Month: February 2004

what’s it worth to work closer to home?

Driving hard
[ . . . ] most travel should be regarded as being in the same economic category as working and if, as the stats linked above imply, Americans spend about twice as much time travelling as Australians, then reducing travel times to the Australian level would be equivalent to a productivity improvement of between 12 and 15 per cent. As it happens, combined with the relatively small difference in hours of paid work, adjusting for hours of work and travel would just about eliminate the gap between Australian and US GDP per capita (about 20 per cent on standard PPP estimates).

An interesting notion, as is the earlier post it references.

By not walking to our shopping (I do this for all but the large weekly run) or school or workplaces, we perpetuate the myth of unsafe streets, since empty public spaces are seen as dangerous or risky. If my kids attended my local school, instead of one a few miles away, we would walk there. In fact, we briefly considered moving to make that a possibility . . .

a great essay on what works . . . . and why

Nicest of the Damned: Running a business on OS X and Linux:

I’m not saying that Macs and Linux boxes are no work, but the work, it seems to me, is focused on the solution at hand, rather than the problem of the moment. It looks like I’m continuing to marginalize the Windows boxes — our CEO wants an iMac when we move into our new space next week.

Frank has written up his experience of the past few years in different environments on building and supporting information technology solutions that work, day in and day out.

Repeatedly, he finds that Windows is the weak link and the less he relies on it, the more reliable the whole system becomes.

There’s also some good stuff about loosely-typed, flexible scripting languages versus more tightly constrained development tools: short answer, Python et al rock, proprietary toolkits don’t. Our time at CNN.com coincided (we were cube neighbors for a while) and where our day to day responsibilities differed, our experiences seem to have been much the same. I supported some Windows-based services that were uniformly unreliable and flaky, and in at least one case, the CTO of one outfit decided to rewrite their whole app from scratch, based on it’s performance in our environment.

Worth reading: I think the idea deserves a more detailed exploration.

[Posted with ecto]

what browser war?

Mirror on the wall

This is exactly the reason why Mozilla appears to be steaming up recently: a couple of years the move was made to radically redesign its renderer to keep an eye open on the emerging W3 standards (CSS was still under discussion). The same happened with the Opera and Konqueror engine. Now, open up the Explorer’s “About Box”: Look for the Mosaic hint. See? Since day and night Explorer has been built around Mosaic. Remember Spyglass? If you’re using Explorer, you’re using ‘second-hand’ technology. Where do you start fixing ‘second-hand’ bugs?

I start to wonder if this is the reason why Microsoft is so reluctant of updating their browser: it isn’t possible to support the new standards without redesigning the internal renderer of Explorer. So while Microsoft seems to have won the “browser war”, looking from a developer’s point of view it looks like Mozilla and Konqueror, Safari and Opera are actually the real front runners, practically stealing the show.

It was a similar revelation to me that the two main flavors of IE (forgetting the shortlived Solaris version) used two different and incompatible rendering engines. I thought the Mosaic/Spyglass code was just to bootstrap things and that by version 3 or so, it was gone.

More innovation, it appears.

[Related link]

It’s good to know your role

Harpers.org:

[ . . . ] Powerful Republicans were said to be urging President Bush to get rid of Dick Cheney, who continued to insist, contrary to all evidence, that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein was allied with Al Qaeda. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” Cheney asked an interviewer. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.”[ . . . ]

[Posted with ecto]

wanna win a prize?

Crooked Timber: Punk the National Review :

“If you possess an email address and an eye-opening story, you’ve passed the rigorous fact-checking that has made National Review and the Penthouse Forum world-famous.

In honor of this editorial decision, I would like to propose my first contest ever:

Punk the National Review“

If you can concoct an outrageous tale about being ill-used — in any way, shape, or form — by one of the Democratic contenders, National Review wants to hear from you. Information about rules and prizes at the above-cited URL.

This should be fun.

[Posted with ecto]

domestic terrorism?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: February 01, 2004 – February 07, 2004 Archives

Why didn’t this get reported more widely? And is it related to what happened yesterday on the Hill?

From a January 9th report from CBS and the AP …

The FBI on Thursday offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to an arrest of anyone responsible for leaving a package containing the deadly poison ricin at a post office in October.

A letter inside the package said the author could make much more ricin and will “start dumping” large quantities of the poison if new federal trucking rules went in effect, according to information released by the FBI and other federal agencies Thursday.

The letter, which was found at a post office in South Carolina, was signed “fallen angel” and the sender identified himself as “a fleet owner of a tanker company.”

looking at life through broken windows

A friend writes: “this page looks like crap” (I’m paraphrasing here) and sent me a screen shot to prove his point. Hmmm, works for me. So I took a look at it in the Leading Brand, in both browsers I can expect to see visits from. The left image is from Mozilla 1.6, the other IE 6.0.2800.xpsp2.030422-1633.

mozilla
ie
Not that my stuff is a work of art, but the most beautiful sight you can imagine won’t be improved by looking at it through a broken window. Replacing it seems like the right thing to do.

[Posted with ecto]
Continue reading “looking at life through broken windows”

more on log cleaning/referer spam

Looking through the logs, I see that more refer spam is showing up. Of course, it all fits a pattern and is easy to drop out of the logs.

referer

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^www(.*)" dontlog
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^XXXX:\.(.*)" dontlog

If I was more clever, I would block them altogether, but one step at a time.

[Posted with ecto]

ecto 1.0.1 released

1.0 just came out a day or two ago . . . .

So now to decide if I can dig $17.95 out of my butter and egg money (made all the more difficult by the fact I don’t keep cows or chickens) to buy this.

It definitely makes publishing easier. Whether that’s good or not, I can’t say.