The Congressional Budget Office published calculations showing that the federal budget deficit is largely a result of President Bush’s tax cuts and spending increases; the agency estimated that only 6 percent of the deficit was the result of economic weakness. The Pentagon was withholding a $300 million payment for Halliburton until auditors make sure that the government was not overcharged. The Bush Administration’s Medicare cover-up continued to unravel . . . .
Month: March 2004
the map of fantasy literature
The New York Review of Books: Dust & Daemons
This is an enjoyable, scholarly but not opaque survey of fantasy literature, in the guise of a review of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (a trilogy with, so far, four books).
I just finished the first of them. I’m not sure what to expect from the other two (ordered from my local library). Surely there was some way to make the adults realistically unlikable while allowing them some actual dimension: the two adults who feature more prominently are so simplistically drawn, I kept waiting for some more detail, something about them. Even after the big secret about them was sprung, they remained unknowable. And their whole final scene together just never came together for me at all.
Continue reading “the map of fantasy literature”
mistakes were made
How we got here.
an easy one for the lazy web
For some reason (dimness, I suspect) I can’t map the copious documentation about mod_rewrite onto my trivial problem.
I fat-fingered my archive format when I switched from numbered to dated archives: the URIs all have a _ before the .html. Not content to leave well enough alone, or perhaps that was causing a problem when the archives were written, I changed the config to remove the offending underscore.
In the meantime, Google and sundry other indexers had taken note of the old format, so switching meant breaking some URIs.
It seemed to me that something like this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)_\.html$ $1.html [R]
should work. But no such luck.
Can anyone show me the error of my ways?
The English disease
This malady, otherwise known as bronchitis, currently has me in its thrall. Rather painful, especially when it’s time to sleep. I doubt most people even know you can get cough suppressant syrups with codeine (it really helps) . . . . for my part, I didn’t know this condition was part of the national identity. What’s bred in the bone will come out of the flesh . . .
your tax dollars at work
help make sure the Department of Homeland Security has its best face on . . . .
The Entertainment Liaison Office supports the Office of Public Affairs by influencing how the Department of Homeland Security is portrayed in mass entertainment media. It helps to ensure accurate portrayal of the department’s mission, policies, and activities, while proactively working to help the American public better identify DHS functions.
The salary range for this position is:
* GS-14: $89,239 – $116,013 per annum
* GS-15: $104,971- $136,466 per annum.
via Boing Boing.
Can’t say the administration isn’t creating jobs . . .
finally, some hope for MovableType 3
With regards to scalability: we’ve now implemented one of the major scalability improvements in TypePad into Movable Type–speeding up the archive list generation by using the MySQL or PostgreSQL processing engine rather than MT.
That’s good news, and I’m glad to see that the heavy lifting has been offloaded to MySQL and PostgreSQL.
There still seems to be some skepticism about TypeKey and what it does/who it benefits (weblog owners or SixApart and it’s constellation of plugin authors).
Continue reading “finally, some hope for MovableType 3”
why the Sept 11 commission may be toothless
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 14, 2004 – March 20, 2004 Archives
Joshua Marshall connects the dots: one of the key people in the Bush fils administration sat in on and ignored the repeated warnings about non-state terrorism and is now in a position to make sure we never find out who knew about the risks and when they knew them.
Apparently, this fellow — Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush fils transition team and part of Bush pére’s staff — is Executive Director of the 9/11 commission. Does it seem reasonable to expect that someone who ignored the warnings that 9/11 was possible, perhaps even probable, will be willing to deliver the facts about it?
dealing with success
Burningbird: TypeKey: The Patriot Act of Weblogging
Following the hype about MovableType 3.0 and SixApart’s new TypeKey system, I’m not sure my feelings are any warmer than Shelley’s.
A centralized database to manage part of a decentralized success seems like a bad idea. As noted, there are plenty of times when the centralized servers (hello, weblogs.com and technorati) fail under load, causing problems for their end-user sites.
I agree that some kind of authentication makes sense, but why not something like what Mailman or other mailing lists require? The steps:
* compose your comment/feedback
* enter an email
* await the authorization email from the MT instance
* reply to it, and your comment is posted *and* the weblog operator has something like contact information for you. You could still be a spammer, but this is all about raising the bar/making it more difficult. No one thinks spam is preventable.
And I hadn’t thought of some of the possibilities: if I ban commenter Adolf from my site and his pals Benito and Christof approve him to comment on theirs, where are the permissions invoked?
I hope they have spent as much time and effort on addressing the performance issues as they have on this idea . . .
To be fair, Mena Trott’s comments in the thread make it clear that there’s more work to be done on this, but this is an issue webloggers feel strongly about: they need to get it right.
piracy as a sales tool
Wired News: Record Stores: We’re Fine, Thanks:
High prices, rather than file sharing, are what usually stop a kid from buying a CD, Wiley said.
Typically, the music industry wants stores to sell CDs for $18 when they should be going for $15, he said. That $3 can make the difference in terms of whether or not a CD is going to sell.
“The file sharing, the Internet — just makes them music junkies,” Wiley said.
Paul Epstein, owner of Twist & Shout, a store in Denver, agreed that piracy has helped his bottom line. He said it’s like radio, another form of promotion that spurs sales.
“File sharing is a danger, but it really turns a lot of kids on to music,” he said.
I hinted at this a while back: selling commodity music artifacts won’t keep music stores open. I think even $15 is too much, especially since we know how little of it is needed to cover the manufacturing costs.
People will go to stores staffed by knowledgeable people who can help them make purchases or explore new sounds. Try getting that kind of help at Wal-Mart . . . .