the dot com world before everything went to hell. (He’s going to update the piece soon, but I went ahead and linked to it anyway.) ...

Anyone following the big loya jirga in Afghanistan? It sounds like a wild time. It’s pretty amazing that Afghanistan’s immediate future is being decided from a more or less democratic assembly. So far, there’s been lots of healthy argument and nobody has gotten shot. That has to be a good sign. The BBC has really detailed loya jirga coverage, including an FAQ, and a diary by BBC World Service regular Robin Lustig.

The Mozilla 1.0 release party isn’t until tonight and those crazy guys have already pushed out the Mozilla 1.1 alpha. Excellent! (1.1 alpha now installed here at work … lock and load.)

Yesterday, my RSS feed got more hits than the home page, and my RSS feed has been up for less than a week. Home page hits are off significantly, which tells me that a number of people who used to hit the site several times a day (you wonderful people) have plugged my site into their RSS aggregator. Granted, depending on the feed reader you use, you might be hitting the site 50 times a day with it, so there’s no way to tell how many people are actually using the RSS feed (well, there is, but not with the tool I’m using for log analysis), but it does seem to have taken off like a rocket. ...

Josh Marshall has an interesting post today on the Bush administration’s timing with regard to the announcement of the Department of Homeland Defense or whatever it’s called.

Bruce Eckel is translating his seminal book, Thinking in Java, for C# users. The new book, Thinking in C# is available in an early form online. One nice thing about the book is that it is written for people using command line C# tools, not Microsoft’s IDE.

The Web Standards Project has returned, this time focusing on developer education, which is a brilliant strategic move. We now have several browsers that do a pretty good job of supporting standards, and it looks like AOL is going to put Gecko into their client, which will push the market even further toward being standards-focused. Now it’s time to get Web developers to drop their Internet Explorer-specific hacks and get on board the standards train. ...

Shall we do a little critical thinking on the case of the dirty bomber, Abdullah al Mujahir, born Jose Padilla? John Ashcroft made a big announcement today about the fact that he was arrested on 5/8 when he arrived in the country from Pakistan, planning to build a dirty bomb. The government reports that al Mujahir had been trained in bomb making and that he is a member of al-Qaeda. Pretty serious stuff, no question about it. However, what I find interesting are the other details. Back in his Jose Padilla days, the would-be terrorist was a common street thug who wound up doing time and converting to Islam while in prison. Furthermore, when he arrived in the US, as far as we know, he had no bomb, no material from which to make a bomb, and no plans for the bomb he was going to make. Donald Rumsfeld admits without reservation that, I quote, “There was no actual plan.” So we’ve arrested someone who (allegedly) intended to execute a terrorist attack but had no concrete plans for how or when he planned on doing so. So what crime are we charging al Mujahir with? None. He’s been turned over to the Defense Department as an “enemy combatant.” Whether or not al Mujahir is capable of executing the attack the government says he was planning, it’s best that we were aware of him, and it’s certainly not a bad thing that he’s in custody, but it seems to me like we could have done better. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that it’s easy for al-Qaeda to find thugs willing to build a bomb and set it off, but it’s hard for them to come up with the radioactive material needed to construct such a bomb. So why did we arrest al Mujahir (with no actual criminal charges to press against him) when we could have followed him around and seen who he was working with and perhaps where he was planning on obtaining the material he needed to build the bomb? I don’t know the answer to the question, but I’d sure like to. Stories: ...