The Question

Posted on September 29, 2006

"The question is this: should Congress pass a bill giving President Bush retroactive immunity for possible war crimes?"

Yesterday, they did.

(Note to those of you reading in a feedreader: there’s video in this post. If you don’t see it, click through.)

Wow

Posted on September 15, 2006

I believe this may be the single ballsiest political campaign ad I’ve ever seen, brought to you by VoteVets.org and Bill Hillsman (the ad guy who helped Paul Wellstone and Jesse Ventura score outsider victories):

Goddamn! That’s awesome!

And from the comments on YouTube, the perfect summation:

In George Allen’s America, you have to be a fetus if you want protection. Soldiers don’t qualify.

(If you’re reading this in a feed-reader, you probably don’t see the video embedded in this post.  Click through to the post on my site to watch, or watch it on YouTube.)

Steal This RSS

Posted on September 15, 2006

Originally uploaded by jalefkowit.
Click photo for full size image.

Two years ago I suggested in my presentation to an online advocacy conference that e-mail was fundamentally broken and that we should be looking at alternative channels like RSS for a lot of our communications to constituents.

The reaction at the time could be politely described as "disbelief".

So when I saw this graffito on a copy of the agenda posted on the wall at GetActive Software’s 2006 user conference yesterday, it warmed my heart 🙂

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Posted on September 13, 2006

You know, I went to all the trouble of pulling a bunch of highly relevant news stories together for my fifth-anniversary-of-September-11 post, and yet this guy makes the same point just as effectively without writing a thing…

Electronic Voting F@#$s Up Another Election

Posted on September 12, 2006

Boy, residents of Montgomery County, MD sure must be glad their tax dollars were spent on fancy new e-voting machines!

From today’s Washington Post — Montgomery to Extend Voting Hours After Election Glitches:

Polling stations in Montgomery County will remain open until 9 tonight–an hour later than usual–to accommodate voters who were turned away from the polls this morning because of a glitch that left computerized voting machines across the county inoperable…

Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said.

Early morning voters were forced to cast provisional, hand-written ballots at Montgomery County’s 238 polling places, while election staffers scrambled to deliver the forgotten voting cards as quickly as possible. Several precincts ran out of the paper ballots, and workers from at least one precinct went to a copy shop to make more. Some poll workers, according to witnesses, did not know the provisional ballots were an option and told voters to try again later in the day.

Jeez Louise. What a mess. But at least they’re all whizzy and electronic, right?

If this sort of thing ticks you off, you can do something about it — Verified Voting is looking for volunteers to monitor the performance of e-voting systems in November’s general election.  Write to observer@verifiedvoting.org if you’re interested.

Five Years On

Posted on September 11, 2006

Today is the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

So how close are we to getting a measure of justice for the people who died that day?

• Defense Tech: "Five years ago tomorrow, three thousand people were killed in my home town. And the bastards who masterminded this mass murder have gotten away with it, thanks in part to the actions of our government and its allies."
• Washington Post: "The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years."
• New York Times: "The Pakistani government signed a ‘truce’ with militants who have resisted Pakistani military efforts to gain control of [Waziristan]… Al Qaeda’s surviving leadership is suspected of using [Waziristan] as a base of operation to support international terrorist attacks, including possibly the July 2005 London subway bombings."
• Associated Press: "A CIA unit that had hunted for Osama bin Laden and his top deputies for a decade has been disbanded."
• Andrew Sullivan: "[The fifth anniversary of 9/11] will see the full unveiling of Karl Rove’s fall [2006] election strategy. He’s intending to line up 9/11 families to accuse [Senators] McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the perpetrators of that atrocity because they want to uphold the ancient judicial traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution."
• Anil Dash: "I feel as if we’ve failed in so many ways. All of us."

Me too, Anil.  Me too.

Books I Love: “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles”

Posted on September 6, 2006

(This is the first in a series of posts to come introducing you to books that I’ve loved, with explanations why.)

Longtime readers of this blog already know that I’m a fan of the late, great filmmaker Orson Welles. This weekend I caught Welles’ last film, F for Fake, for the first time on cable (great movie, if you care) and the experience prompted me to pick up again a book I hadn’t read in a while: David Thomson’s biography “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles”.

Calling “Rosebud” a biography doesn’t really do it justice; the word probably conjures up in your mind images of monumentally dull thousand-page tomes. “Rosebud” is exactly the opposite: it doesn’t set out to recount every single event in Welles’ life. Instead, it uses lively prose to attempt to give you a flavor of the man’s personality, to give you a sense of what it must have been like to have been around him as he tore through Broadway, radio, and Hollywood.

This is an astute approach, because Welles’ story, more than most peoples’, is the story of his personality — both how it brought him fame and success and the price it exacted upon him. Welles was a visionary of such force and drive that by age 25 (!) he had been entrusted by a major studio with the resources to make his first film; and he used those resources to make Citizen Kane, still remembered as perhaps the single best movie ever.

The same drive that led him to the top, though, led him to alienate everyone around him; and the same voracious intellectual appetites that helped him to envision Kane drove him in so many directions at once that he would later become famous for never finishing his projects. By the time he died alone in 1985, he had become a kind of punchline, grossly overweight and earning a living pitching box wine and frozen peas on TV, a pale shadow of the dashing young visionary who had captivated and threatened Hollywood’s leading lights. After his death, though, a new generation discovered his work, and today he’s remembered among the great directors.

“Rosebud”, unlike most biographies, lingers not on Welles the man, but on the glory and tragedy of his life. Thomson’s prose, witty and erudite, is a pleasure to read. This biography is neither comprehensive nor academic; there are other works you can turn to if that’s what you’re looking for.  What it is, though, is compelling, insightful, and just plain fun to read.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with Welles, you could do a lot worse than to start learning about the man and his work by reading “Rosebud”; it will give you a sense for why so many people (me included) are so fascinated by both, these many years later. And if you already know Welles, read the book anyway; you’ll discover whole new facets to the man’s life that you never appreciated before. Either way, “Rosebud” is a great take on a truly American story.

An ADOdb Question

Posted on September 5, 2006

Here’s a question for any of you out there who use the ADOdb database abstraction layer for PHP.

I have a block of code that looks like this:

$sql1 = “MySQL INSERT statement”;
$sql2 = “MySQL UPDATE statement”;

$dbconn -> StartTrans();

$dbconn -> Execute($sql1);
$dbconn -> Execute($sql2);

$dbconn -> CompleteTrans();

Now, here’s the thing. There’s a typo in the SQL statement I put into the $sql2 variable. It will never process successfully.

Given that, nothing should be committed to the database. Correct? Because ADOdb’s “smart transactions” means that it will catch the error being returned from the second Execute and automatically roll the transaction back.

Right?

That’s certainly how the docs read to me. Thing is, that’s not how ADOdb is behaving. Instead of rolling back the whole transaction, it simply fails the second Execute() call, and commits the first — which is pretty much the exact opposite of what anything calling itself “transactions” should do, since it leaves loose data hanging around.

Am I missing something regarding ADOdb’s transaction handling? Should I be using an alternate syntax, throwing in some manual rollback triggering of my own, or what? Frankly if I can’t rely on ADOdb to handle transactions reliably my impulse is just to throw the whole library out — but this seems like a basic enough use-case that I can’t imagine nobody’s run into it before, if it truly is a bug and not just me screwing up somewhere.

PHP gurus, whaddaya think?

UPDATE (Oct. 20, 2006): Problem solved!

Windows Vista Pricing Announced

Posted on September 5, 2006

Microsoft have finally announced the final list of all the versions of their long-delayed Windows Vista operating system, including prices for each.

The good news is that the number of different versions has shrunk to five, down from six. Prices range from $199 for “Windows Vista Home Basic” to $399 for “Windows Vista Ultimate“.

Of course, Ubuntu is free, top notch, and runs fine on today’s PCs. But it’s up to you 🙂

Air Marshals Can (Finally) Be More Frank Serpico and Less Joe Friday

Posted on August 28, 2006

Two years ago in this space, I wrote about how the Federal Air Marshal Service’s ridiculous dress code was hampering marshals’ ability to protect passengers:

In other words, the Air Marshal Service has decided that, when their dress code comes into conflict with their requirement to blend in with the other passengers, the dress code comes first. Never mind that this could result in Marshals sticking out like a sore thumb — which would make them pretty easy to identify and eliminate in the opening stage of any halfway-competent hijacking operation. That’s not important. What’s important, apparently, is that the dress code be preserved.

Well, it took two years and the appointment of a new director to the Air Marshals Service, but they finally announced last week that the dress code is being relaxed:

In a memo to the air marshals, [FAMS Director Dana] Brown said the dress code was changed to "allow you to blend in and not direct attention to yourself, as well as be sufficiently functional to enable you to conduct your law enforcement responsibilities."
Air marshals had complained that Brown’s predecessor, Thomas Quinn, insisted on a too-formal dress code that allowed people to pick them out. The marshals said, for example, that being forced to wear a jacket and collared shirt made them stand out on flights to Hawaii.

You can read Brown’s complete memo to the marshals at ABCNews.com. While you’re there, you can see all the stories ABC’s investigative reporters have filed about the sorry state of the Air Marshals Service over the years since 9/11. It’s a depressing read, but hopefully this nice little sign of sanity is an indicator of better things to come.

Here’s One For the JDs

Posted on August 24, 2006

Hey, law dorks!

You can now subscribe to a podcast that delivers recordings of oral arguments from the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s even an "iTunes Enhanced" version (whatever that means).

Do we live in the future or what?

Sweating the Details

Posted on August 22, 2006

I have to hand it to Mark Pilgrim; he is the only podcaster or videoblogger I’m aware of who does the extra work to make his multimedia content accessible to the handicapped. (His videoblog has closed captions embedded.)

I probably should have expected no less from the guy who wrote the outstanding Dive Into Accessibility, but it’s still nice to see.

Is there anybody else out there blogging with audio or video who’s as considerate as Mark is?

Mmm, That’s Good Kool-Aid

Posted on August 16, 2006

Dedicated readers will remember that a few days ago I made some observations regarding Apple’s latest product offerings.Today, über-Apple fanboy John Gruber weighed in on the same subject, and made the following curious observation while doing so:

In addtion to completing the architectural switch to x86 processors, the Mac Pro also completes Apple’s “Mac” nomenclatural consolidation. Gone is the “Power” prefix from “PowerBook” and “Power Mac”; in is the word “Mac” in every computer Apple makes. Every computer but Xserve, that is…
[W]hy not the Xserve, too? Clearly it’s not just because “MacServe” sounds bad, otherwise we wouldn’t be stuck with “MacBook Pro”. One explanation could be that Apple’s marketing executives just don’t care enough about the Xserve to demand a name change. That doesn’t ring true to me, though. It probably is true that the Xserve is much less interesting to Steve Jobs than any of Apple’s other computers, but it’s not like the Xserve is lost in a labyrinthian Dell-like product matrix: Apple sells two notebook brands, three desktops, and one server. That’s it.
My bet is that it’s because the Xserve is the one machine Apple sells where they expect a significant number of customers to run an OS other than Mac OS X, full-time.

(Emphasis mine)

What the hell? Is he serious? Gruber really thinks Apple is planning for people to buy XServes, wipe them, and load ’em up with Red Hat?

As I noted earlier, Apple’s server offerings are generally priced at a significant premium compared to other low-end servers. This can’t be explained by the hardware inside them, which is generally pretty basic stuff for a 1U server. The best explanation offered in my comments for this was that the Apple premium is for the software — the administrative tools that come with OS X Server, which make basic administrative tasks much easier than is typical for a Unix box.

I can buy that. But apparently, Gruber cannot. As he notes, Apple’s tardiness in renaming the XServe (not to mention the loooong delays between hardware refreshes) probably means one of two things:

1. Apple wants to distance the XServe from its "Mac" product line, or
2. Apple doesn’t really give a shit about the XServe.

He can’t bring himself to believe #2 (surely His Steveness would not sell us a product that he didn’t believe in, heart and soul!), so the answer must be #1: Apple figures that people buy XServes to run with other OSes — in other words, to run as something else than Macs.

Which seems pretty screamingly implausible to me. Seriously, does anybody buy servers from Apple to run anything other than OS X on? Why on earth would you do that when Apple charges you a 40% premium for commodity hardware?

The idea that Apple’s heart is on the desktop and not in the server closet doesn’t strike me as too hard to believe. I’m not sure why Gruber has so much trouble with it.

Fun With Spam: A Girl Named Scott?

Posted on August 16, 2006

A girl named Scott?

Two Sides to the Same Story

Posted on August 15, 2006

This is interesting…

Clint Eastwood has a new movie coming out this fall.  It’s called “Flags of Our Fathers” and it’s an adaptation of a book about the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War 2, told from the perspective of the U.S. Marines who fought there.

What’s interesting is that, at the same time, Eastwood has been making another movie.  That one is called “Red Sun, Black Sand” and it tells the same story, only from the Japanese soldiers’ point of view, with an all-Japanese cast (led by the inimitable Ken Watanabe).

“Flags” and “Red Sun” are both due to be released in both the American and Japanese markets, though I would imagine they will be promoted quite differently in each.  (What do you want to bet that “Red Sun” only plays in a few art-houses over here?)

If you’re interested in a first look, the Japanese trailer for “Red Sun” is out now, and it looks damn good — it’s an interesting glimpse at the story through Japanese eyes.  “Flags” has yet to have its trailer released.

It Was Probably Only a Matter of Time

Posted on August 15, 2006

Check it out: there is now a Segway SUV.

How I wish I was kidding.

Windows Live Writer

Posted on August 15, 2006

I’ve been playing around a little with Microsoft’s new Windows Live Writer tool, and it’s pretty slick.

If you missed the announcement, WLW is a little graphical tool for composing posts to a blog. It works out of the box with MS’s Windows Live Spaces service, which isn’t surprising; and with any other blog tool that supports the MetaWeblog API (like Movable Type and WordPress), which is.

It writes nice clean XHTML, and (this is a nice touch) it even imports your stylesheet from your blog so that what you type in the editing window appears exactly the way it will on your blog:

It’s still a little rough around the edges in some places, but it’s still in beta so hopefully those will all be smoothed out by the final release. And even in beta it’s more impressive than any other posting tool I’ve seen for the Win32 platform — and that includes the ones that expect you to pay for them (WLW is free).

It’s nice enough that I find myself pining for something even close to equivalent for Linux — I’m on Windows at work but I’ve gone over to Kubuntu full time at home, and to the best of my knowledge there’s no Free tool that’s even remotely equivalent.

My kudos to the team at MS that whipped this up…

UK Stops Airliner Bomb Plot

Posted on August 10, 2006

Scotland Yard is saying that they’ve foiled an attack on airliners that could have been of 9/11 scale — or bigger:

A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said.
It is thought the plan was to detonate explosive devices smuggled in hand luggage on to as many as 10 aircraft.
Police are searching premises after 21 people were arrested. Home Secretary John Reid said they believed the “main players” were accounted for…
Mr Reid said had the attack gone ahead it would have caused a loss of life of “unprecedented scale”.

Congratulations to the authorities over there for taking these guys out.

Own3d!

Posted on August 9, 2006

Hee!  Check out what’s currently the #1 listing on Google for any of the following queries:

• "US Airways lost baggage"
• "US Airways baggage claim"
• "US Airways lost my luggage"
• "US Airways pig-fucking commie bastards"

I should start selling ads on this blog to Southwest…

The Best of Just Well Mixed

Posted on August 9, 2006

You probably haven’t noticed, but over there on the right side of the page, in the categories list, I’ve created a new category called "The Best of Just Well Mixed".

In that category, I’ve placed all the posts I’ve written to date that I would consider the best of this blog.   As of today, there’s 70 posts in there.  Any new ones I write that I’m particularly proud of will be in there too, going forward.

Why bother?  Well, in a few months this blog will be five years old (!), and the amount of stuff I’ve written here boggles my mind — more than 1100 posts since this blog launched in January 2002.  Most of them are nothing special, but there’s some bits in there that deserve not to get buried in the pile, so this will help keep that from happening.

If you haven’t been reading from the beginning, and you’ve got a few minutes to kill, feel free to take a trip down memory lane.  All my old posts still accept comments, so you can even tell me that I was full of it three years ago, should you feel the need to. 

Strange Doings in Connecticut

Posted on August 8, 2006

Today’s the day of the big Democratic primary in Connecticut, with challenger Ned Lamont looking like he may potentially unseat Fox News’ favorite Democrat, Senator Joe (“Joementum”) Lieberman.

This morning the race took a weird turn when Lieberman’s primary campaign site, http://www.joe2006.com/, went offline, displaying an “Account Suspended” page from their Web host in its place. The Lieberman team’s email addresses (on the same domain, joe2006.com) were non-functional as well.

The Lieberman campaign charged that the site had been knocked offline by a malicious “denial of service” attack coordinated by Lamont:

Sean Smith, Lieberman’s campaign manager, said the site began having problems Monday night and crashed for good at 7 a.m. Lieberman’s staff offered no evidence that Lamont’s supporters were to blame.
Smith said the campaign has contacted the Connecticut attorney general’s office and asked for a criminal investigation by state and federal authorities. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office declined immediate comment. Calls placed to the FBI and the chief state’s attorney’s office seeking comment were not immediately returned.
“Voters cannot go to our Web site. They cannot access information,” Smith said. “It is a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters.”

Lieberman’s spokesman, Dan Gerstein, echoed this charge to Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, adding that :

They disabled both our website and our email yesterday morning. So we have had almost no ability to use electronic communications over the final two days of the election.
That has severely impeded our ability to communicate with our field offices and internally here at HQ, which in turn has undermined our ability to talk to voters and to coordinate our get out the voter efforts.
This is serious, which is why we have called on the Lamont campaign to aggressive get the word out in the online world that this has got to stop.

Lamont’s staff offered to help Lieberman’s however they could. However, Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos (an acknowledged Lamont partisan) did some digging and discovered that the culprit might be simple technical ineptitude rather than Evil Hackers:

They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.

Apparently Joe2006.com is hosted on an el cheapo shared hosting plan. If that’s the case, it’s easy to imagine that the site went down due to a simple spike in usage (it is primary day, and their primary is being closely watched across the country) rather than any malicious action.

That leaves the e-mail outage, though. The only scenario I can figure where the shared-hosting explanation would also account for e-mail outage would be if they were doing DNS off the same box as their Web site, or if they had registered the domain through the hosting company and the company shut down all their services when they blasted through their bandwidth cap.

Personally, the shared-hosting’s-not-enough explanation strikes me as more likely than the we-got-hacked explanation, even factoring in the fact that they lost e-mail as well. Why? They’ve been offline all day, which certainly seems to imply that they do not have any technical people near at hand. That means their services were probably set up by some doorknob who didn’t know how to do it right in the first place…

What do you think? Does it seem more plausible to you that overrunning a shared host’s limitations could knock their site and email offline, or that an organized hack campaign has been aimed at Lieberman?

UPDATE (5:45PM): Lieberman campaign’s online consultant denies relying on shared hosting plan, but can’t say how much he pays for hosting or where his client’s site would be hosted other than MyHostCamp. What do you want to bet he’s been charging the campaign $150/month for hosting, paying the $15 to MyHostCamp, and keeping the change?

Not to mention this choice quote:

[Consultant Dan Geary] didn’t have any more information about the nature of the supposed attack. “I’ve spent 99% of my time speaking [to reporters] about the story,” he said.

Hey, doorknob — if I had hired you as my Internet consultant and my site was down all Election Day, it would not thrill me to find out that you were too busy giving interviews to fix the damn site.

UPDATE (5:54PM): State Attorney General’s office promises investigation.

UPDATE (5:56PM): Lieberman campaign retracts charge that Lamont supporters are behind alleged DoS.

UPDATE (7:13PM): I was wrong. Lieberman’s consultants didn’t charge him $150 for $15 Web hosting. Nope, they charged him $1,500!

UPDATE (6:34AM August 9): Owner of hosting company cited in “charged him $1,500” report has threatened to sue Wonkette for associating them with the outage:

2Dog Media, LLC has not hosted the joe2006.com website for over 3 months. When the site was hosted with us, it was on a dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth and daily server back-ups. The Lieberman Campaign was paying much more than $7 a month for this service. The campaign manager, Sean Smith, came on board and decided he would rather work with a friend of his that he had worked with in the past. Since then, our company has not been in charge of the hosting services.

Oh snap!

(Lieberman lost, by the way. Though nobody seems to have told him.)

UPDATE (6:42AM August 9): TPM Muckraker reports that Lieberman’s web host denies the problems were caused by exceeding a bandwidth cap, blaming the outage on an unspecified hack attack:

When I spoke with him at 9 p.m. Tuesday, [MyHostCamp owner Samuel] Hubbell said the site had been hacked, but declined to say what kind of attack he believes had been used.
“We’re still trying to figure out where it came from,” Hubbell said. “That’s what we’re investigating. . . I can’t clearly say at this point.”

Note that (if I’m reading the report correctly), while Hubbell denies the issue was bandwidth, he does not deny that Joe2006.com was hosted on a shared hosting plan.

UPDATE (7:04AM August 9): Consultant Dan Geary denies using shared hosting to the New York Times:

Mr. Geary said that claims by Lamont supporters that the site was being run by a single, inexpensive computer were also inaccurate. He said that he had contracted with a Dallas-based Web company, Server Matrix, as the host of Joe2006.com. Executives at Server Matrix did not return phone calls seeking comment.

UPDATE (2:27PM August 9): Remember when I said Lieberman’s people were backing off the charge that the outage was caused by his opponent?

Well, somebody oughta tell their Web guys, because as of right now the joe2006.com site is still down — we’re coming up on two full days offline now — and still blaming Lamont:

Pathetic.

UPDATE (8:53PM August 9): Hey open-source content management fans! Guess who the Lieberteam is blaming for the outage now?

The site uses a software package called Joomla to manage its content, according to both [Geary and Hubbell]. Hubbell insists his company kept the servers up-to-date with all security upgrades and patches. Right now, he theorizes that an as-yet-unreported flaw in Joomla was exploited by a hacker to bring the site down.
“It was potentially various components and modules, we haven’t figured out which one,” Hubbell said. “That’s kind of the guess. . . . The security patches were so fresh that. . . there might have been an additional undocumented loophole that someone got through.”

Considering that Joomla is notorious both for poor scalability and for needing frequent security patches, I’m not sure this tidbit clears anything up. Sure is a rousing endorsement for Joomla, though, eh?

UPDATE (10AM August 10): Well, it’s now been more than two full days since their site got “hacked”. Surely they’ve sorted things out by now…

Never mind.

UPDATE (December 20): Epilogue.

The Only Interesting Thing Apple Announced Today

Posted on August 7, 2006

Well, today was the start of Apple’s 2006 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), and they kicked it off with the usual spectacle of rolling out new products.  And of course, like all things Apple, it was blogged obsessively.

Mostly, the announcements were a big yawn, at least for the non-hardcore.  There’s an Intel Power Mac (I’m sorry, Mac Pro) now — big surprise, eh?  Oh, and some improvements to OS X.

There was one announcement, though, that I thought was pretty cool — and, amazingly, it’s one that seems to have been nearly completely overlooked in the blog blitz, so I thought I’d point it out here.

In their list of new features added to their OS X Server product, we find this:

Introducing iCal Server, the first calendar server for Mac OS X Server. Now it’s easy to share calendars, schedule meetings, and coordinate events within a workgroup, a small business, or a large corporation. Built on open standard protocols, iCal Server provides integration with leading calendaring programs. And unlike other calendaring solutions, iCal Server doesn’t impose a per-user license, so your business can grow without having to pay for additional licenses…

Using iCal Server, colleagues can propose and set up meetings, book conference rooms, and more quickly and easily…

iCal Server uses open calendaring protocols for integrating with leading calendaring programs including iCal 3 in Leopard, Mozilla’s Sunbird, OSAF’s Chandler and Microsoft Outlook.

Wow, that sounds like a pretty credible threat to Microsoft Exchange to me — especially for small businesses, given that (a) it works with their existing calendaring client (Outlook) and (b) unlike Exchange, you don’t have to deal with paying a fee for each user you connect to the server.

Of course, the acid test will be whether it’s as easy to work with and administer as Exchange is.  But assuming it doesn’t suck, this could be very good news for all of us who have waited for years for a real challenger to Exchange.

UPDATE: In the interest of fairness I should point out that, in inimitable Apple fashion, their server offering is ludicrously overpriced. $3K for a 1U server with one (obsolete) CPU, 1GB of RAM and a single SATA hard drive is a tough pill to swallow.

UPDATE THE SECOND (Aug. 8): Good discussion going on in the comments. Sandy points out that a refresh for the XServe line was announced at WWDC too — starting in October, that same $3,000 will buy you a dual Xeon XServe, rather than a pokey single G5.

That’s good news, and it makes the basic XServe a better deal. I still think there’s issues with Apple’s XServe strategy — the fact that they let the XServe go so long between updates illustrates some of the risks of being completely dependent on a single vendor for your technology. If you’re a Linux shop and Dell is dragging its feet on updating its hardware, you can go to a million other vendors; not so with Apple. That’s less of a concern for low-end workgroup servers than it is for things like application and database servers, though.

And Oscar points out that part of the reason you pay a premium for OS X servers is because Apple has invested in making administration easier than it is on your typical Linux box, reducing the need for a dedicated high-skill sysadmin.

What Not to Do This Summer

Posted on August 3, 2006

This may be the single worst vacation idea ever.

Glad to See We Still Have Our Priorities Straight

Posted on July 27, 2006

Seen on Technorati‘s home page this morning:

Sigh.

Why Not Say He Fell Down the Stairs?

Posted on July 27, 2006

BBC News — China activist ‘beat himself up’:

Chinese investigators say activist Fu Xiancai, who was paralysed after a severe beating, inflicted the blows himself, according to a rights body.
Mr Fu, who campaigned for people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, was beaten up returning home after he was summoned by police in Hubei province.
The June beating was so severe he is not expected to walk again, according to Human Rights in China (HRIC).
But an official investigation has ruled the attack was fabricated.
Officials told Mr Fu’s son, Fu Bing, that investigators had failed to find anyone else’s footprints at the scene of the attack, and had concluded that he must have hit himself.