Category: observations

it shouldn’t come to this

CNN.com:

Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke today began his statements to the 9/11 commission with an apology to the loved ones of those killed in the attacks. “Your government failed you,” he said, “and I failed you.”

What we should be able to expect from an honorable public servant, even if it’s uncalled for . . . . .

It will be interesting to see how this gets spun: will the ideologues be brazen enough to say that Clarke is to blame? The guy they say was “out of the loop,” the one they claim was demoted and never had a plan to deal with Al Qaeda?

Contrast that with this: the exercise of simple good manners and professionalism in his resignation letter somehow undermines his criticism of the administration’s handling of the threat . . .

CNN.com – Clarke wrote warm letter to Bush in 2003 – Mar 24, 2004:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday that the warm tone of the letter “runs counter to what he is now asserting.”

“At this time period, when he was leaving, there was no mention of the grave concerns he claims to have had about the direction of the war on terrorism, or what we were doing to confront the threat posed by Iraq,” McClellan said.

I realize this is a spokesman talking — a professional prevaricator — but what planet are these people from?

Does anyone like TypeKey?

TeledyN: MT To Reinvent Drupal Authentication:

To mimick the proposed TypeKey selective-ban policies, any network member site would apply a JayAllen ban-pattern list to the full login name@server, but they might also now ban the specific authenticating server — if some server starts to pollute our network with bad IDs, like a lame nameserver, it gets itself excluded from the gene pool (but it could still be considered reliable and just in some other network); we may even improve on the JayAllen content-based filter by adding a facility to ban by point of entry into the network.

Gary reviews the various arguments for and against the new TypeKey authentication {proposal|meme}, and perhaps unintentionally makes a counter-proposal.

The whole thing is quite tiresome (don’t any of us have anything more important to talk/think about?), but one of the reasons webloggers even take up the filthy habit is a sense of “I know better” . . .

What seems to stick in everyone’s throat about this is the lack of transparency and openness about it: “just trust us, we know best” doesn’t get you far with this crowd.

I guess the only thing to do is wait for MT 3.0 to be released so the new APIs can be leveraged for something people will hate less.

this isn’t how monopolies think

Shot across Microsoft’s bow:

Cusumano said Microsoft should focus more on improving the Windows operating system itself than on adding extra programs. If Microsoft could fix Windows’ security problems and make it “the best in class — no questions asked,” the company would have people lining up to buy the operating system and upgrade to the improved version, he said.

Considering that Microsoft makes most of its money on Windows and loses money in many other areas, such a strategy makes even more sense, Cusumano said.

But do the risks of losing share loom large enough to make the investment? This is a case of the best being the enemy of the good: the cost of fixing it all, even if they can, may outweigh any new revenue, either from upgrades, new purchases, or switchers.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 21, 2004 – March 27, 2004 Archives:

[ . . . ] the pattern suggests two possible theories.

The first is that President Bush has the odd misfortune of repeatedly hiring Democratic party stooges for key counter-terrorism assignments who stab him in the back as soon as they leave his employ.

The second is that anyone the president hires in a key counter-terrorism role who is not either a hidebound ideologue or a Bush loyalist gets so disgusted with the mismanagement and/or dishonesty that they eventually quit and then devote themselves to driving the president from office.

Which sounds more likely?

You’d think someone with the leadership and management background one expects of the highest officeholder in the land would be immune to either possibility . . . .

and the beat goes on

Harpers.org: Weekly Review:

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 . . . .

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”

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?