Where I’m @

20020723

We’ve posted a new list, in order this time, of the songs that wash us in nostalgia we don’t really have for gunning around in the Camaro in the late ’70s. For your added pleasure, we found a post to Bleahh from mid-2001 discussing this concept for the first time. (Only the fans care about this post.)
Comments are welcome.

posted by Tk at 15:51 • • sealed in amber

20020711

Why does this not make us feel better about how China is dealing with software piracy? (from this week’s designated floggee, ZDNet News):
Pirates selling software such as operating systems for $1 had been blocking software development in China, but new strict laws including executions are working.
(Emphasis added.)

posted by Tk at 11:20 • • sealed in amber

20020709

Hard on the heels of yesterday’s alarmist article on lazy markup-writing, ZDNet today seems to think that “PC” can be used to designate an Apple computer.
A hacker claims to have found a way to send malicious code via Apple’s downloadable software updates into the PCs of OS X users—and he’s posted instructions on the Net. (Full article)
Oh yeah, and there’s that thing about a hacker and OS X. Frankly, it would be wonderful to have a Mac with OS X — learning UNIX on a Mac seems to us to be a great way to do it. Somehow this article does not make us think different.

posted by Tk at 09:29 • • sealed in amber

20020708

ZDNet news talks about web developers writing markup that favors Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to the detriment of other browsers. Not only is this lazy, it’s also bad business. Fulfilling the promise of the Web requires making sure as many people as possible can access as much as possible. Good thing that one of the new targets of the Web Standards Project is developer education.

Update: Sources close to the WaSP mentioned to us that that body will have a response to the ZDNet article soon. We neglected to mention in the original post that that article curiously had no comment from the WaSP, a fact no doubt attributable to some sort of summertime reportorial ennui.

posted by Tk at 10:33 • • sealed in amber

20020701

Independent Site of the Day #9: The Political Compass
The Political Compass puts Bleahh farther to a certain Left than Gandhi. (Good thing they didn’t ask us our views on passive resistance to colonialism.):

Economic Left/Right: -5.62
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -5.23
Which adds up, of course, to a Libertarian Leftist

We do not usually participate in these sorts of self-description quizzes (Why would we care which Pokémon we most resemble?), but this one is not quite so facile, and we found it in the blog of the generally level-headed Rebecca Blood.

Underpinning the Compass’s questions is the proposition that the standard terms of Right and Left just don’t quite cut the mustard. Not that this is news; most of us use those as convenient buttonholes into which we place our politicians, friends, and family members in order to avoid having to give any real consideration to the nuances of their views. American politicians in general have reacted accordingly by moving to the center (except for the ones who have managed to move what might be considered the center) and by obfuscating so that there is only nuance in their words.

The Political Compass asks us to reevaluate our perspective and answer six reasonably short HTML pages of questions on political, social, and economic topics. Your answer to each can only be Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree, and the sum gets put into the food mill of the Political Compass site and hey presto! they tell you where you sit. Not only that, but they give you some historical and current (though see below) benchmarks so you can see what charismatic figure you should plagiarize most frequently. True enough, many of the questions are harder to answer clearly than others. What happens when you strongly agree with the first part of a question but disagree with the conclusion? Another drawback is that this site is based in the UK, so their current benchmarks are all UK pols and public figures. All told, though, it feels reasonably accurate. We do feel that people — even corporations — should be allowed to do what they want, provided what they want to do does not hurt others. Further, the government’s role is not that of a soccer referee, trying simply to make sure that the game is under control; rather, its role is to ensure that prosperity comes to all, to ensure that neither the majorities nor the minorities are terrorized by the other, in short, to care for the country as one would for a garden in which every plant is important. (Cue swelling John Williams music.)

posted by Tk at 10:27 • • sealed in amber