Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
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.
Creative Good – Case Studies has some top-level usab ility case studies. They’re half puff, of course, but worth a read.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
Apparently the US’s key mine-finding dolphinhas gone AWOL. No wonder there are delays all over the place….
Good summary of things you can do to maximise flow and creativity when managing programmers.