OK, This Is New

Posted on August 23, 2007

Has something like this ever happened before?

By "something" I mean an anti-war op-ed in a major newspaper written by active duty military personnel. Not retired generals or soldiers whose enlistments are over. Active duty soldiers — not just soldiers, either, but NCOs! And with the 82nd Airborne to boot.

Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.

To the best of my knowledge, it’s unprecendented for people in their position to publicly be saying stuff like this:

Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages…

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Fred Kaplan at Slate thinks it’s unprecedented too (and asks an important question: are these soldiers facing reprisals by the Army for taking their doubts public?). Whatever it is, it’s pretty startling.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Posted on August 22, 2007

Seen on Digg:

There is something ineffably satisfying about seeing someone talk about "foolproofing" something who doesn’t know how to spell "fool".

The Most Dangerous Weapon of Mass Destruction

Posted on August 15, 2007

…turned 60 this year. And no, it’s not the atomic bomb.

It’s the AK-47 assault rifle — a weapon that was born from the cauldron of World War II, and has since become the emblem of several generations of armed struggle around the world. And in the process, it has taken a startling number of lives.

The idea of the “assault rifle” — a weapon designed to unleash a storm of medium-caliber bullets upon targets at short range — didn’t originate with the Soviet Union. The first army to field them in any quantity was the army of Nazi Germany, which began equipping its troops with the Sturmgewehr 44 in the waning months of World War II. Russian troops, who had no comparable weapon, were unpleasantly surprised by the sudden increase in firepower available to their German opponents, and began to wonder how to match it.

One of those soldiers was Mikhail Kalashnikov, who began contemplating a Soviet assault rifle while recuperating from a battle wound. From his bed, Kalashnikov dreamed of the simplest automatic weapon possible — a weapon so simple that it would withstand even the harshest conditions. When the Soviet government put out a call for design proposals for such a weapon, Kalashnikov responded with the design that would become world famous — the AK-47.

The AK-47 became standard Soviet Army issue in 1949, but its real fame came later, when the Soviets began exporting the weapon to their allies around the world. Frequently, these allies were armies associated with “wars of national liberation” — armies attempting to overthrow the established governments of their countries and replace them with Communist states.

The AK-47 was uniquely well-suited for these armies, because of its simplicity. It had been designed, after all, for use on the World War II Eastern Front — a famously unforgiving environment where ruggedness was prized above all other factors in a weapon. Weapons that jammed easily, that required special care and attention, didn’t last long on the Eastern Front, where temperatures would drop to unbelievable lows and where the front lines were manned by barely-trained peasants. Years of bitter fighting with the Germans in this environment had taught the Russians the value of simplicity and reliability.

The AK-47 became perhaps the single purest distillation of these lessons. It was built to be made cheaply, to require no training to operate, and to be usable even in the worst conditions — in bitter cold or howling sandstorm. To armies of guerrillas around the world, operating in jungles and deserts, leading troops with no training, these qualities made the weapon enormously attractive. (As did the USSR’s willingness to supply them generously to her allies, of course.)

American soldiers ran up against the AK-47 in Vietnam, and found their own weapon — the M-16 — wanting in comparison. In his book Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts, Colonel David Hackworth recalled how a discovery while digging up the earth of Vietnam gave him a chance to demonstrate just how superior the AK-47 was:

One of the bulldozers uncovered the decomposing body of an enemy soldier, complete with AK47. I happened to be standing right there, looking down into the hole and pulled the AK out of the bog.

“Watch this, guys,” I said, “and I’ll show you how a real infantry weapon works.”

I pulled the bolt back and fired 30 rounds – the AK could have been cleaned that day rather than buried in glug for a year or so. That was the kind of weapon our soldiers needed, not the confidence-sapping M-16.

The AK-47 became such a symbol of the guerrilla that when Mozambique won its independence, they put the weapon on their flag. Today in Iraq, American soldiers face insurgents with AK-47s once again.

In the sixty years since Kalashnikov’s first design, the AK-47 has become one of the most widely distributed weapons in the world, for two main reasons. First, the Soviets’ unwillingness to recognize intellectual property made it a kind of “open source” rifle — able to be ripped off by any country that wanted to start producing their own assault rifles. And second, when the Soviet Union collapsed, a tidal wave of AK-47s that had been stored in Soviet armories was unleashed upon the world by cagey Russians out to make a buck.

Estimates are that more than 50 million AK-47s have been produced over the years. Nobody knows how many people have been killed by them, but consider this:

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — widely considered the worst violence ever unleashed by man — killed about 100,000 people.

Every year, 300,000 to 500,000 people are killed by small arms in brushfire conflicts around the world; and in those conflicts, the most common weapon is the same as it was in 1950, 1970 and 1990 — the AK-47.

That’s mass destruction too. Just in slow motion.

UPDATE (July 24, 2012): If you want a more in-depth treatment of the history of the Kalashnikov family of weapons, I highly recommend C.J. Chivers’ excellent book The Gun, which explores both the history of the family of weapons spawned by the AK-47 and the shameful shortcomings of the development process that led to the M-16.

Fred Kaplan Steals From My Playbook

Posted on August 10, 2007

Yesterday in Slate, foreign policy expert Fred Kaplan mused on the similarities between a potential partition of Iraq and the partition of India back in 1947:

Anyone who believes that U.S. troops can simply and suddenly leave Iraq without risk of unleashing great horror—or who regards religious or ethnic partition as a solution instead of a desperate ploy—should look back at the summer of 1947, when the British Empire packed up and India fulfilled its "tryst with destiny" (as Jawaharlal Nehru described its awakening to independence), only to plunge into a monstrous spree of ethnic cleansing (12 million people uprooted, as many as 1 million murdered) that continues to take its toll today.

… which sounds a lot like what I wrote on this blog back on July 22:

My prediction is that we’re going to hear a lot more about the so-called "soft partition" option once the nation gets serious about withdrawal in the fall. "Soft partition" is the plan favored by Senator Joe Biden and some other foreign affairs types in which Iraq would essentially be divided into three countries along ethnic lines…

This is actually not without precedent; the Partition of India in 1947 saw millions of people uprooted as British India was split into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. But that event was marked by serious violence, and left bitter hatreds that have set the two states at each others’ throats for sixty years.

New slogan for Just Well Mixed: "What You’ll Be Reading In Slate Two Weeks From Now."

Introducing MyPHPDocs.com

Posted on August 9, 2007

On May 30 of last year, I wrote a post that began with the statement that "the worst thing about PHP is the documentation".

That post got a decent amount of attention in the PHP world, and attracted a good bit of feedback, most of which boiled down to people telling me that I’m an idiot and that the PHP docs are the best thing since sliced bread.

I remain unconvinced. While the wiki-style user comments on every page are nice, the basic organization of the docs is a mess. Most of the really useful stuff about PHP is in the function reference, and that thing is just a giant mass of undifferentiated links, with no guidance for developers as to which modules to turn to in which situations. Eventually you find what you’re looking for, but it’s not as easy as it could be, or should be.

One of the comments on my post from last year came from Philip Olson, the editor of the PHP documentation. He took my feedback in the constructive spirit in which it was intended, and gave us an update on the future of the docs by telling us to be on the lookout for "Livedocs", the next generation of the PHP documentation. He even made a promise about when we’d see it happen:

[D]on’t worry, Livedocs will be out before Vista and that’s a promise 😉

That was posted on June 6, 2006. Windows Vista came out on January 30, 2007. Livedocs is still not "live". So the lesson here is, be careful what you promise 🙂

So why am I revisiting this issue?

Many of the commenters said something along the lines of "if you think the docs are so bad, show how they could be better". So, in that spirit, I present to you MyPHPDocs.com.

MyPHPDocs.com is my attempt to make the PHP documentation more useful by making it more organized and more personalized. Specifically, with MyPHPDocs.com, you can:

• Burn your own custom PHP docs: include the functions you use every day, strip out the ones you don’t
• Find what you need faster: the function reference is completely reorganized, with functions grouped together based on the problem they solve rather than a huge alphabetical list
• Organize your docs however you like: You can re-order the sections of your custom manual, and it will remember the order in which you put them. You can also minimize sections you use infrequently to further simplify the list; it’ll remember that too
• Share your custom docs with friends and colleagues: Once you’ve got things Just So, you can pass your custom docs to anyone you like simply by giving them a URL

Is MyPHPDocs perfect? Heck if I know. But it’s my response to the "let’s see how you would do it" challenge.

So now I’m looking for your feedback. Try out MyPHPDocs and see if it makes your life easier. And if you have feedback on it, or find any bugs, send ’em my way, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

If Something Happens

Posted on August 8, 2007

I’m beginning to wonder if I should get a bit concerned for my personal safety.

There has been a small-but-steady drumbeat of hints over the last few weeks that we should expect a new "spectacular" attack on the United States from al Qaeda and/or related groups this month, and that its target will be a city in the Eastern U.S., likely Washington. Where I, um, live.

• Roll Call: "Capitol Police officials have stepped up the department’s security presence on Capitol Hill in response to intelligence indicating the increased possibility of an al-Qaida terrorist attack on Congress sometime between now and Sept. 11."
• Senator Trent Lott:
  

  Without mentioning a specific threat to the Capitol, Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) ominously advised Thursday that Congress needed to pass changes to terrorist surveillance laws before leaving for the August recess and warned that otherwise “the disaster could be on our doorstep.”

  When asked if people should leave Washington, D.C., during the month of August, Lott responded, “I think it would be good to leave town in August, and it would probably be good to stay out until September the 12th.”

• Susie Madrak: "I have to say, I’ve been hearing rumors from places I ordinarily don’t. Lots of talk about a nuclear bomb targeting an East Coast city, etc."

Now, much of this talk has been driven by the debate in Congress over whether or not to allow the President’s illegal domestic wiretapping program to go continue for six months — a renewal that was necessary after the Supreme Court struck the program down. The Democratic Congress gave the President the authority to continue last week, to howls of outrage from around the progressive blogosphere.

But it’s not like al Qaeda isn’t a threat. The National Intelligence Estimate released last month indicates that the group has grown back to its pre-9/11 strength, thanks to its finding a safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the influx of recruits and money the Iraq War has brought to it. 

So it’s an open question whether there is a real, concrete threat here that the Dems responded to, or whether it’s just a boogeyman conjured up by the GOP to spook the Congress into letting the wiretapping continue. If it’s the latter, that’s beyond reprehensible. But if it’s the former…?  I guess we’ll only know for sure on September 12 (if then).

I’m not counseling fear — indeed, I believe that fear is our worst enemy in the fight against terrorism. Fear makes us do stupid things and amplifies the power of the terrorists manyfold.

But I do counsel prudence, and I’ve been hearing this chatter consistently enough from enough sources to make me wonder if there’s a kernel of truth anywhere in it.

So, in the name of prudence, let me make a request.

I don’t think it’s likely that anything is going to happen. But if something does happen here in Washington this month, and it’s of any serious scale, it will probably kill me. I ride the Metro twice a day and work a few blocks from the White House; I’m under no illusions about how easy it would be for me to become collateral damage.

If something happens, please do not let my name be used to justify stupid and counterproductive foreign policy decisions, the way the victims of 9/11 had their names prostituted to justify the invasion of Iraq – an invasion that did nothing to bring their killers to justice, and which, in the long run, actually reduced our safety here at home.

If something happens, make me this promise: that you won’t let my memory be hijacked to put less worth on the lives of innocent people than on the simple-minded plans of arrogant politicians.

If something happens.

Wear Your Big Love Proudly!

Posted on August 2, 2007

You know you want one (especially if you live in Utah):

Now available at http://www.AllMyWivesAreForRomney.com!

(Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with this and make no money from it. But I know the guy who’s behind it and think it’s funny as hell.)

When I Hear “Web 2.0”, I Reach For My Revolver

Posted on July 25, 2007

A friend and I were chatting this morning and he pointed me at a help-wanted ad he saw as a prime example of how NOT to hire developers. I read it, and I’d go even further: not only is it a prime example of how not to hire developers, but it’s a prime example of the ridiculous priorities of so much of the Web sector these days.

To illustrate, here’s the ad copy, with my annotations. I’ve removed the name of the company and the principals because this isn’t a slam on them specifically; it’s more an observation of the culture in which they are swimming. Fish don’t know they’re in a fishbowl and these guys don’t seem to know they are in the "Web 2.0 Reality Free Zone" either. 

We’re looking for a rockstar developer to help us with <our Facebook app> (5+ million users) and other major apps we’re building.

One way to let me know that you’re not worth paying attention to is to say that you want to hire "rock stars". Have you ever seen a real rock star? They are out-of-control ego demons who waste everybody’s time with ridiculous demands like removing all the green M&Ms from their candy dish. They certainly don’t waste time on unimportant concepts like "working well with others" or "meeting deadlines". Going out of your way to hire them means spending all of your time catering to their eccentricities if you hire one, or spending all of your time mediating their arguments if you hire more than one. Have fun with that.

We have contract work available, but also want someone full-time in SF. This isn’t going to be the ideal job for most people. It’s a full-on startup environment, and we need someone who can start right away. For the right person, it’ll be awesome.

Translation: we expect you to work 80 hour weeks without bitching about things like "food" or "rest" or "pay". You’re a rock star! Rock stars don’t worry about shit like that!

A bit about us: * Two of us (A, 21 and his brother B 23) do web development,

Two of the three founders do the same job you’ll be doing. So get ready to lose lots of arguments!

the third (C, 23) handles tons of other stuff.

The unimportant stuff, like figuring out how we make money. Nowhere in the ad does it explain their business or its prospects, other than it being on Facebook.

True story. Back during the first Web bubble, I was approached by a major national bookseller to come join their online team. They flew me out to their headquarters and gave me the royal treatment. They were constantly saying how they were going to put Amazon.com out of business.

When the time came for my questions, I only had one: "Why should I buy a book from your online bookstore instead of through Amazon.com?"

They couldn’t answer it.

I turned down the job.

And last time I heard, Amazon was doing fine. I have yet to meet anybody who will admit to buying a book through this major national bookseller’s online store. Funny about that. 

We do all our decisions/brainstorming/everything together. We’ve worked together for several years and love what we’re doing.

Try our Kool-Aid. It’s excellent! 

We’ve never hired anyone before so we’re figuring this out as we go. In rough order of importance, we’re looking for: * Someone who’s honest, reliable, and easy to work with

Pick two. 

* Someone who can get things done FAST and WELL

Pick one. 

* PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Facebook API

We’re 100% buzzword compliant! 

* Someone who can help with scaling/optimization/server/security stuff

It’s telling that this is left for last, and that things like "scaling" and "security" are covered in ten words. Scaling and security don’t work if you do them as afterthoughts, or if they’re everybody’s second priority. You have to put them first and make the hard choices they require. (And "work fast!!!" doesn’t tend to encourage building scalable or secure systems, either.)

I don’t mean to bag on these guys too hard; I don’t know them, for all I know they’re good guys who just wrote a bad ad. But so much of this stuff is flying around these days it makes me sick to my stomach. The worship of youth over experience. The development of features rather than businesses. The desire to impress 53,651 technology obsessives in San Francisco rather than real people with real problems. And on and on.

Enough already.

The best thing about the dot-com bust was that for a while, we got back to building real applications that solved people’s problems in exchange for money. It’s depressing to see just how thoroughly that idea has been eclipsed once again by 1998-style "build it and they will come!" nonsense. 

Come on, folks. We can do better than this.

Newegg.com Ripoff Alert

Posted on July 24, 2007

I’m in the process of building a new PC to replace my now-seven-years-old-and-upgraded-too-many-times-to-count-Athlon-2400 box. So when I heard that this week was going to see big price cuts on new Intel CPUs, it was music to my ears.

Specifically, it was music because it would be the first time a quad-core CPU would actually be affordable by normal human beings. Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU used to cost more than $500, which is pretty lofty considering that you can build an entire PC for $800 these days that will do everything you need. But the price cuts knocked that part down by more than 50%, bringing it to the much nicer price of $266. At that price, you can actually consider building a system around it without breaking the bank.

I typically buy computer parts from Newegg.com, so I cruised over there to see if they had any Q6600s in stock. Turns out they do — but at Newegg, the $266 chip is being sold for $375! That’s a 40% markup.

I don’t have a problem with Newegg making a profit on the sale, but a 40% markup is insane. Some reports around the Web speculate that Newegg is setting the price dynamically based on supply; there’s a lot of people interested in the Q6600 this week, so they’re charging a premium. But there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of Q6600s based on availability at other outlets. 

The alternate explanation, of course, is that Newegg knows that the Q6600 is going to be popular this week, and is just looking to gouge people who buy from them reflexively. Lesson learned, then. In the past I’ve been happy enough with Newegg’s prices and service to just buy from them without looking too closely; but from now on I’ll check prices on any gear I buy from Newegg before I plunk down my credit card.

Why I Don’t Write Much About Iraq Anymore

Posted on July 22, 2007

Because it’s too depressing.

Longtime Readers will remember that I was against invading Iraq from the beginning. But even I didn’t think in my worst nightmares in 2002 that an invasion would turn out as badly as this one has. I made the mistake of assuming some degree of competence in our nation’s foreign policy leadership, which I think we can all agree in retrospect was unwarranted.

But that, as they say, is water under the bridge. The question that looms now is, how do we end this thing?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t.

None of the plans that I’ve heard floated strike me as having any realistic chance of keeping Iraq from sliding into chaos as we pull out.  (Of course, one could argue that Iraq is in chaos now. But more chaos is still a possibility.)

My prediction is that we’re going to hear a lot more about the so-called "soft partition" option once the nation gets serious about withdrawal in the fall. "Soft partition" is the plan favored by Senator Joe Biden and some other foreign affairs types in which Iraq would essentially be divided into three countries along ethnic lines. The Shia would get the south, the Sunni would get the center and west, and the Kurds would get the north; these divisions would be made based on which parts of the country have that ethnicity as the majority. And the U.S. forces would pull out of most of the country and settle down in the Kurdish region, in case they’re ever needed in the future. (The Kurdish region would be our base because the Kurds are the only Iraqis who view American intervention as an unalloyed good, so we’d be welcome there.)

And if you’re a Shia living in (Sunni) al-Anbar, say, or a Kurd living in (Shia) Nasiriyah?  Well, you get your ass out of there and into your group’s new homeland tuit suite, or you suffer the consequences.

This is actually not without precedent; the Partition of India in 1947 saw millions of people uprooted as British India was split into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. But that event was marked by serious violence, and left bitter hatreds that have set the two states at each others’ throats for sixty years. Even today there is still sectarian violence occurring there whose roots can be traced back to the Partition.

And there’s an additional wild card in any Iraqi partition: the Kurds. When "soft partition" is typically discussed, it includes a Kurdish state in the north, allied with the other two new states in some kind of loose confederation. And if there are any people in Iraq whom we owe something to, it’s the Kurds, considering how we happily armed and funded Saddam Hussein while he was brutally exterminating them in a campaign of genocide that killed tens of thousands — maybe even hundreds of thousands — of people.

So it might seem that giving the Kurds their own homeland would be the logical thing to do. Right? They certainly deserve it.

However, Iraq’s neighbor to the north, Turkey, has made it clear that they would take such a move extremely seriously. Turkey, you see, has its own Kurdish population, which has been striving for independence from Turkey just as Iraqi Kurds clamored to be free of Iraq. The Turkish government fears that the sudden appearance of a Kurdish homeland on Turkey’s southern border would start giving their own Kurds ideas — ideas of a unified Kurdistan made partly of land from Iraq and partly of land from Turkey.

(It doesn’t help matters any that the PKK — a group of Turkish Kurds who stage violent attacks on Turkish officials in the name of winning an independent Kurdistan — have used the Kurdish regions of Iraq as a safe haven for staging their operations.) 

Until now, we have been able to finesse this issue by keeping Iraq’s Kurds technically part of Iraq. But if we set them up with their own autonomous political unit — even one with the fig leaf of a powerless Iraqi confederation — the Turks will not be happy. So unhappy, in fact, that they have been making noises about invading Iraqi Kurdistan if the Kurds try to achieve anything resembling independence.  

Let’s say we went ahead and pulled back into the Kurdish region, and then the Turks invaded it. We guarantee the Kurds’ security, but Turkey is a NATO ally. Would we fight? On whose side? Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

There’s another Kurdish-related problem with soft partition, too: the city of Kirkuk. Take a look at this map of Iraq’s ethnic groupings; notice how Kirkuk sits right on the border between the Sunni region and the Kurdish region. This is a problem for two reasons:

1. Kirkuk used to be a heavily Kurdish city, until Saddam decided to "Arabize" it by running the Kurds out and giving their homes to Iraqi Arabs (Sunnis and Shia). Estimates are that at least 100,000 Kurds were driven from the city.
2. Kirkuk is swimming in oil. The Kirkuk area accounts for 40 percent of Iraq’s oil reserves and 70 percent of its natural gas reserves.

Keeping that in mind, answer this question: who, in a "soft partition" scenario, would get Kirkuk? The Kurds, whose claims to it are so emotionally powerful that some refer to it as "the Kurdish Jerusalem"? Or the Sunnis, who by today’s geography and ethnography have just as much a claim to its riches as the Kurds do?

(And remember, if you give it to the Kurds, that’s really going to piss off the Turks. A dirt-poor Kurdistan, they might be able to learn to live with. But a filthy rich Kurdistan thanks to all that oil?)

It’s a measure of just how starved for good options we are that "soft partition" still seems like the most practical way out, even with all these problems factored in. But nobody should delude themselves that it will be an easy process. The best that can be said for it is that it may be the best of a bad bunch of choices.

Marking Time

Posted on July 19, 2007

I’m actually 32 today. But I like the song too much not to post it 🙂

You Too Can Ruin Careers and Destroy Lives! Read On to Find Out How

Posted on July 10, 2007

Attention amateur sleuths! Have I got a treat for you.

If you haven't heard of the infamous Case of the D.C. Madam, let me clue you in. Deborah Jeane Palfrey is alleged to have run a high-end prostitution business under the name of "Pamela Martin and Associates" here in our nation's capitol for 13 years, from 1993 to 2006.  Last October, the Feds busted Palfrey on racketeering charges arising from her business. Palfrey insists that she wasn't breaking the law, though; ABC News reports that

The women [employed by Palfrey] signed contracts agreeing not to engage in illegal activity, including having sex for money, Palfrey says, and were given guidelines on the difference between legal and illegal sexual behavior.  At least one woman, Dr. Paula Neble, is known to have told federal prosecutors that she had sex for money while working for Palfrey. Palfrey is suing her for breach of contract.

Her defense, in other words, is that the women she was representing were only supposed to be providing companionship, not sex; and if they took money in exchange for sex, they did so against Palfrey's instructions and their employment agreement.

That's not the interesting bit, though. The interesting bit is that Palfrey kept her phone records for all those years she was running Pamela Martin and Associates; and when the law came down on her, she threatened to make those records public — presumably embarrassing her clients, among whom are supposedly many Movers and Shakers.

Well, yesterday, she made good: the phone records are available for download on the Web site of her legal defense fund. Here's the link. (Note: you may have to hit refresh a few times to get the page to load; her Web server is currently getting hammered. No pun intended.)

So is there anything juicy in there? Well, at least one client has pre-emptively outed himself: Senator David Vitter (R-LA) announced yesterday that he had been a Palfrey client.

So clearly Palfrey wasn't kidding when she said there were Movers & Shakers in there. Which raises the obvious question: who else?

If you want to try and find out, grab the records and get going. It won't be easy; the records are being distributed as ZIP-ped up image files, not as text, so they're not easily searchable, and all you get is the timestamp of the call, and the phone number & city from which it came.

But you're an amateur sleuth, right? Surely little hurdles like that won't stop you.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

UPDATE (July 11, 2007): That was fast! 

Use this site to search the publicly released phone records of "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey, proprietor of the Pamela Martin and Associates "high end adult fantasy firm" in Washington, DC.

Yet More Hard-Hitting Journalism From the Huffington Post

Posted on July 9, 2007

You don't say.

MST3K: It’s Baaaaaack! Well, Close Enough

Posted on July 6, 2007

If you were going to try and identify a work of art that truly captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s, you’d be hard pressed to find anything better than Mystery Science Theater 3000, the long-running cable comedy show in which the performers heckled bad movies. It was a kind of meta-entertainment, which took amusements that seemed tired and clichéd to our modern eyes and made them new again by overlaying them with a healthy dose of snark. In other words, it was the perfect program for a nation that was embarking on a decade in which everything was steeped in irony and surrounded by air quotes. (Some people say that era ended on 9/11. Me, I wish it had.)

MST3k is long gone and done with, but it still has fans, including me. At the end of each episode, they told us to “keep circulating the tapes”, and we did; and then the DVDs, and then the digital archive files. But in the bottom of our hearts, there was always that quiet wish for something new from the Satellite of Love. Sure, the various performers went their separate ways and worked on their separate projects, but none of that ever really seemed to capture the spark they had together (Mike Nelson’s books probably come closest).

Which is why it’s exciting to say that the gang has gotten back together! Well, several of them, at any rate: Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy have come together as “The Film Crew“. The fruits of this reunion? Next week will see their first DVD hit the streets — a DVD which features them mocking a bad B-movie, Hollywood After Dark. From the looks of it, it’s MST minus the robot puppets and the silhouettes; which is fine by me, since it’s not like anyone watched MST for the production values. We watched for the writing, and the wit of the team. Anything that brings that back is worth watching, in my book.

(Oh, and I should probably mention Mike Nelson’s RiffTrax here, too.  RiffTrax provides downloadable MST-style commentary tracks for today’s movies, performed by Nelson and his cohorts, occasionally including other MST alumni. I’m told they’re pretty good, but I haven’t tried them myself. Anyone out there who has, feel free to chime in with your impressions in the comments.)

This One Is Gonna Be Hard to Beat

Posted on July 6, 2007

I think we have a new winner for the Best Headline Ever…

Has the Perfect Free PHP IDE Arrived?

Posted on July 4, 2007

It may be Eclipse.

People who develop in languages like Java and C# have long had a wide range of powerful IDEs available to help them in their coding tasks.

For those of us who code in PHP, though, there hasn't been a really 'killer' IDE. There are some choices – Zend Studio and Komodo spring to mind – but these have always carried a non-trivial price tag, closing them off for those of us without big budgets for tools. So for me, at least, the choice has been to work in a plain old text editor: my usual choice is Kate. 

The other day, though, I heard that there was a new version out ("Europa") of IBM's open-source IDE, Eclipse — and that PHP support in Eclipse had matured enough to finally be useful. So I downloaded it and gave it a spin.

Wow! When tricked out with the proper add-ons, Eclipse makes quite a nice environment to write PHP in. Eclipse's extensible architecture has led to a wide range of add-ons being developed — allowing you to easily snap together a single environment in which all your common tasks are performed (in other words, what IDEs were invented for).

What can you integrate?

• PHP Development Tools gives you a complete PHP editing environment, with syntax highlighting, code folding, autocompletion, and other goodies
• Subclipse adds Subversion support, letting you check code out of an SVN repository directly into a new Eclipse project, or commit your changes to a repo with a simple right-click
• Eclipse SQL Explorer provides a complete GUI interface to MySQL (and other DBMSes too), letting you browse tables, run queries, and generally forget about the MySQL console

Together, these add-ons turn Eclipse into a pretty slick package for handling all the tasks a LAMP developer is likely to deal with on a given day. (And there's others I haven't even tried yet, but which sound promising – like Mylyn, which lets you connect up Eclipse's internal task-tracker to external task repositories like the ones that come with Trac and Bugzilla.)

Oh, and all this is free, too. Which is certainly nice.

The only real downside I can see is that, unlike Komodo or Zend Studio, you have to do a little up-front work setting up your environment; by default, Eclipse is a Java IDE, so you have to add on the packages above to make it 'speak' PHP comfortably. But the process of adding features is straightforward (thanks to Eclipse's update manager, which lets you snap new tools into Eclipse just by pasting a URL into a textbox). 

So, what do you PHP geeks out there think? Is Eclipse in position to become a major player in the PHP world?

“AAAAAAAAH The French”

Posted on July 3, 2007

Even our heroes have off days…

For comparison, here’s how he sounded when he wasn’t potted:

And here’s how the hilarious animated series The Critic remembered Orson’s days as a pitchman:

HOWTO: Get Out of Debt

Posted on July 3, 2007

Yesterday I made the final payment on the last bit of debt I was carrying — my student loan.

This was the last step in a project I set for myself three years ago. Back then, I was in the same position as most Americans: I was making payments on a car, on student loans, and on multiple credit cards.

I wasn't alone. The average American carries $8,652 in credit card debt; a middle-class family these days spends more than a third of their income making payments on personal debt. In 2006, average household debt reached a stunning 134% of average household income — the highest level ever. When you're over-leveraged like this, all it takes is one crisis — a lost job, say, or a health emergency — to send you over the edge into bankruptcy.

I didn't want that to be my story, so I decided to attack the problem systematically. It took a little while, but now the project is complete; and I thought I'd share with you the strategy I came up with, in case you've got some debt of your own you'd like to retire.

The key thing to understand about consumer debt is that it isn't the debt that keeps you in debt; it's the interest.

It's absolutely shocking, when you think about it, how much interest people are paying on their debts. While interest rates on bank loans have been low over the last few years, consumer debt interest rates have exploded. Credit cards have interest rates as high as 30%; even the good ones are typically in the 15-20% range. Other personal debt vehicles are even worse: payday loans, for instance, can carry interest rates as high as 99%. At these rates, the original amount of the loan quickly turns into something much larger. 

The good news, though, is that we can use this fact to build a strategy for getting out of debt.

What you want to do is prioritize your payments so that you're paying off the highest-interest debt first. Make a list of all the things you're making payments on, and sort that list by interest rate, with the highest one first. That list will tell you which loan should be your first priority.

The first way to cut down that highest-interest loan is to transfer debt to lower-interest vehicles. If you have more than one credit card, compare their rates and transfer as much of your balances as possible from the higher-interest cards to the lowest-interest one. Credit card companies usually make it easy for you to do this (they're probably spamming you with "balance transfer checks" in the mail).

Once you've done this, concentrate your payments on the remaining highest-interest balance. Make the minimum payments on the others, and send everything you can spare to pay off the high-interest card. Once it's paid off, move on to the next one on the list, and pay it off, working your way down the list. (What about the other debts? That's why we moved them to lower-interest vehicles, to minimize the amount of interest they build up while we're focusing on the most expensive loan.)

Progress will seem slow at first when you use this approach; but it will get faster and faster with time. As your principal on the first card gets paid down, the interest payments you owe will go down with it, freeing up money to pay down more principal. Once you've got that first card paid off, you can take the whole amount you used to pay on it and apply it to the second card. And so on.

Once you've got your credit cards paid off, you can turn your attention to things like car loans, mortgages and student loans; these typically have quite low interest rates, so they're a lower priority. Figure out the absolute minimum you can pay on these, and apply the cash to your higher-interest debts.

That's how I got out of debt. And if you've been wanting to do the same, that's how you can do it too!

What’s Worth Listening To?

Posted on June 28, 2007

It occurs to me that I could stand to get some new music. I haven't bought a new CD in, like, forever. And I'm not one of those Evil Internet Pirates, I just haven't been paying attention to what's out there very closely.  So now my music collection is kinda boring.

I already know one album I want to pick up, but I could use some suggestions as to others. So sound off in the comments: what's worth listening to these days? 

(Note: don't worry too much about whether or not the genres you like are genres I'll like. I'll try just about anything once.) 

If You Suddenly Can’t Map Fields In a TemplaVoila Template…

Posted on June 28, 2007

Thought I'd write this up in case anyone else out there runs into the same thing.

If you use TemplaVoila as your template engine, you know that a big part of changing the look and feel of your site is changing the mapping of data structures to fields in the template.

But what if one day you're making changes to a template — say, adding a new field — and the field just won't save in the template? Even if you clear out the caches?

If this has happened to you, check your Apache error log. If you see a bunch of errors in there that look like this:

PHP Warning:  mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource…

… then you can solve the problem by going into the Extension Manager and uninstalling, then reinstalling the TemplaVoila extension. Doing this fixes something in the database that is causing your problem. Once TemplaVoila is reinstalled, you will be able to map fields again.

Don't ask me why this works, I have no idea. But it does work.

Crazy Judge Gets Nothing

Posted on June 25, 2007

Good news in the case of the ridiculous missing pants lawsuit (which I blogged about in May):

A judge on Monday ruled in favor of a dry cleaner that was sued for $54 million over a missing pair of pants in a case that garnered international attention and renewed calls for litigation reform.

District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff ruled that the Korean immigrant owners of Custom Cleaners did not violate the city's Consumer Protection Act by failing to live up to Roy L. Pearson's expectations of the "Satisfaction Guaranteed" sign that was once placed in the store window.

"Plaintiff Roy L. Pearson, Jr. takes nothing from the defendants, and defendants Soo Chung, Jin Nam Chung and Ki Y. Chung are awarded the costs of this action against the plaintiff Roy L. Pearson, Jr.," the ruling read.

Holy God

Posted on June 24, 2007

Did I really go almost three weeks without posting anything here?

Wow. Sorry about that, folks… 

“Bring a Change of Clothes With You to Work”?

Posted on June 24, 2007

Jeff Ventura has done an outstanding job of deconstructing the marketing language used to describe the side effects of Alli, a new over-the-counter weight loss drug, so I won't bother to do the same. Just go and read his funny post.

I did want to mention one thing, though.  I was a bit stunned to see stuff like this on the actual Alli page (emphasis mine):

alli™ works by preventing the absorption of some of the fat you eat. The fat passes out of your body, so you may have bowel changes, known as treatment effects. You may get:

• gas with oily spotting
• loose stools
• more frequent stools that may be hard to control…

You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work

Couple of observations here.

First, notice how they don't ever refer to side effects. They're "treatment effects" instead. Doubleplusungood.

Second, these "treatment effects" must really be something. I say that because I've been through the process of hashing out Web copy a few times myself, and each time, I've found that the people involved generally fall into one of two camps:

• Marketers want to play up the positives of whatever you're writing about, and play down the negatives. Their secret dream is for everybody in the world to use the product/service/whatever you're writing about.
• Lawyers want to play down the positives, and play up the negatives. Their secret dream is for nobody to use the product/service/whatever, since zero users equals zero liability.

(Note that you don't have to actually be a lawyer to fall into the Lawyer camp, or actually work in marketing to be a Marketer. These are personality types, not job titles.)

Typically the process of writing Web copy is a political struggle between the Marketers and the Lawyers. The Marketers' first draft usually reads something like this:

OurProduct is not just easy to use, inexpensively priced, and 100% safe and effective; it will also whiten your teeth, condition your hair, and make you 3 times more attractive to the opposite sex!

… while the Lawyers' first draft usually reads like this:

We're pretty sure that OurProduct won't hurt you, if you read the instructions and use it as intended. But things happen, you know? We tried to test it as thoroughly as we could but there's always the chance we missed something. Are you sure you wouldn't rather just go watch a TV show instead? 

The battle that ensues is over exactly where between these two extremes the final draft will fall.

What struck me about the Alli page is that it acknowleges things that no Marketer would ever voluntarily acknowledge. Things like Alli will cause explosive, uncontrollable diarrhea — though they use prettier words than that, that's the essential message. (They recommend that you bring a change of clothes to work, for Pete's sake!)

There's really only two reasons why something like that would be mentioned: either the Lawyers at GlaxoSmithKline (the makers of Alli) are all powerful and the Marketers are serfs, or the circumstances described are so common that there's no way the Marketers could ever justify leaving them out. So common, in fact, that they can't even hide them in the fine print; they have to put them right up in the main copy.

If the Marketers at Glaxo were that weak, we wouldn't see sites like this at all. So the only logical conclusion is that a whole lot of Glaxo's test subjects for Alli had a whole lot of pretty grody "accidents".

Which raises the obvious question: why the hell would you take a pill that flat out promised you repeated incidents of explosive diarrhea? Is that (not to mention the $60/month cost of Alli) really preferable to going to the gym a couple of times a week?

I guess we're about to find out!

Separated at Birth?

Posted on June 5, 2007

Gary Brecher, the War Nerd

Guess who

War Nerd

Posted on June 4, 2007

I have to thank John Robb for turning me on to War Nerd, Gary Brecher’s witty and bizarre column in the Moscow-based online zine exile.ru.

Why? Well, first there’s Brecher’s photo, which makes him look like Dwight Schrute after a three-day bender:

Second, there’s Brecher’s way with words. This guy writes like Hunter S. Thompson had taken up the Pentagon beat instead of blowing his brains all over the wall.

Brecher on war:

There ain’t no law of war. There’s just double-dealt rules pushed through by the big powers. Asking guerrillas to put up their dukes and face the attack helicopters is as stupid as scolding the Boers for filing the tips of their bullets while they watched their families die, nice ‘n legal, in those Brit death camps. Like Rummy said, “You fight with the army you have, not the one you wish you had,” and if that means you’ve got nothing but small arms and IEDs, then you fight sneaky.

Brecher on peace:

As for peace, I was always against it. Peace is for people who have satisfying lives. The rest of us want that flood, that real rain. Like the man said, “Bring it on.”

Brecher on Iraq:

Sure, Saddam was a killer. Don’t you get it by now? In a place like Iraq, killing is how you run things. Sure, Saddam boosted his clan, his people; you think Sadr’s goons are going to be any less vicious about boosting their tribe? They’re not off to a very good start, promoting interfaith cooperation by torturing Sunnis to death and stacking their stinking corpses in old trucks dropped off at the nearest bus stop.
Blaming Saddam for being what he was is like blaming a rattlesnake for killing.

Brecher on Iran:

It’s like our command got one of those brain puzzlers Captain Kirk used to use to fry alien computers: how do we pacify Iraq (impossible) while invading Iran at the same time (double impossible, does not compute, frying noises, smoke coming out of computer). Right now there’s so much smelly smoke coming out of the Pentagon it looks like another Boeing hit the place, but it’s just the DI sections’ brains frying.

Brecher on the past:

Europe before Stalingrad was an alien planet, as crazy and bloodthirsty as any Aztec priest. Nobody realizes the complete flip-flop Europe did in 1945. Before that, it was a continent full of insane fascists. Some were braver, better soldiers, or smarter; those are the only real differences.
And when I say “smarter,” I don’t want to overdo it, because the Greatest Generation was a bunch of morons. Hitler was the stupidest of all, I grant you that, but he was just the standout in graduating class full of mongoloids in fedoras. Take Churchill, who’s supposed to be a God of courage and decency and smarts. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Churchill was a buffoon. He was the moron who got Allied armies into useless Mediterranean campaigns in both World Wars. Gallipoli had Churchill’s autograph all over it, and he was so stupid he tried the same crap 25 years later with the Italian adventure. He had this obsession with the “soft underbelly of Europe” which conveniently forgot about these things called “mountain ranges,” like the Alps and the Apennines.

Brecher on the future:

[Conventional] wars are rare, and going to get rarer. Because there’s a much cheaper, easier way to make war. This way doesn’t require any of the building blocks of conventional war: you don’t need industry, aircraft, armor or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos that can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge — and those are the only two commodities most of the world has a surplus of.

See what I mean?