Socks Awaaaay

Posted on June 27, 2005

Lately, now that the weather’s nice, I’ve been taking the long way home after work; instead of going to the nearest Metro station to my office (Foggy Bottom/GWU, about a 10 minute walk), I’ve been walking up through Georgetown, across the Key Bridge, and over to the Rosslyn station on the other side of the Potomac. It kicks the walk up to about 40 minutes or so, but walking through Georgetown is always nice, and you can watch the kayakers and crew teams out on the river as you walk over the bridge. Tunes courtesy of my XM MyFi make the time fly by.

Naturally, given the duration of the walk it doesn’t make much sense to do it in my office shoes. So I throw a pair of sneakers and athletic socks in my bag before I go to work, and change footwear before I leave the office, stowing the “work” shoes and socks in my bag until I get home.

Anyway, I’m out walking today and I get about halfway across the bridge, blissfully zoned out listening to the radio, when I realize that my bag is hanging off my shoulder in a weird way. I stop to check it out and it quickly becomes clear why — one of the zippers had worked its way open, and the bag was flapping half open in the breeze.

How long had it been like that? Who knows? I was so oblivious that for all I know I bopped all through Georgetown with my bag hanging open like an idiot.

I quickly check the contents of the bag to make sure I haven’t lost anything. Thankfully, everything that was in the bag when I left the office is in there now.

Except my socks.

Oops!

So — if you’re walking down M Street in Georgetown and you see a rolled-up pair of khaki socks on the street… you know who to blame.

Yahoo Search: Better Than Google

Posted on June 16, 2005

… at least, that’s been my experience for one batch of searches today.

I had to reinstall Firefox on my PC at work, and in the process I lost my favorite Greasemonkey scripts, Google Butler and Book Burro. I hadn’t bookmarked the pages where you could download them, either. So I hit Google to search for them.

Weirdly, Google’s results for my searches were pretty awful. The first search I did was on the terms “butler greasemonkey“, figuring that would narrow the results enough. What Google returned, however, was a bunch of pages talking about the Google Butler script — the link to the actual script itself was way down the page, nearly at the bottom.

Next, I tried searching on “book burro” and got the exact same thing — several pages talking about the script, with the script itself trailing behind. The first result, in fact, was a page from one of my own blogs praising Book Burro!

Huh? I originally fell in love with Google back when it was at google.stanford.edu because of its uncanny ability not just to find a bunch of sorta related pages, but to find exactly the page I was looking for and put it first on the results list. (That’s why that “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is there.) So this struck me as pretty sloppy.

Since Yahoo! has been pushing hard on interesting search tools lately (like the Y!Q search link I’ve got at the bottom of my posts), I thought I’d run the exact same queries through their engine to see what it came back with. In both cases, Yahoo put the home page for the relevant script at #1 in the result list.

See for yourself:

• Yahoo Search: butler greasemonkey
• Yahoo Search: book burro

So I never thought I’d see the day, but here it is — for at least some searches, Yahoo’s results are better than Google’s. Ain’t competition grand?

(Full disclosure: Earlier this year I was a beta tester of the Y!Q search service. I found it interesting and useful enough that when the beta ended I chose to keep it around on the blog. For participating in the beta and providing feedback on Y!Q, I was paid the kingly sum of $100 by Yahoo. This payment was not contingent on my continuing use of Y!Q, nor did it require me to praise Y!Q or Yahoo in public or private to receive it. I have no other business interest in either Yahoo or Google.)

BFF! Kinda

Posted on June 15, 2005

Fascinating story at Slate today about the competitive friendship of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

“Dear Fellow Rider”

Posted on June 7, 2005

(Click image to download PDF copy of flyer)

Since I dinged the Washington Post in my last post for wallowing in nostalgia for its glory days as an investigative paper rather than continuing to live up to them, it’s only fair to point out a series they’ve been running over the last few days that’s struck me as a real counterpoint.

“Off the Rails” is a four-part series that started Sunday that has explored in detail exactly how badly managed Washigton, D.C.’s Metro system has been. It’s strong stuff. Anyone who rides Metro knows that the quality of service isn’t what it used to be — I was actually shocked when I returned to DC in 2002 after several years away to see how bad it had gotten — but in this series, The Post has exposed Metro’s problems as much worse than everyday wear and tear.

The centerpiece of the series is an independent analysis of Metro safety and performance data by The Post, which uncovered, among other things, that:

• Warnings of lowered safety levels in the Metrorail system have been routinely ignored, due to the lack of any central oversight authority;
• The newest batch of rail cars added to Metro’s fleet — the ones you may have noticed with the spiffy new red, white, and blue upholstery in place of the old earth tones — show a disturbing tendency to jump off the track, with four derailments in 18 months;
• “Storage tracks”, which are not supposed to be used to carry everyday traffic, were being used for such a purpose at the Reagan National Airport station in January 2003, leading to a derailment; while a restraining rail has been installed at that station to prevent another accident, a similar storage track is in use at West Falls Church station without any such preventive measures
• After spending $93 million to improve the reliability of escalators in stations across the system, a third of the repaired escalators are now breaking down more frequently than they did before they were serviced

… and on and on. This is what a metropolitan newspaper is supposed to do — hold the authorities’ feet to the fire.

And you can tell they’re feeling it at Metro headquarters, too, because when I entered the station to come home from work today, there was a Metro employee standing there handing out copies of a flyer entitled “Dear Fellow Rider” specifically seeking to rebut The Post’s claims. Thing is, though, it never really gets around to addressing the claims — it just talks about how ridership is up, and Metro is a good system, and they’ve been improving with time, and blah blah blah.

The irony? When I got past the guy with the flyers and onto the platform, here’s what I saw:

That’s right — broken escalators, and a platform overflowing with people because the trains were running late!

Here’s a hint to Dick White and the rest of the people in charge at Metro — there’s no need to waste my money printing up flyers rebutting the stories in the paper, and paying people to stand around handing them out. The only reason the stories need rebutting is because your management is so damn bad! You could do a lot more to rebut The Post’s charges by dropping the PR game altogether and just concentrating on improving the quality of service. If that comes up, they can say anything they want in the paper and nobody will care.

You only have to bother rebutting stories about yourself when they’re true. When they’re obviously false, they rebut themselves. So how about you get to work making the stories false, rather than telling us not to listen to them?

(Note: if seeing your money wasted by Metro on flyers and guys to hand them out ticks you off as much as it does me, click this link to send them an e-mail telling them so.)

Nostalgia — You’re Soaking In It

Posted on June 1, 2005

Jesus Christ. The Washington Post has gone completely apeshit today with this “Deep Throat Revealed” coverage.

Something like ten stories (!) in today’s paper are Deep Throat stuff. On the front page, it practically shoves every other story off completely:

(Click image to enlarge; image from washingtonpost.com)

And the Web site! My God!

(Click image to enlarge)

Check out the headline that’s peeking out down there way below the fold: “Dutch Reject EU Constitution“. Yeah, no reason why that might be more newsworthy than a good long wallow in nostalgia.

They’ve even put up a “Deep Throat Revealed” blog, for Pete’s sake!

I know that Watergate is the story that made The Post. But come on, folks, this is unseemly. It’s been thirty years and you haven’t broken anything like it since. In fact, when war was brewing in Iraq, your reportage was so shoddy — so remiss in its failure to challenge the story that was spoon-fed to you by the Administration — that you even had to apologize to your readers:

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., “we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration’s rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part.”
Across the country, “the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones,” Downie said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to the minority.”
When national security reporter Dana Priest was addressing a group of intelligence officers recently, she said, she was peppered with questions: “Why didn’t The Post do a more aggressive job? Why didn’t The Post ask more questions? Why didn’t The Post dig harder?”

Good questions. Maybe instead of congratulating themselves for having the guts to ask the tough questions three decades ago, The Post would be better served by proving that the paper that broke Watergate can still be as relevant today as it was back then.

For Memorial Day, Do Something For the Living

Posted on May 30, 2005

Since today is Memorial Day, we’re all remembering those who have made the supreme sacrifice so that we can be free to enjoy a day off.

But why not do more than just remember? Why not reach out and do something for those who are risking their lives right now — those who run the risk of making that supreme sacrifice every day?

No matter what you think of the war in Iraq (and if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know what I think of it), there’s no reason to hold it against the men and women who are sweating out daily mortar attacks and roadside IEDs. They can use your support — and I don’t mean slapping a stupid sticker on your SUV, either.

Here’s some ways you can reach out and help a soldier.

• If you’d like to send a care package, AnySoldier.com will make sure it gets to a soldier who’s serving on the front lines who isn’t already getting mail from friends or family.
• The Veterans of Foreign Wars has a program called Operation Uplink, where you can buy phone cards for soldiers serving overseas so they can call their loved ones back home without racking up phone bills.
• In a similar vein, Cell Phones for Soldiers will take your old cell phone, recycle it, and turn the proceeds into calling cards that are distributed to soldiers on the line.
• Books for Soldiers is an online service where serving soldiers and soldiers in VA hospitals can post things they like to read, and then if you own those books, they connect you to the soldier so you can mail them.
• Got a ton of frequent flier miles that you’ve built up? Donate some to Operation Hero Miles so that a soldier won’t have to pay for their flight home — or so that the families of wounded soldiers can be flown to their bedsides, free of charge.
• AdoptAPlatoon runs a variety of projects to get needed supplies to soldiers serving abroad.
• You can help deployed snipers get the specialized gear they need by contributing to AmericanSnipers.org (formerly Adopt A Sniper).

What if I just want to say “thanks”?

You can send an e-mail to a random member of any service you choose through anyservicemember.navy.mil. (Note that the Postal Service will no longer deliver postal mail addressed to “Any Service Member”, for security reasons.)

And finally, consider giving to one of these organizations that are working to make sure that soldiers get the honorable treatment they deserve, both during their service and when they come home:

• Veterans of Foreign Wars
• Soldiers for the Truth
• Operation Truth

My thanks to Operation Truth and the Department of Defense sites, among others, for helping me compile this list. For a complete list of ways you can help soldiers and their families, see AmericaSupportsYou.mil.

Well, I Called That One

Posted on May 29, 2005

Microsoft’s IEBlog confirms: IE7 won’t be available for Windows 2000.

It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000. One reason is where we are in the Windows 2000 lifecycle. Another is that some of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.

So like I predicted back in February, if you’re not running XP with Service Pack 2, upgrading to IE7 will only cost you $100.

Or you could, you know, just download Firefox today for free, rather than waiting and paying to get IE7 tomorrow…

Paradox On Demand

Posted on May 29, 2005

Paradox on-Demand: Buy great strategy games at low prices, download them, play them right now. No need to wait for shipping, or muck about with CDs. Nice!

These are the great games from Paradox Interactive that I’ve spoken of so highly here before, so if you’re into this sort of thing at all this is right up your alley.

“Everyone is a burning sun”

Posted on May 24, 2005

Jesus, don’t cry
You can rely on me honey
You can combine anything you want
I’ll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun
Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around
Don’t cry
You can rely on me honey
You can come by any time you want
I’ll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun
Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around
Voices whine
Skyscrapers are scraping together
Your voice is smoking
Last cigarettes are all you can get
Turning your orbit around
Our love
Our love
Our love is all we have
Our love
Our love is all of God’s money
Everyone is a burning sun

— Jeff Tweedy and Wilco, “Jesus, etc.“

What Can I Say, I’m Digging Whitman Today

Posted on May 19, 2005

ONE hour to madness and joy!
O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings!
(I bequeath them to you, my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)
O to be yielded to you, whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me, in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me — to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d man!
O the puzzle — the thrice-tied knot — the deep and dark pool! O all untied and illumin’d!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
O to be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions — I from mine, and you from yours!
O to find a new unthought — of nonchalance with the best of nature!
O to have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!
O to have the feeling, to-day or any day, I am sufficient as I am!
O something unprov’d! something in a trance!
O madness amorous! O trembling!
O to escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts — with invitations!
To ascend — to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate Soul!
To be lost, if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

— Walt Whitman, “One Hour to Madness and Joy“

Two Ways To Say the Same Thing

Posted on May 19, 2005

WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands;
Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true Soul and Body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs — out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.
O I have been dilatory and dumb;
I should have made my way straight to you long ago;
I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.
I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you;
None have done justice to you — you have not done justice to yourself;
None but have found you imperfect — I only find no imperfection in you;
None but would subordinate you — I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you;
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.
Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light;
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light;
From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

— Walt Whitman, “To You”

Wanting is — what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant,
Where is the blot?

— Robert Browning, “Wanting — Is What?“

New Photoset: Hiking Great Falls

Posted on May 14, 2005

The weather was so nice for most of the day today that I hopped in the car and drove out to Great Falls National Park to do some hiking. My luck held — it was sunny and warm the whole time I was out, and didn’t start raining until after I got home.

I had my phone with me, so I decided it might be fun to create a little illustrated travelogue of my hiking trip. Therefore, I give you my new photoset “Hiking Great Falls National Park” on Flickr.

How Soon We Forget

Posted on May 12, 2005

Huh, apparently O’Reilly are continuing their rich tradition of 100% buzzword-compliance by sponsoring an “Ajax Summit“.

I was struck by two passages in the write-up of the summit on the O’Reilly Network site. First:

The summit saw little or no interest in any sort of Ajax standard. [Adaptive Path’s Jesse James] Garrett noted that “the consensus of the group was that there are too many people trying to solve too many problems in too many environments for there to be one standard.” As such, he sees no universal Ajax toolkit forthcoming, possibly ever. “The variety and needs of Ajax developers are too diverse.”

Yeah! Ajax developers are wild, man! Standards? They don’t need no stinking standards!

… followed shortly by:

Back on the wider web, Ajax is being driven by a desire for cross-browser compatibility.

(snort)

By running away from the one way we’ve found so far that actually works to encourage cross-browser compatibility — open standards, openly arrived at — Ajax is fostering cross-browser compatibility?

Riiiiight. That must be why you have to write ’90s-style browser-sniffing JavaScript at the beginning of every Ajax app, so you can tell which XMLHTTPRequest invocation method to use — because browser-sniffing JavaScripts encourage cross-browser compatibility!

The future is bright — it’s just the people that are dim, I guess.

Firefox 1.0.4 Available, Fixes Security Hole

Posted on May 12, 2005

Saturday, May 7, 2005: A severe security flaw is found in the Mozilla code base by third-party security analysts that renders Firefox 1.0.3 open to exploitation.

Thursday, May 12, 2005: The Mozilla Foundation announces the release of Firefox 1.0.4, a security release that fixes the problems identified by the analysts.

Total time elapsed between the identification of the problem and the release of a fixed version: 6 days. Not too shabby!

(There’s also an updated version of the Mozilla Suite, if you’re still using that.)

To get Firefox 1.0.4 — and all Firefox users should — just download it from the Firefox product page, or use FF’s software update mechanism to grab the new version (you’ll see the green update indicator light on your Firefox menu bar, just click it to start the download).

Something To Think About

Posted on May 12, 2005

Reuters — Mine Kills Two U.S. Marines in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, May 12 (Reuters) – Two U.S. Marines were killed on Wednesday when their armoured vehicle drove over a mine in northwest Iraq during an offensive against insurgents, the U.S. military said on Thursday.
The military said 14 Marines were wounded in the blast.
The Marines were taking part in Operation Matador, an offensive against insurgents and foreign fighters in northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Wartime Prayer:

Dear Lord,
Lest I continue
My complacent way,
Help me to remember that somewhere,
Somehow out there
A man died for me today.
As long as there be war,
I then must
Ask and answer
Am I worth dying for?

“They Came Here to Die”

Posted on May 11, 2005

If you think Iraq is all peaches and cream and purple fingers these days, read “They Came Here to Die” in today’s Washington Post — the story of Lima Company, a team of Marine Reservists (including one guy who in civilian life is a cop from my home town) battling jihadis from outside Iraq to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades. Strong stuff.

Did He Really Say That?

Posted on May 10, 2005

You know, my expectations for President Bush’s historical literacy are not high. But his comments in Riga, Latvia on Saturday at the commemoration of the anniversary of the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Hitler managed to fail to clear even my abysmally low bar.

As we mark a victory of six days ago — six decades ago, we are mindful of a paradox. For much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

(Emphasis mine)

OK. First, the one thing he actually managed to get right: it was a colossal tragedy that the nations of Eastern Europe had to exchange one dictator for another at the end of the war. Seriously. After so many years of war and oppression, they deserved their freedom as much as the people of the West did.

However. Bush compares the Yalta conference, at which the victorious Allies set up the framework for postwar Europe, to be morally equivalent to such odious doings as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was the 1939 agreement between Nazi Germany and the USSR to jointly invade and divide up Poland.

Now, I see why Bush might get a bit of a kick talking this way — it fits his usual, generic “democracy is job 1” rhetoric. But it’s more than a little offensive. Yalta was not an agreement to make something happen that was not already in place, like Molotov-Ribbentrop was — it was a simple recognition of the facts on the ground. In 1945 the Red Army was in control of Eastern Europe, and Stalin wasn’t going to order them out anytime soon. Churchill and Roosevelt could protest, but they had little leverage. Stalin already had what he wanted. Yalta was a recognition of this, not the cause of it.

Bush’s words go beyond historical illiteracy into offensiveness because they imply that Britain and America should have done something about this state of affairs. What would Bush have had us do? Declare war on the USSR and try to push them out of Eastern Europe altogether? Fat chance — the Red Army dwarfed the other Allied forces, Britain had already been bankrupted by fighting the Nazis, and America was weary of war and ready for peace. There are some mountains you just can’t climb; Churchill and Roosevelt had the wit to recognize that, even if Bush does not.

And it’s not like they left Yalta empty-handed. At Yalta, Churchill and FDR got Stalin to at least agree to hold fair elections in his territories — even if they knew he would never act on this promise, just by getting him to make the agreement, they were maneuvering him from the position of World War ally into the Cold War enemy, seizing the moral high ground for the West in the rift that they must have known was coming.

Oddly, after excoriating the heroic leaders of the WW2 generation for not being macho enough to stick up for democracy (!), Bush seems to change his mind in the next breath:

The end of World War II raised unavoidable questions for my country: Had we fought and sacrificed only to achieve the permanent division of Europe into armed camps? Or did the cause of freedom and the rights of nations require more of us? Eventually, America and our strong allies made a decision: We would not be content with the liberation of half of Europe — and we would not forget our friends behind an Iron Curtain. We defended the freedom of Greece and Turkey, and airlifted supplies to Berlin, and broadcast the message of liberty by radio. We spoke up for dissenters, and challenged an empire to tear down a hated wall. Eventually, communism began to collapse under external pressure, and under the weight of its own contradictions. And we set the vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace — so dictators could no longer rise up and feed ancient grievances, and conflict would not be repeated again and again.

That’s all substantially true — but if we had walked away from Yalta and resolved to free the East by force, none of it would be. Instead the history of the second half of the twentieth century would be a story of even more global war, fought across the world, with millions of casualties and Europe’s recovery delayed by decades — and, almost certainly at some point, some level of atomic war between the combatants, with all the consequences that implies.

The people of the world were spared all that because of the decisions Churchill and Roosevelt made at Yalta, and in the immediate postwar months that followed. The outcome of the war wasn’t perfect; but given the reality of the USSR and Stalin, it’s easy to see how it could have been a lot worse. President Bush should think about that before he boils every leadership decision down to Democracy™ vs. Dictatorship™.

Google Web Accelerator == Pitiless Enforcer of Web Design Patterns

Posted on May 9, 2005

This one goes out to all my homies who design Web applications. You know who you are.

How many of you have apps that fire events which change the underlying data — things like deleting stuff from the database, say — when the user clicks a link indicating they want to do so? Raise your hands.

OK. Now, those of you with your hands up — how many of you prevent the user from accidentally deleting stuff this way by putting a JavaScript confirm dialog box on the link? Something like “Are you sure you want to delete this?”

All of you, eh?

Then you’ll be interested to know that the minute one of your users installs the new Google Web Accelerator, you’re going to be in for some serious problems.

Here’s the deal. When you submit an action from a link, you’re using the HTTP GET method. The alternate way to submit the action would be to put the action in a form, rather than a link — that way you’re using the HTTP POST method.

In practical terms, there’s not much difference — both GET and POST allow you to pass information to the server, which can then act on it. The only difference many developers see is that GET puts all the parameters in the URL, while POST embeds them in the headers.

But — and this is the key point — even though there may not be a practical difference between the two, there is an important distinction made in the RFC that defines them:

In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered “safe”. This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested.

Let me put this into English. According to The Specification, any action sent via GET should be “safe” — it should make no permanent changes to the underlying application or its data. The app should be no different after the GET than it was before it. GET is for retrieving data, not writing it.

Of course, the common usage of GET has diverged considerably from this. But this is an RFC, so if it conflicts with common usage, it’s common usage that’s wrong.

Now, what does this have to do with Google Web Accelerator?

As it turns out, a lot. See, the way GWA “speeds up the Web” is by using an approach called prefetching. This means that, when you’re on a page, it scans through that page, pulls out all the links, and downloads all the pages the links point to in the background while you’re reading the first page. That way, when you click the link, the page is right there — no need to wait for it to download, it’s already come down the wire.

Pretty clever, eh? Yeah — too clever.

See, when a user armed with GWA is browsing your Web app, GWA is gonna hit that link that says “Delete row in database” when it does its prefetch. When it clicks through all the links it found, it’s gonna click this one too. But you’ve protected it with a JavaScript dialog! you cry out, right? Wrong — GWA doesn’t understand JavaScript. So it merrily clicks the link and deletes the record in your database.

Depending on how many of these links there are in your app, this could be Very Bad.

The thing is, though, in this case it’s not Google that’s in the wrong. Their app makes the naïve assumption that every page out there uses GET in a way that follows the RFC. Now, any Web developer with 10 minutes’ experience could tell you that’s not the case; but it’s hard to fault them for following the rules.

The upshot, though, is that 10 years’ worth of Web apps are going to have to be reviewed — and fast! — to make up for our longstanding common misconception of how HTTP GET is to be used. In this way GWA is kind of like an RFC Robocop — forcing us to get right with the law tuit suite.

Pleasant? No. But don’t blame Google. The lesson here is to pay attention to the RFCs.

(Read more on this from Phil Ringnalda, 37Signals, O’Reilly Radar, Simon Willison.)

Tweaking Firefox With about:config

Posted on May 6, 2005

One of the genius decisions behind Firefox was the decision to simplify everything — to limit the number of choices the browser exposed to the average user. Firefox’s preferences panel is clean and relatively simple, and the defaults are set to the choices that make the most sense for the average user.

But what if you’re not the average user? What if you want to tweak Firefox beyond the options available in the preferences panel?

It’s as simple as this: go to the address bar in the browser and type

about:config

and hit “Enter”. This will bring up a page listing all of Firefox’s preferences — not just the common ones you can set through the GUI.

How many preferences does this give you access to, you ask? This many. Tweakers, start your engines 🙂

Stop Killing The Good Ones, Dammit!

Posted on May 5, 2005

Well, this came as a bit of a shock:

Washingtonpost.com: David Hackworth, Vietnam Vet and Military Analyst, Dies at 74.

HARTFORD, Conn. — Retired Army Col. David Hackworth, a decorated Vietnam veteran who spoke out against the war and later became a journalist and an advocate for military reform, has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 74.
Hackworth died Wednesday in Tijuana, Mexico, where he was receiving treatment for bladder cancer.
A Newsweek correspondent during the Gulf War, Hackworth worked in recent years as a syndicated columnist for King Features, often criticizing the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war…
“Hack never lost his focus,” said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, a California-based veterans group that Hackworth chaired. “That focus was on the young kids that our country sends to bleed and die on our behalf. Everything he did in his retirement was to try to give them a better chance to win and to come home. That’s one hell of a legacy.”

I just tried to check Soldiers for the Truth’s site, but it appears to be slashdotted — go figure.

Hackworth was a unique figure on the stage of American defense policy — a decorated soldier whose Vietnam experience led him to stand for decades as a tireless advocate for military leadership that put the soldier first.

Long before you ever heard about unarmored Hummers getting shot up in Iraq, Hack was screaming about them — and about a thousand other issues that put the lives of soldiers at risk for no good reason.

That’s not to say Hackworth was soft on soldiers. One of his most frequent topics was on the need to train them relentlessly, to make them “hardcore”, to turn them into “snake-eaters”. Anything that got in the way of that process earned his enmity.

And he was a writer. His book About Face chronicled his Vietnam experience and how it changed him. The Vietnam Primer is the distillation of operational lessons in fighting guerrilla warfare learned in field by hundreds of riflemen — lessons that are still saving lives today. Hazardous Duty follows Hack across a range of ’90s battlefields and near-battlefields — Iraq, Somalia, Korea — to examine the gradual decay of the military as an institution that has been exposed so dramatically of late.

(According to Amazon, that last one has one “statistically improbable phrase” as its signature: “rat fuck”. This should give you some of the flavor of Hackworth’s candor.)

Hack pulled no punches and took no prisoners. He will be missed.

UPDATE: SFTT’s site is back up, and in their remembrance of Hack they charge that a likely cause of the bladder cancer that killed him was exposure to Agent Blue — a herbicide deployed in Vietnam to kill the rice that sustained the enemy, right alongside its better-known counterpart, the defoliant Agent Orange. SFTT is working on a lawsuit to force the Pentagon to recognize exposure to Agent Blue as a hazard equal to exposure to Agent Orange, and compensate victims appropriately.

If you want to help them carry on this and other projects in Hackworth’s spirit, you can make a contribution through their Web site.

Apple Takes a Page From Microsoft

Posted on May 4, 2005

Well, this sucks… turns out that when Apple users who have Firefox set as their default browser update to Tiger (the recently released new version of OS X), the update process changes the default to Apple’s browser, Safari.

If a Windows service pack removed Firefox as the default and replaced it with IE, you’d hear the howls from sea to shining sea. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple gets a pass for the same behavior.

So You’re The Reason We’re So Screwed! Thanks

Posted on May 2, 2005

Seen on the window of a Porsche Cayenne S SUV:

Wow, 14 whole miles to the gallon? That’s some serious fuel efficiency there. But dammit, little Aidan and Madison have play dates to get to! Who has time to worry about such things?

It’s a good thing that our demand for gas-guzzling sport-utes doesn’t have any negative side effects…

Oh, yeah. There is that.

How to Be A Jerk on the Metro

Posted on May 2, 2005

Here’s one great way:

Yeah, you just wrap those cheeks right around that pole, there, buddy. It’s not like anyone else might want to use it too.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Posted on April 30, 2005

I just got back from seeing the movie version of one of my favorite books of all time, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Capsule review:

1. Don’t Panic. It’s not bad. In fact in many places it’s quite good. There is lots of stuff from the books that’s left out, but that’s to be expected when you squeeze three books into a 2-hour screenplay. And the material that’s original to the screenplay is pretty good, too.
2. I am officially, insanely, irretrievably in love with Zooey Deschanel.

Zooey Deschanel as Trillian in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.
Photo by Laurie Sparham – © Touchstone Pictures, All Rights Reserved

That is all.

Hubris! It’s What’s For Dinner

Posted on April 29, 2005

You know, a bankruptcy announcement is probably not the place to be waxing rhapsodic about how your tiny company that never actually shipped any of the far-out hardware it was touting managed to change everything, man!

I’m just sayin’.