New CNN Prez Puts Crossfire Out of Misery

Posted on January 6, 2005

With a bitch-slap for Tucker on the way out the door, too:

CNN has ended its relationship with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and will shortly cancel its long-running daily political discussion program, “Crossfire,” the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, said last night…
Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”
Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

Daaaaaaamn. Serious props to Jon Stewart there — how many people could lay waste to an institution like Crossfire so thoroughly that the network actually pulls the plug?

Exciting New Concepts in Home Decor

Posted on January 6, 2005

I have to tell you that I laughed out loud when I saw this.

I suppose that either means that I have a healthy lack of fear about death, or I’m a pretty sick motherfucker!

I’ll leave deciding which as an exercise for the reader 🙂

Call For Help: Generating Charts and Graphs in PHP

Posted on December 30, 2004

I need recommendations for a good, free (and, preferably, Free) charting library for PHP.

Ideally this library would be able to generate all the simple types of business graphics — line charts, bar charts, pie charts, etc. If it can do fancy stuff like find trendlines that’s even better.

Have a suggestion? Let me know in the comments thread. Thanks!

Rumsfeld and Transformation: The Word is Getting Out

Posted on December 29, 2004

Check this out.

The Aviator

Posted on December 28, 2004

I saw Martin Scorsese’s new movie about the life of Howard Hughes, The Aviator, on Sunday.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator
Image (c)2004, Miramax Pictures

This picture is a masterpiece. It is easily Scorsese’s strongest work in years. I was moved by his last picture, Gangs of New York, but I could recognize even when I first saw it why a lot of people weren’t — the last third of the film had a rushed, choppy feeling as the story lurched suddenly from the small-scale gang story Scorsese had been telling into the much larger story of the 1863 New York draft riots. For those of us who knew the history, it wasn’t too hard to follow the leap (the gangsters were Irish, and it was Irish immigrants angry at being pressed into the Union army who launched the riots), but that’s not many people these days, alas. The film was great, but it was hard not to wonder how much greater it could have been had it not been cut the way it had.

The Aviator leaves the viewer with no such what-ifs: it tells its tale confidently, and though it is a long movie it never slows its pace or seems to drag. Everything fits together perfectly.

It helps that Scorsese has chosen such a compelling subject. Most people only know Howard Hughes from the last years of his life, after his descent into madness left him an eccentric hermit; but in his youth he was a genuine innovator and pioneer in several very different fields (aircraft design, commercial air transport, and the movies), pulling himself to success in each mostly through obsessive attention to detail and sheer force of will. These same forces would eventually overwhelm his sanity, but while he managed to stay on the tiger, he accomplished some amazing things.

DiCaprio’s portrayal of Hughes is very strong. He hits all the right notes; watch the scene near the end where he pulls himself out of a prolonged obsessive fit to fight off an effort by rival tycoon Juan Trippe (the owner of Pan American Airlines, which at the time was the only airline to fly internationally from the U.S.) to buy out Hughes’ TWA, and you’ll see what I mean. You can sense the effort it must have taken Hughes to rally for that effort. DiCaprio’s performance is the latest evidence of his emergence as a serious actor (and, apparently, one of Scorsese’s go-to collaborators, much like Robert de Niro used to be).

The Aviator is Scorsese’s Citizen Kane — the story of a brilliant, driven man brought low in the end by his own weakness. It is full of great moments (the scene where Hughes becomes the “fastest man alive” in his experimental aircraft is so full of joy, it will make you want to get a pilot’s license — and another scene later on will make you think again). You should see it.

Administering MySQL with Navicat

Posted on December 27, 2004

MySQL is a great database package, but one area where it has always been weak is in its administrative interface. The default approach to working with MySQL seems to be driving it from the command shell, which is OK but quickly gets unwieldy when you are working with large and/or complex queries. Not to mention that once you’ve been exposed to the slick GUI management tools available for commercial RDBMSs like Microsoft SQL Server, it’s hard to go back.

For a long time I used SciBit’s Mascon as my graphical MySQL admin tool. Mascon was OK but always felt kind of clunky to me, like it was designed by DBAs rather than UI experts. It got the job done, but never really left me satisfied.

Lately I’ve been trying a new contender, PremiumSoft’s Navicat, and so far I’m really impressed. Navicat makes working with MySQL a breeze, and it does so in a package that has the fit and finish that Mascon always lacked. (O’Reilly has a good review of Navicat on their site.)

Even more impressive, it’s cross platform — unlike Mascon (which was Windows-only), you can get Navicat for Windows, OS X, or Linux. Which means no more telling the one Mac guy in the office to go track down his own MySQL GUI on Freshmeat (I’m looking at you, Sandy 😉 ).

Apparently Mascon is no longer in development, having been replaced by SciBit’s new offering MyCon. MyCon is about $20 less than Navicat, but if it’s as clunky as Mascon was, I’d be inclined to shell out the extra money. Anyone out there who can tell me if there’s any reason not to?

Tragedy and Hope

Posted on December 27, 2004

Two stories from the international wires:

• The death toll from the Indonesian tsunami is now 14,000 and still counting. (Learn what you can do to help.)
• Meanwhile, halfway around the world, democracy has won out in Ukraine as the people of that country finally got to have a fair election — an election which has elevated Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko to power after many trials, including an attempt to poison him.

Tragedy in South Asia, hope in Eastern Europe. The universe works in mysterious ways…

Christmas Day Catblogging

Posted on December 25, 2004

Since I’m home for the holidays and my folks have three cats, I thought I’d partake in a blogging tradition as old as blogging itself: catblogging.

Pee Wee (above) is the least social of their three cats. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he appears to view humans as a kind of necessary nuisance. His attitude towards people ranges from mild annoyance to outright pique. Still, though, I find myself respecting him for his flintiness.

Except, of course, when we get out a jar of baby food and he comes running and throws himself abjectly at our feet, playing cute to get a treat. Then he’s just selling out to The Man.

Missy (above) is the youngest of the three cats. She is a real FAP — a Feline-American Princess. Everything must be Just So for her to be happy. Example: we are always refilling her water bowl with fresh water, but sometimes she decides that water isn’t fresh enough — so she will jump in the sink and wait for someone to turn on the tap so she can drink straight from the faucet. But — and this is the true Missy touch — after you turn on the tap, she won’t drink until you leave. You want to watch me drink? How gauche! I don’t drink with the servants!

She can be very cute and friendly — much more so than Pee Wee, who reminds me more of a militant Black Panther circa 1971 — but you just have to remember The Way That Things Are Done.

Last, but certainly not least (insofar as he weighs a ton), is Victor (above). Victor is the oldest and strangest of the lot. All his life he has behaved as if he was convinced that he was a dog trapped in a cat’s body. When people come home, Victor comes running to the door to greet them. If you pick up a toy and pretend to throw it, Victor will go tearing after its imagined trajectory. Unlike just about every other cat I’ve ever seen, he loves being picked up, played with, and generally messed around with by humans.

Friendly, eager, and dumb as a post — like I said, he thinks he’s a dog.

The main pursuit of Victor’s younger days was figuring out new and exciting ways to knock things over. If there was anything in the house that was even close to the edge of a table or nightstand, he would take it as his mission to help it meet its destiny on the ground. Nowadays he’s mellowed a bit, but he still enjoys the occasional bout of destruction.

He also loves to go tearing through the house on running jags for no reason. Like an SUV, because he weighs so much, he does not corner very well once he has built up some momentum. When he hits a tile floor, this results in the sight of a huge white ball of fur sliding across the floor at high speed, with legs clawing frantically in the opposite direction trying to stop the skid and change direction before he careens off into, say, the living room. Ten years of having to do this maneuver has yet to convince him to modify his approach to crossing tile floors. Some people never learn.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Dealing with Comment Spam

Posted on December 23, 2004

If you have your own blog, you are probably familiar by now with the problem of “comment spam” — bottom-feeders trying to pump up their Google Page Rank by spraying their URL all over the comment section of your blog.

Movable Type users have long used Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist as their first line of defense against this sort of thing. However, last week some hosting companies began complaining that MT and MT-B didn’t scale very well under very large volumes of comment spam, sucking up disproportionate amounts of system resource.

There’s now new versions of Movable Type (3.14) and MT-Blacklist (2.03 beta) out that address this issue, along with several others related to comment spam. If you’re running any version of MT 3, you should pick both of these up and get them installed ASAP.

Also, one other tip — I found before these were released that enabling the Apache module modsecurity on my domains cut down on the volume of comment spam I received dramatically. I have no idea how it did that, since I know just about nothing about modsecurity except that it has “security” in the name, but it really seemed to make a difference; and it didn’t break any of my scripts or cause any other untoward flakiness. Regardless of what blog software you use, if you’re hosting on Apache, you might want to speak to your sysadmin or Web host about how hard it would be to get mod_security working for you.

Thunderbird 1.0

Posted on December 19, 2004

Did I forget to tell you that Thunderbird 1.0 is available now?

Apparently I did. Sorry about that.

On Priorities in Leadership

Posted on December 19, 2004

“People, ideas, and hardware — in that order!” — Col. John Boyd, U.S. Air Force

The Boys’ Club

Posted on December 17, 2004

I guess some things never change:

According to today’s Washington Post (“You Can Tell a Republican by His Stripes,” 12/17/04) Viacom’s Gail McKinnon sent an e-mail this week to offices in the U.S. House of Representatives regarding a job opening in Viacom’s government relations department. The e-mail calls for a male, Republican to fill the open position and reads as follows: “Importance: High We need to hire a junior lobbyist/PAC manager. Attached is a job description. Salary is $85-90K. Must be a male with Republican stripes.”

Good to see that the whole “equal opportunity” thing is still alive and well over at Viacom, eh?

A Personal Note

Posted on December 17, 2004

Ginger is always after me to talk more about myself on this blog. So, here’s a personal observation:

I am a fuck-up.

That’s all.

(Sorry, long week)

North Korea Rattling the Saber

Posted on December 14, 2004

Fun news from the other side of the Pacific:

North Korea warned Japan on Wednesday that it would treat economic sanctions as a “declaration of war” and threatened to try to exclude Tokyo from six-party talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear arms programs.
Calls are growing from the Japanese public and politicians for the government to impose sanctions on North Korea after Tokyo said bones Pyongyang had identified as those of kidnapped Japanese were from other people.
“If sanctions are applied against the DPRK (North Korea) due to the moves of the ultra-right forces (in Japan), we will regard it as a declaration of war against our country and promptly react to the action by an effective physical method,” a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said.

This is in reference to an ongoing flap between those two countries over 13 Japanese nationals that the North Koreans kidnapped back in the 1970s and 80s. Of those 13, only five remained alive in 2002 when the North Koreans finally confessed to the crime to be repatriated to Japan. (This was truly one of the more bizarre stories to come out of the Cold War.)

The most recent development saw the North Koreans recently give the Japanese back the remains of two of the eight dead kidnap victims — but then DNA testing revealed that at least one of the bodies they handed over wasn’t of the kidnapped woman they claimed it was. The outraged Japanese have responded by freezing 250,000 tons of food aid, which the starving North Koreans probably desperately need.

So now Kim is falling back to his usual last resort — rattling sabers. And since he has at least one nuke, the Japanese are probably paying pretty close attention.

(If you want to keep up with news from North Korea, the NKZone blog is a great place to start.)

Modern Propaganda

Posted on December 14, 2004

Watch this and then ask yourself — what use would Vo Nguyen Giap have been able to make of digital video, global connectivity, and a competent videographer?

How Depressing

Posted on December 11, 2004

This country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Why They Yelled At Rummy

Posted on December 8, 2004

If you want to understand why those National Guardsmen cheered when one of their number griped to Secretary Rumsfeld about having to root through the trash to scavenge armor for their vehicles, I humbly recommend this JWM blast from the past:

The Pentagon’s Procurement Mess (May 3, 2004)

I think it’s one of the most important things I’ve ever written on this blog. Every American should understand just how unprepared our Army is for the war we have pitched them into.

Woman Threatened By Telemarketer

Posted on December 8, 2004

From the “here’s where you can stick your do-not-call list” department — Woman Gets Threatening Letter After Hanging Up On Telemarketer:

Jill Beyer, of Waterford Township, Mich., said she received the letter about one week after she refused to donate money in a recent call from a telemarketer.
“He wanted a donation for the veterans’ association, which the veterans don’t get that much of that money. That’s why I wouldn’t donate to him,” Beyer said.
Beyer (pictured, left) said the man refused to take no for an answer so she hung up the phone.
“I slammed the phone very hard,” Beyer said.
The letter arrived postmarked from El Paso, Texas. The first lines read, “Before you are rude to another telemarketer, you should keep in mind that he or she has your phone number and your address. Many of them live in your own state and most don’t give a (expletive)! ”

The full letter is pretty creepy. What on earth would someone be thinking when they sent something like this?

Now How Much Would You Pay?

Posted on December 8, 2004

This is interesting.

Magnatune is a small record label. They sell music from the artists they represent. Unlike the majors, they are very Net-savvy and offer the tunes as both CDs and digital downloads.

There’s another interesting twist — when you buy from Magnatune, you set your own price. When you click to buy an album, it asks you how much you want to pay for it — the suggested price is $8, but you can choose any value from $5 to $18. So it’s up to you what each album will cost you.

Magnatune founder and owner John Buckman has a blog where he periodically talks about various aspects of his (very interesting) business. Today he’s posted an extensive analysis of what people choose to pay for his music, along with some thoughts as to why.

He finds some interesting things. Here’s a few of them:

• The average buyer chooses to pay $8.20 for an album, even though they could go lower
• More than half (56%) of customers choose to pay the recommended $8, while 14% go down to $5 and 14% go up to $10. However, since one $10 purchase is equivalent to two $5 purchases, the 14% that buy at $10 account for a disproportionate share of Magnatune’s revenue stream
• Buyers who choose delivery on physical media (i.e. a CD) pay almost $1 more, on average, than buyers who choose to download

Lots of food for thought here for anyone who’s interested in doing business online…

Morale: It’s Grrrrrreat!

Posted on December 8, 2004

How good is troop morale in the Army National Guard these days?

This good:

After delivering a pep talk designed to energize troops preparing to head for Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld got a little “talking to” himself from disgruntled soldiers…
Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that is comprised mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly three years after the war in Iraq.
“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense…
Rumsfeld replied that, “You go to war with the Army you have,” not the one you might want, and that any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armor to produce it as fast as humanly possible.

Wow. I bet that answer really pepped those grunts up! That’s why Bush is keeping Rummy around for his second term, I bet — because one good nitwit deserves another.

Ukraine to Re-Run Election

Posted on December 6, 2004

News on the Ukrainian election crisis: Ukraine_revolution is reporting that their Supreme Court has declared the previous election invalid and has ordered a new election to be held on Dec. 26.

CNN confirms the report, and adds that outgoing President Leonid Kuchma is not going to stand in the way of the new election, which is a blessing. He could have simply ignored the ruling and escalated the crisis.

If he had done so, he would have been following the historical example of our own President Andrew Jackson, who ignored our Supreme Court when it tried to stop him from removing the last Indian tribes from east of the Mississippi along the “Trail of Tears”. (The Supreme Court had much less power in that era than it does today.) When the Supreme Court’s ruling came down, Jackson is reported to have had a tart response for Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!”

Such a decision in Ukraine would almost certainly have led to civil unrest. Kuchma’s decision to take a more conciliatory path is therefore very important.

UPDATE: The NY Times reports that Kuchma may not have backed away from his candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, quite as much as we thought. After announcing that he would not oppose a new election, he apparently tried to get Ukraine’s parliament to swallow changes in the law that would strip the Presidency of much of its power — ensuring, in effect, that when the new election was held the winner would inherit a crippled office. Since Kuchma’s man, Yanukovych, is universally expected to lose in a fair election to opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, it’s not hard to read this as a sly attempt to stab Yushchenko in the back even while making nice with him in public. So far the parliament has not approved the measure.

Also in the Times: Russian President Vladimir Putin has backed off his earlier vociferous support for Yanukovych, saying now that he will support whoever the people of Ukraine elect. That’s got to be a serious blow to the hopes of Yanukovych…

Not a Confidence-Builder

Posted on December 5, 2004

One last word on this year’s election, before I forget. (I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, and never seemed to get around to it.)

There’s been a lot of rumbling about possible vote fraud and other malfeasance in Ohio since the election. Personally I tend to be skeptical of these allegations. It would have taken fraud on a massive scale to tip the balance of the election, and it would have been awfully hard to pull that off without somebody finding out about it. (Verified Voting agrees with me, saying “[s]o far, we have not seen convincing evidence of either fraud nor of a major error in the Presidential election.”)

However, that’s not to say that the people running elections in Ohio are totally on the ball. A few days after the election, I received this e-mail from the office of the Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell:

Um, Ken? I haven’t been an “Ohio Voter” for quite some time now. In fact, I’ve been a resident and registered voter in Virginia since 2002, and voted in Virginia in both the 2002 and 2004 election cycles.

But hey, I guess once an Ohio Voter, always an Ohio Voter.

Another Bad Idea: “Chrismukkah”

Posted on December 3, 2004

This has been in the Post several times over the last couple of days:

Chrismukkah: the holiday for interfaith families

From the site:

What exactly is Chrismukkah?
Chrismukkah may be celebrated from the 1st night of Hanukkah until Christmas Day. This year, Chanukah begins at sundown December 7th, and therefore Chrismukkah lasts 18 days! Chrismukkah is all-inclusive and non-judgmental – Saints and sinners, naughty and nice, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, straight and gay… all may celebrate without guilt, obligation or self-consciousness. All are invited to “Spin the Dreidel” under the mistletoe. On a more serious level, Chrismukkah can help teach children of mixed heritage about rituals from both sides of their family. Most of all, kids (and grown-ups too) love Chrismukkah because there are 18 nights of presents!

Um, OK.

They do seem to be half-kidding — but come on, y’all know where the “Chris” in “Chrismukkah” comes from, don’t you?

Though in one way, I have to hand it to them. Chrismukkah is a true example of American ingenuity. We Americans are busy people. We don’t have time to piss on religious traditions one at a time! Do you know how long that would take? We’ve got things to do, places to be.

With Chrismukkah, though, we can piss on two religions at once. Multitasking! Brilliant! What a time-saver.

“Eyeballing the NSA Power Supply”

Posted on December 2, 2004

Want to turn out the lights at the National Security Agency? Cryptome shows you how.

(Disclaimer: they may have additional generators inside the facility, away from prying eyes, so you might not want to bet your whole jihad on this info.)

Somebody Buy Microsoft A Spell Checker

Posted on December 1, 2004

Seen on the Windows 2003 Server IIS 6.0 management tool:

Ooooops.