John Ukec Lueth Ukec, the Sudanese ambassador to Washington, has threatened to take away the United States’ access to Coca-Cola in response to sanctions against Khartoum. Nevermind that you’re complicit in the genocide in Darfour, and apparently an idiot too. And nevermind that Sudan’s supplies of gum arabic can’t be as critical to the soft-drink industry as you claim, since your own government predicts the sanctions will have little effect on your economy. Mr. Ukec, if this is what it takes to get your government to cease its mass murder campaign, I’ll stop drinking Coca-Cola.
Author Archives: admin
Shame on you
The Bush administration’s new Iraq strategy is to tell the American press how hard our troops are working to train Iraqis and how everything is set for the Iraqi government to take over.
Nevermind that there’s absolutely no hard evidence being offered to demonstrate that things actually are getting better. No evidence of a drop in casualties or violence. No evidence of improvements in security, no increases in successfully trained Iraqi police, no economic development, no increases in foreign investment. And there is no functioning Iraqi parliament that’s actually capable of passing laws and making policy decisions.
This is the same old Bush administration strategy; repeat anything enough and people will start to believe it. What’s coming next is scarier.
Six months or a year down the line, when the Iraqi government is still failing to provide security, services, or make policy decisions, the Bush administration is going to throw up its hands and say “Too bad, we tried, but those pesky Iraqis just couldn’t pull it together.” And then they’ll pull out the troops. If you believe what the administration has been saying, it will sound like the screaming failure of this occupation wasn’t their fault. Can you say “cut-and-run,” Mr. Bush? They don’t care about trying to fix the mess they’ve made, or taking responsibility for an ill-concieved invasion; no, they care about saving face and getting out. And the Iraqi people whose lives are actually affected by the fiasco? They aren’t the voters who will elect the next president, so the adminstration doesn’t care.
Probably this will happen sometime before next November, clearing the way for Romney, Giuliani, Gingrich, or McCain to try wash the stain of the war off of the Republican party. What’s coming next, though, is the scariest.
Enough Democrats have just rolled over to pass a war funding bill without a deadline. That’s right, some of the same Democrats who were elected en masse in an election that was a referendum on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy are now following the policy of that same administration. An administration with an approval rating of less than 30%. Shame on you for defecting. And shame on the Democratic leadership for not preventing these defections. Shame, shame, shame.
Optimus keyboard released
Somebody promised to buy me one of these if they were ever actually produced. At $1,500, I don’t think my gift is coming anytime soon. This keyboard seems now like one of those ideas that is clever but doesn’t go far enough. If you’re going to put led screens on the keys, why have individual keys at all? Why not have just one big touch screen, or one big LED array which detects finger motion? Then you could have any key layout, or scale the entire thing for the size of your hands and the width of your shoulders, or rearrange the keys into a grid or offset individual columns for the different spans of your different fingers, or switch to a one-handed layout, or switch to a chording style keyboard, or anything else. Why stick to the traditional physical key layout when you are going to all the trouble of making the keys themselves totally configurable?
Update 2008-01-09: Ars Technica reviews the Optimus.
Why god Xerox PARC invented laptops
This afternoon, on the corner near my house, I noticed a homeless looking guy with a hand cart covered in black plastic bags holed up in the bus shelter in front of the corner coffee shop. Something didn’t look right, and on second glance I saw a cord hanging down from the bus shelter connected to his cart. At first I wondered if he had one of those intravenous bags on wheels. But it turned out he was getting online.
That’s right. Five minutes later, on my way back from the store, I took a closer look. He had plugged in to the light fixture inside the bus shelter with an extension cord, and he had a terribly beat-up flat screen hanging off of his cart. A keyboard lay on his lap as he sat cross legged on the concrete inside the bus shelter. Another keyboard stuck out of his cart. I can only assume he picked that spot because of the free wireless from the cafe behind him.
He also had all the stereotypical hallmarks of a homeless person — beat up clothes, dirty hands, scruffy beard, disheveled hair, tanned skin, and a cart wrapped in ripped black trash-bags. I couldn’t see what was on the screen — it was too bright out. I guess everybody needs their MySpace fix.
Underlapped, Iconoclasted, Aliased
Wacky. My Underlapped gets it’s own category. I’d be even more excited if Fontage knew about anti-aliasing, but one cannot be picky while ego-surfing.
Announcing PottyMouth
I’ve just released PottyMouth, a tool for transforming completely unstructured and untrusted text to valid, nice-looking, safe HTML. Check it out.
Spiro
Spiro 0.01 is finally out! Spend ten minutes learning how to edit Raph Levien‘s Cornu spiral curves and you’ll see that they have the potential to complement or even displace Bézier curves in vector and font design programs.
Spiro will be the native algorithm for Fontly.
BitTorrent filesystem
Wow. There’s a FUSE plugin to mount a BitTorrent swarm as filesystem. I would be speechless, but I’m waiting for the FUSE plugin to mount my neighborhood as a file system so I can just grep for my car (by license plate or VIN, of course) rather than walking around trying to find it before the street sweepers ticket it.
Get out of the way
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the W3C is stuck in 2001. Shape up. Quick. We don’t need to wait another five years for a grand unified theory of document presentation and mark-up. We need incremental improvements, and we needed them six years ago. If you don’t get with the program quickly, the industry is going to move on (CSS 2.2) without you (HTML 5).
It’s not you, babe. It’s not me either. It’s the website.
This is the story of a girl, a boy, and the website that came between them.
Many years ago now, I signed up for every online dating website I could find. I’ll spare you the list of excuses and protestations that I am actually capable of meeting girls in real life; all that matters is that I like to check out every website I can — because it’s my job, and because it’s interesting.
I once paid a little bit for what was, at the time, the best of the sites. To protect the icompeten– I mean, the innocent, I’ll just call this site www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com.
There’s a kind of paradox of profit in the online dating industry. To be a successfull company, you have to actually successfully connect people, which means they are no longer customers. Your customers are paying you — even if your site’s entirely ad-driven — to make them non-customers as quickly as possible. If there’s a clever way around this, I don’t know what it is.
Over the years, www.meetsomeonenicetosettledownwith.com got worse and worse. Although I initially paid for “credits” which could be used to send messages at any time, they converted to an exorbitant monthly fee system, and instituted a rigid caste system much like India had for centuries, with “Gold” (Desperate and loaded), “Silver” (Desperate or loaded, but not both), and “Standard” (Broke, sexually confused, deceased, or untouchable).