Month: October 2002

Ascii-me!

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Royce sent this to me.

Too.

Freaking.

Cool.

Who’s gonna swerve first?

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I don’t have time to comment much right now, but I sure hope that Douglas Rushikoff is right.

It’s not ‘conspiracy theory,’ as some of my readers have accused me, to suggest that Bush may not actually want to spend the lives of Americans to invade Iraq. It is quite possible — no matter how evil or misguided you believe Bush to be — that he would rather not waste a few hundred or thousand American lives, or a few hundred thousand Iraqi lives, on pipelines and additional security against nuclear/chemical/germ threat. Bush would rather do it the easy way than the hard way. He’d stand a better chance of being re-elected if he could cow Iraq into true submission without a full-scale war.

In order to do this, though, he needs to convince Saddam Hussein that he’s coming in, and that he’s coming in no matter what Chirac, Putin, or any other more “reasonable” statesman advises. He needs to appear like a chicken without a head — a driver without a wheel — careeing inexorably towards invasion. He needs Saddam to believe that America doesn’t have the mechanisms to flinch.

Microsoft switchers – oops!

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So Apple‘s had their ‘Switch’ campaign going on for a while now, touting stories from ex-PC users who have switched to Macintosh computers. Apparently the campaign is doing fairly well — at least well enough for Microsoft to start a similar campaign of its own.

Unfortunately, since they (apparently) couldn’t find any customers that had actually made the switch from the Mac to Windows, and were happy about it, and willing to talk about it — they had to combine fictional accounts a hired freelance writer’s story with stock photography, as pointed out on /. earlier today.

Apparently, this isn’t a rare practice, either. I especially like the page where the people in the photograph are using a Mac 6100.

Methinks Microsoft’s marketing folks need to work on their game a bit.

Thanks to Scripting News for this one.

Small update to RSS feed

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Lately I’ve been reading a ton of sites daily (65 at current count) via NetNewsWire Lite. While this allows me to skim through a huge amount of information in a short time, one of the disadvantages is that none of the RSS feeds that the sites provide give any information on comments to a given post (this isn’t a limitation of NetNewsWire at all, it’s part of how the RSS feed is written). Since I’ve often found some really interesting stuff in the discussion threads after a post, this is a bit of a downside.

So, while I doubt that very many people subscribe to my RSS feed, I figured I’d at least make my feed give me the information I want, and changed my feed template slightly. Where the code used to say…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]></content:encoded>

…I’ve altered it to say this…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]><MTEntryIfAllowComments> <![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryCommentCount$> Comments)]]></MTEntryIfAllowComments><MTEntryIfAllowPings><![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$> TrackBack Pings)]]></MTEntryIfAllowPings></content:encoded>

…so that in my RSS feed, there’s a short display line that tells whether I’ve gotten any comments or TrackBack pings for an entry.

Maybe if I’m really lucky, someone a little higher up in the blogosphere heirarchy will stumble across this and the idea will start to spread.

Trackback changes and Category links

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Well, for the moment, I’ve had to give up on my goal of staying pop-up free. Grrr. I thought I had it for a while, but as it turns out, TrackBack pings won’t automatically rebuild the page that they reference, so they weren’t showing up at all unless I forced the page to regenerate. So, until I find another way of managing it (apparently displaying TrackBack pings inline can be done using MySQL, but I’ve yet to dive into that), I’ve gone back to the default pop-up method of displaying TrackBack pings. Thanks to Phil for the suggestion he e-mailed me — while it didn’t work, it was a good idea (and, incidentally, congrats also on getting that CSS bug fixed…ain’t debugging fun?!?).

The second change tonight is the addition of Category-based navigation links for the individual entry pages. On the page for each entry, just below the previous entry/next entry links, there are now links that lead to the previous entry and next entry in whichever category the entry belongs to. I’d wanted to do this for a while, but just finally found the code to get it working — much thanks to ScriptyGoddess and Pixels in Time for the assistance with the code in setting this up!

Kinda freaky – voices from the past

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Okies, this was kind of weird. As usual in the evenings, I’m sitting here at my desk, working on my ‘puter and letting iTunes grab songs at random. The current track is ‘America No More’, by the KLF, off of the single for ‘America: What Time Is Love?‘.

The song is a combination of war sound effects (planes, helicopers, missiles, explosions, and the like), a bagpipe tune, and samples from various broadcasts from around the time the song was written, in (I believe) 1991.

All of a sudden, I hear George Bush Sr.’s voice coming out of my speakers…

…the legitimate government of Kuwait will be restored to its rightful place, and Kuwait will once again be free. Iraq will eventually comply with all relevant United Nations resolutions, and then, when peace is restored, it is our hope that Iraq will live as a peaceful and cooperative member of the family of nations, thus enhancing the security and stability of the Gulf.

I guess it sounded good at the time, huh?

Wired goes CSS

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I’ve occasionally babbled here about my continuing efforts to create a modern, standards-compliant site, using CSS, ensuring that my site validates, and most recently, adopting current accessibility standards. In doing so, I’ve joined an ever-growing group of sites across the ‘net working to follow current web standards.

As is typical for movements like this, it’s the ‘little people’ that start the ball rolling (in this case, primarily weblogs and personal sites), then the ‘big boys’ follow. Today, one of the first major, heavy-traffic sites has unveiled their new standards-compliant design — Wired. They detail their decisions to move to the new format in their article “A site for your eyes“, and web guru Jeffrey Zeldman gives his thoughts (and praise) on his site today. Congrats Wired!

iMac caught with PC in illicit love nest

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iMac and PC caught in poolside trystIn a surprise development that has rocked the computing world today, paparazzi have made public a photograph of Apple‘s popular iMac computer cavorting poolside with what appears to be a Microsoft Windows-based PC. The photograph in question shows the two models of computer — who have been publicly embroiled in bitter enmity for nearly two decades — lounging beside a swimming pool and playing chess, both of them entirely in the buff. The iMac’s towel is draped coyly over the back of its lounger, while the PC is sitting on its towel.

Spokespersons for the two computers have angrily denied any implications of a hidden relationship between the long-feuding enemies. “Look, it’s amazing what can be done with Photoshop these days,” fumed a Microsoft spokesman, speaking under condition of anonymity. “Now, why don’t you just go bother Britney Spears or something?”

What Bush wants us to forget

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Things that Bush wants us to forget:

  • Forget for a moment that we still can’t prove Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons.
  • Forget that the latest Bush speech was just a re-hash of all the “ifs” and “mays” and “coulds” in Tony Blair’s flimsy 16 pages of allegations in his historically dishonest “dossier”.
  • Forget that if Osama bin Laden ever acquired a nuclear weapon, he’d probably use it first on Saddam.
  • Forget the 14 Palestinians, including the 12-year-old child, killed by Israel a few hours before Mr Bush spoke…
  • …forget that when his aircraft killed nine Palestinian children in July, along with one militant, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon — a “man of peace” in Mr Bush’s words — described the slaughter as “a great success”.
  • Forget that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It’s essential to forget this for three reasons.
    • Firstly, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians — which is one of the reasons we are now supposed to go to war with him.
    • Secondly, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the US embassy — in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad.
    • Thirdly, because the envoy was — wait for it — Donald Rumsfeld.
  • We must forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds — when he “used gas against his own people” in the words of Messrs Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al — President Bush senior provided him with $500m in US government subsidies to buy American farm products.
  • We must forget that in the following year, after Saddam’s genocide was complete, President Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1bn, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious “dual-use” material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons.
  • Forget how the Americans promised Pakistan and Afghanistan a new era of hope after the defeat of the Soviet army in 1980 — and did nothing.
  • Forget how President Bush senior urged the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam in 1991 and — when they obeyed — did nothing.
  • Forget how America promised a new era of hope to Somalia in 1993 and then, after “Black Hawk Down”, abandoned the country.
  • Forget how President Bush junior promised to “stand by” Afghanistan before he began his bombings last year — and has left it now an economic shambles of drug barons, warlords, anarchy and fear.
  • We must forget, as we listen to the need to reinsert arms inspectors, that the CIA covertly used UN weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq.
  • And of course, we must forget about oil…in all of Bush’s 30 minutes of anti-Iraq war talk yesterday — pleasantly leavened with just two minutes of how “I hope this will not require military action” — there wasn’t a single reference to the fact that Iraq may hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stand to gain billions of dollars in the event of a US invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war.

We must ignore all this before we go to war. We must forget.

— Robert Fisk: What the US President wants us to forget

A proposal

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If/when we catch the Maryland sniper, howabout we just airlift him into Iraq and set him loose on Saddam?

No, this isn’t entirely serious. Just a brain fart.

Talk about killing two birds with one stone, though. Remove Saddam from power (okay, via assassination, which the U.S. really isn’t supposed to condone, even though Ari Fleischer doesn’t seem to know that), and since the sniper isn’t likely to make it out of Iraq alive after offing Saddam, we save the trouble of all the trials, media frenzy, and eventual death sentence over here. Hmmm….

Again — this is not a serious suggestion. Just some random rambling.