Olle Wastberg's New York Times editorial lays out why he thinks former New York City mayor Rudi Giuliani would make an excellent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. It begins thus:
Today I will send a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee nominating the former mayor of New York City, Rudolph W. Giuliani, for the [...]
Via Slashdot comes a CNN article which states the South Korean MSN website (located at www.msn.co.kr) was compromised earlier this week, possibly allowing users' login information to be stolen. As with some many other Windows security problems, the culprit seems to have been an unpatched operating system:
The Korean site, unlike U.S. versions, was operated by [...]
One year ago today, I switched to WordPress from Movable Type. At the time, I was attracted by three things:
WordPress' GPL license seemed increasingly attractive as Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type (who currently owns LiveJournal) seemed to be constricting users' rights in order to increase revenue.
At the time of my switch, the version [...]
The Internet is all abuzz because of a CNet article that claims that Apple computers will stop using IBM's PowerPC processors in favor of standard Intel processors (the standard x86 architecture). The announcement is expected on Monday, at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Why is this important? By switching to x86-compatible processors, Apple opens up the [...]
After looking at a couple of WordPress plugins that implement Techorati tagging, I decided to go with Ben O'Neil's Technorati Tags plugin. I did not like some of the default settings, so I made some modifications, the most notable of which was adding a link to the Technorati Tags help page before the tags' listing. [...]
In his latest weekly column, Robert Cringely outlines a plan to make phishing, the practice of stealing personal information by sending fake emails, much less profitable. He suggests that people who notice phishing emails should go to the websites linked in the messages and enter false information, thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of the data [...]
I received an interesting, if almost nonsensical email message, claiming to be from SPAMIS, or the Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam (there is a website at spamis.cc, but it seems to be defunct; Google cache). The contents of the email consisted of various quotes from Mike Lyman, who the email describes as the "Microsoft [...]
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows changing the behavior of websites through the addition of "user scripts." User scripts are also supported in the latest version of Opera, and in Internet Explorer through Trixie and the not-yet-released Turnabout. The user scripts I have installed include Jesse Ruderman's AutoLink (which creates hyperlinks in useful places), [...]
After last Friday's confirmation of earlier rumors that Apple would switch its entire Mac lineup to Intel-based processors, many of the Internet's Apple pundits seemed unable to believe the news. Some of them (including Russell Beattie and John Gruber) suggested that Apple might move to Intel-based PowerPC processors. If this was the case, the CNet [...]
The New York Times write about three albums coming out today (Coldplay's X&Y, the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan, and the Black Eyed Peas' Monkey Business) and how they are symptomatic of the music industry's decadence:
The big record companies continue to insist that the only route to profitability is blockbuster sales of a few [...]
The news that a trojan horse attempted to trick users by telling them that Osama bin Laden had been captured is not surprising; malware have created false news events for several years now. However, an event like the capture of Osama would be important enough that it would be relatively easy to verify. A more [...]
While I generally consider myself to have eclectic musical tastes, the amount of classical music in my collection is very low. There is a bunch of Mozart, some Grieg, and a bit of Rimsky-Korsakov, but nothing to write home about.
This is one of the reasons I am excited about the BBC's Beethoven Experience (via Legal [...]
If you read my previous post about boycotting the RIAA, you may have been confused by the music formats that the clip of "Let's Push Things Forward" was available in. I am sure that you recognized MP3, but what the hell is OGG? Since I now understand I am horrible at explaining technical issues (I [...]
The EFF's Deep Links blog has a post on how some websites charge different prices to different customers. However, the post only look at the negative aspects of such a situation - when a website decides to charge you more because it knows you will pay it. What about websites who offer preferential prices to [...]
Although most of the world's attention seems to be focused elsewhere, the recent political uprest in Bolivia culminated in the resignation of the president, Carlos Mesa, two days ago. Some suggest that it may be part of a larger trend toward liberalization in South America.
"The bottom line is that Latin America is in open rebellion [...]
Chirol from Coming Anarchy writes about the so-called "Group of Four" (Germany, Japan, India, & Brazil) and their willingness to give up veto power for 15 years in order to increase support for their bids for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). At the end of his post, he suggests a number [...]
It seems increasingly likely that Bolivia will not collapse into chaos, a real possibility as recently as two days ago. Diez, the conservative President of the Senate, decided not to accept the presidency. After suggesting that the military could be used to suppress protest by indigenous Bolivians, most of the country considered him an unpalatable [...]
The London News Review takes a humorous look at Giancarlo Neri's sculpture "The Writer," a 22 foot chair and table set that has been constructed on Hampstead Heath in north London:
Neri has called his table and chair “a monument to the loneliness of writing”. But if this is what it is meant to be, then [...]
From the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money comes a series of posts about the German Moltke-class battlecruiser Goeben, which became part of the Turkish navy during the Great War. You could just read the Wikipedia entry, but Robert Farley's writing is far more engaging (the subheadings given below, however, are mine).
Part I - The Rise [...]
As I have previously mentioned, the Firefox extension Sage was my choice for reading RSS feeds. After reading Chris Gonyea's post on Feedlounge, a new web-based RSS feedreader (like Bloglines), I became intrigued about using an online aggregator. Since Feedlounge is still in private alpha testing and I was not really enthused about using Bloglines, [...]
Corey Burger's suggestion that the Xiph Foundation, makers of all things Ogg, use different extensions for Ogg video and audio files is a good one. On Windows, the operating system relies on the extension to determine the type of file, ignoring its contents completely.
If you are using Windows, and are looking for Ogg codecs, you [...]
Curzon at Coming Anarchy points to an Economist article on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I disagree with the article's assertion that stability or the lack thereof in the DRC will make or break Africa (it seems too close to the pre-war claims that a liberated Iraq would bring liberal democratic revolution to its [...]
Mildly concerned about the fact that there was no way to contact me other than posting a comment, I created a contact page, using Matt Mullenweg's page as inspiration. Unlike Matt, I refrained from adding my cell phone number; I get enough strange messages as it is.
Tomorrow the State of Virginia holds primary elections. As the title of this piece states, I do not plan on participating. There are multiple reasons for this:
First off, I was not even aware of the date of the primaries until last week. This is probably a result of neglecting to watch local television news and [...]
Not content to simply restrict their citizens' access to Internet topics they consider obscene or inflammatory, the Chinese government is now resorting to astroturfing to affect political discussions online. Astroturfing is the practice by using the relative anonymity of the Internet to create a positive image of a company, organization, person, or in this case, [...]
Subject: hello
From: Catalina Crain <richtrent@walla.com>
Even before I opened it, I could tell that this message was going to be spam. However, I expected the message it contained to be a generic spam message pimping out email addresses, prescription drugs, or OEM software like the vast majority of spam I receive. I have seen spam that [...]
In response to a query about whether RSS feeds would be coming to The Crimson's website sometime before the Second Coming of Christ, I was informed that the Crimson already has two RSS feeds of its News and Sports sections, located at http://www.thecrimson.com/rss/news.xml and http://www.thecrimson.com/rss/sports.xml. Their feeds do not have more metadata than the scraped [...]
I find it interesting that the week after Francophobic Republican congressmen suggest that we should leave Iraq and polls show that public support for keeping troops there is at its lowest level ever, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is suggesting that we send more troops.
Maybe it is too late, but before we give up [...]
This International Herald Tribune article lambasts Musharraf and the Pakistani government, claiming that Pakistani liberals face a "mullah-military alliance" intent on restricting civil liberties and freedom of expression:
Democracy, human rights and meaningful civil liberties are anathema to a hypermilitarized state. Pakistan's voters consistently vote overwhelmingly for moderate, secular-oriented parties and reject religious extremists, so the [...]
Tagged Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, civil liberties, government, human rights, International, intervention, Mukhtar Mai, Musharraf, Pakistan, Politics, reform, sovereignty, Vaclav Havel
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I liked this quote from a Register article about how computer manufacturer Dell would have no problems shipping the x86 version of OS X:
It does seem to be the case that Mac OS X is winning grudging respect from the PC world, primarily because of its relative freedom from malware. That's not going to change [...]
Since the "liberations" of Iraq and Afghanistan, it has become popular in Republican circles to claim that Bush is the heir to Woodrow Wilson, and the interventionist, pro-democracy type of foreign policy that Wilson and his Fourteen Points have come to represent. I previously suggested that this approach was merely an opportunist attempt to increase [...]
Nurdi Nukhazhiyev, a member of the Chechen government led by Alu Alkhanov, claims that human rights violations were committed by Russian soldiers during the two conflicts in the region:
Many of the accusations levelled against the Russian authorities by human rights groups - namely the deliberate targeting of civilians by the Russian military - have angered [...]
I feel having no unread items a great accomplishment, especially considering that a number of days ago, there were about 4500 items. Almost 900 of them were unread. That means in about 48 hours, I have read, skimmed, or otherwise parsed almost 4000 different news articles.
Using Gregarius is a lot different than using Sage. Gregarius [...]
I was reading earlier in the week about PledgeBank, a website where you can create pledges to do something, but are only required to complete your task if a certain number of other people also make that promise. As the site claims, you can "Tell the world 'I'll do it, but only if you'll help [...]
Over at Acts of Volition, Steven Garrity continues his writing about file formats, tackling office suite formats like those used by Microsoft Word and why they are important. As you might recall, I wrote about the first post in the series, which focused on music file formats like OGG and MP3. Again, I am not [...]
I have always liked Senator Biden, even if the last time I mentioned him here was to make fun of him (the Talking Points Memo interview I link to in that post is still worth reading in its entirety, though). I think it is his willingness to give it to you straight:
"My intention is to [...]
Given what we already know about the character of Reverend Sun Myung Moon (chiefly, that he is the head of a strange cult-like church which believes the only way to world peace is to establish a global theocracy with himself at the head) and the closeness of his ties to our national government (do you [...]
One of the more interesting items in yesterday's music news was the appearance of a full-page advertisement in the Chicago Tribune by Billy Corgan, lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins, one of the most popular bands of the 1990s. In the advertisement, he makes reference to his wish to "revive the Smashing Pumpkins." Several online [...]
In April, the Free Culture movement celebrated its one year anniversary. What is Free Culture, you ask? It is a college-based movement which wants to ensure that humanity's traditional values of innovation and creativity are not stifled. From their manifesto:
The freedom to build upon the past is necessary for creativity and innovation to thrive. We [...]
This letter to the International Herald Tribune by an official from the "Embassy of the Union of Myanmar" really annoyed me with its criticism of a Human Rights Watch report on the persecution of ethnic minorities by the military, especially with its suggestion that "The International Herald Tribune needs to be sensitive to the real [...]
A cool thing about WordPress is that each category (you can see a list of them on the main page, in the sidebar at the right) has its own RSS feed, accessible by adding "/rss/" to its URL (For RSS 2.0 feeds, add "/rss2/". For Atom feeds, add "/atom/".). So if you were only interested [...]
While much of the internet is still talking about the Los Angeles Times' aborted "Wikitorial" experiment, nobody seems to have noticed that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (which I scrape for RSS feeds, since the official feeds are only accessible in Hebrew) recently added a "Talkback" feature to their website, following the lead of other Israeli [...]
I like Margaret Cho as much as the next person, but her reasoning behind the naming of her new puppy seem a bit over the top:
Gudrun is named after the infamous Gudrun Ensslin who was the female leader of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, an art terrorist group from the 70s. Terrorism was different then. It had [...]
I think it says something about the independence of Hong Kong (and the prospective independence of a Taiwan that accepted PRC sovereignty) that Donald Tsang, the new executive, celebrated his inauguration in Beijing, not the city he will be administering. On the other hand, there is a distinct possibility that Tsang, a former official in [...]
About a month ago, I wrote about the ongoing problems in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was disturbed by the suggestion that international aid should go to the Congolese army and the various militias that are causing the region's instability, especially after finding a Human Rights Watch report that [...]
I do not like dogs. When I was little, this was because I was afraid of being bitten. The thought of sharp canine teeth plunging through my delicate skin still makes me feel uncomfortable. This translates into increased jumpiness when I am around them, as I attempt to mentally prepare for an attack. While I [...]
Fernando Cassia of The Inquirer took a look at AOL's new AIM Email service and generally liked what he saw. With 2 GB of space (the same amount as GMail, approximately), a nice DHTML application (like GMail), and IMAP access (which allows you to use external programs like Mozilla Thunderbird to access the mail server [...]
Darfur
walking on Edgerstoune Road with my father
surfing a website where I was voting for the best commercials of the past year; I had not seen most of the commercials, but the ones I remembered had all appeared in earlier dreams
post-apocalyptic Ohio, complete with mutant prairie dogs
Via TalkLeft comes a New York Times article I overlooked that explores why our troops in Iraq do not have the armored vehicles necessary to properly protect them from IEDs. Part of the problem is that the chassis design of the Humvee allows it to absorb much of the force from explosions that occur underneath [...]
From Ben Tesch's del.icio.us feed comes a Flash application called "Iraqi War Fatalities." It shows deaths of Coalition personnel chronologically, marking them on a map of Iraq and Kuwait with small black dots and "tic" sounds. During times when the insurgency has been particularly troublesome (like the summer months), the ticking increases in volume. While [...]
My IBM Thinkpad T43 came with the standard 6-cell battery and an advertised battery life of 4.9 hours. Under normal conditions, I get about three hours. This is far better than the hour and 45 minutes that my Inspiron 9100 would receive, the fact that my actual battery life is about half of the advertised [...]
In an interview with the Onion AV Club, Billy Corgan proves that my analysis of his full-page Chicago Tribune advertisment was correct:
[The Onion]: It sounds like you could see yourself going back with the Pumpkins.
[Billy Corgan]: No, I think the relationships with James and D'arcy are pretty poor. I haven't spoken to D'arcy in over [...]