Posts

I’m in love with the XML::Simple module for Perl. It’s amazingly useful for a certain class of tasks. Steve Ballmer says that the sanctions requested by the 9 holdout states in the anti-trust trial would kill Microsoft. Sounds perfect. Ted Koppel defends Nightline on the NYT op-ed page: But I have one complaint – and that is about the anonymous suggestion from one of our corporate executives, quoted in The Times, that “Nightline” has lost its relevance. Another unnamed executive implied that the program is no longer competitive or profitable – both assertions are demonstrably untrue – but relevance is a more subjective matter. I would argue that in these times, when homeland security is an ongoing concern, when another terrorist attack may, at any time, shatter our sense of normalcy, when American troops are engaged in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Yemen and Georgia, when the likelihood of military action against Iraq is growing – when, in short, the regular and thoughtful analysis of national and foreign policy is more essential than ever – it is, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, malicious to describe what my colleagues and I are doing as lacking relevance. ...

The Economist has a decent summarization of the changes President Bush proposes to welfare reform. Paul Boutin on the state of the wi-fi world. My next tech purchase is going to be a wi-fi card and hub.

I’m honestly not sure what to do with the news that we’ve set up a hidden, “just in case” government manned by high ranking civil servants that would take over if someone blows up Washington, DC. The plans for such a replacement government have been in place since the Cold War, but on 9/11 the civil servants were actually spirited away to their secret bunkers, and the shadow government will continue to be deployed indefinitely. ...

So Congress batted around some Wall Street analysts yesterday for rating Enron highly even though the company was obviously in deep trouble and its stock was in free fall. The CNNfn article I link to concludes with the obvious question – why does anybody heed the stock ratings provided by Wall Street analysts. If there’s anything that recent history has taught us, it’s that companies can go right down the tubes wearing “strong buy” ratings all the way. It’s obvious to this observer that stock analysts are not paid to provide objective analysis of equities. If they were, then they would actually rate at least some companies negatively. To put it bluntly, if you purchase a stock because a Wall Street analyst rates it a “buy,” you ought not be investing in the stock market in the first place. ...

Poll: Muslims call U.S. ‘ruthless, arrogant’. Earlier in the day, this story mentioned that over 60% of those surveyed believed that Arabs did not commit the 9/11 attacks, but that detail has been excised from the article. Your guess is as good as mine as to why. If you want the full data set that was collected, it can be yours for the low, low price of $9,500. Combatant Letter 2002 is the official site for the Israeli reserve troops who refuse to serve beyond the 1967 borders of Israel (in other words, in the occupied territories). ...

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a site that’s getting a lot of detention, and deservedly so. I’m kind of ashamed that nobody has ever sent me a cease-and-desist letter of any kind. Maybe I should change the name of this site to “Coca-Cola Blog” or “Wal-Mart Daily”. Updated thanks to reader feedback. A reader sent along this link to a story about blood donations following the 9/11 attacks. Very little of the blood that was donated actually went to help the victims of the attack, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. The good news is that blood donations tripled and only 1 to 2 percent more than normal had to be destroyed, so it seems to have all been put to good use. ...

I’m a sucker for a good Bush gaffe. Here’s a gem from an article about a speech to Japan’s parliament: He said he was beginning his Asia trip in Japan “because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.” So the Olympics are finally over. I really enjoyed the Olympics, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I like the winter games better than the summer games, despite the fact that the only winter “sport” I’ve ever engaged in was sledding down a hill one time. ...

One of my former co-workers rescued a man from a burning pickup truck on I-95 last week. He’s too modest to acknowledge that he saved the guy’s life. I entered a bug in Bugzilla regarding the Orbitz pop-under: Bug 127555 - DoubleClick pop-under gets past advanced script prefs. Update: whoops, my bug was a dupe. See bug 126224. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a hypocrite brought low. John Fund, a WSJ opinion page venom-spewer who gained fame for his attacks on Bill Clinton has found himself in a bit of trouble. There’s a lot of unseemly backstory here, too, but I can’t find any reliable source that discusses it. (Update: the John Fund backstory can be found in this Washington Post item, which a reader submitted.) ...

Despite the fact that everybody is linking to Wal-Mart’s OS-free computers, all the links I’ve seen so far are missing an important point. These computers with no OS illustrate to consumers exactly how much Windows adds to the price of PCs. As the prices of PC components have gone down over the years, the price of Windows has gone up. You can buy the hardware for a pretty kick ass PC for less than $500 – purchasing the home edition of Windows XP adds a good 20-25% onto the cost. ...

Thoughts on Olympics TV Coverage I think that the coverage provided by NBC of the Winter Olympics has been as good as it was ever going to be, given NBC’s constraints, which are that NBC ponied up a boatload of money for US rights to cover the games, and that February is sweeps month, so NBC has an added incentive to milk the ratings cow for all its worth. (Never mind the stupidity of sweeps month in general – how can you set ad rates for the next few months based on a four week sample that includes two weeks of Olympics?) ...