TIME Magazine: Gulf War II looks at how we got to GWII (not GWB). It starts in March 2002.
F___ Saddam. We’re taking him out
Archive for March, 2003
phpMySubscriptions is almost there in terms of removing my need for the Radio News Aggregator. Basically it parses your subscriptions.opml file on the fly and displays news. One part of what I want, just the (difficult) back end admin and database functionality to add…
Urban Legends Reference Pages at Snopes.com are the granddaddy of all urban legends pages. Obviously the time travelling stockbroker who died at work without anyone noticing for five days prompted me to put this up.
Fisk on the first Iraqi suicide bomber. He makes a good point about the anger that the US has unleashed by this invasion. However, he reads as if the US should have expected 9/11 and certainly shouldn’t be angry about it. To use a Shrub-ism, misunderestimating how angry the US still is about 9/11 would be foolish.
US Navy’s ‘Flipper’ goes AWOL and returns. So that’s OK then.
The New Yorker: Offense and defense is a must-read on the war. In the build up to the invasion, Rumsfeld repeatedly over-ruled traditional troop deployment methodology. This has led to the position they are now in: the Iraqis are saying “so what” to shock and awe and the US troops are woefully over-stretched, with too little equipment to support them properly.
Joel on Software - Finding an Office in New York City is a must-read about the nasty shenanigans that I’m sure are common to property letting everywhere. Particular favourites: the “broom clean” clause and pegging rent rises to the non-existent porter’s wage.
Creative Good - Case Studies has some top-level usab ility case studies. They’re half puff, of course, but worth a read.
Long article about one way of thinking about digital identity and the world of means. Interesting stuff.
So get this: due to medieval law, I still need to have banns read in my local church (which of course I don’t use or visit). The banns must be read on three weekends, and once read only last three months. Without a certificate of banns from my church, the vicar in the church we’re getting married in won’t go ahead with the service. In some ways, this is quite a good system to prevent bigamy in cases where the grooms village was more than a few days’ travel away. Not the case any more, though. Just another silly admin thing to add to the list. Thankfully, I think I’ve found the authoritaive source on which parish, etc my church is in.
Good summary of things you can do to maximise flow and creativity when managing programmers.
Apparently the US’s key mine-finding dolphinhas gone AWOL. No wonder there are delays all over the place….
Shirky: Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data predicts that the guerilla-style spread of unmetered WiFi access will a) destroy the 3G metered-data idea and b) lead us bit-by-bit to an approximation of the always on, unmetered access to the network that we all want.
gzip file serving. A how-to for PHP. Worth doing to reduce bandwith charges, etc.
Time Zones can still cause trouble. The article talks about how to address this in Movable Type, but the really interesting quote is this one:
Also of note is that, this year, Europe moves to DST two days before Iraq does, which is five days before the US does, guaranteeing a week of fascinating confusion for international cooperation and media efforts
Looks like the BBC owes Ben a nod? The 10 things we didn’t know this time last week seems remarkably close to a regular feature of Longers’ blog.
101 dumbest moments in business from Business2. I particularly liked the unexpected use of a vibrating Harry Potter broomstick and the “Novemer” edition of Business 2.
Is Tufte suggesting that bad PowerPoint may have played a part in the Shuttle disaster? It sure looks that way. Regardless, its a great summary of what not to do on a PowerPoint slide.
TV Torrent has the new series of 24, just in case you’ve missed any. NB the way Bit Torrent starts off is misleading: I’m guessing it writes out a 400MB blank file to write bits to as they come off the wire. To the user it looks like it’s actually downloading the file in real time. Shame it isn’t!
Another human ingenuity story: using the temperature difference between the deep and surface ocean (up to 43C) you can create fresh water and power. This will provide a massive boost for smaller islands, and might even make some currently uninhabitable places habitable. Time for a remote island shopping spree. Oh no, I’m broke. Damn.
