Now THAT'S cool.

Holy effing crap. What did we do as a nation to deserve this much negative karma?

Yeah ... what are the odds of that happening right then?

BWA ha ha ha ha! Snort! You're killing me with this stuff.

Given the amount of election fraud going on all over the planet, surely nobody will mind if I vote for Lileks for US Senate in 2006, right?

HAR HAR! I've been claiming for quite a long time that outsourcing saves no money at all because you have to build in an entirely new layer of expensive U.S. executive types to manage the relationship and spin the (bad) results coming back. To that I can now add you must hire more lawyers.

Now that's just freaky, man.

Mr. Sun!: Paging Wonkette! Paging Wonkette!

Now that's cool: a paper airplane that flaps its wings.

Mark Steyn gets it right: it isn't enough to be sad ... you have to do something about it.

SDB calls it quits. I understand how he got to that point, but I'm still quite irked at all the peasantry who felt compelled to mailbomb him into this state.

Damn, but this sucks.

BWA ha ha ha ha ha: Spenjurmunni

296.4 is my best: Bennetts - Neil Hodgson's SuperJump

Mark your calendar now: Talk Like A Pirate Day - September 19

How quaint! Telephone exchange names and everything! "Get Me PEnnsylvania 6-5000"

Sometimes you just don't know if it's true, or merely crap. But ... Bob Cringely is hoppin' mad about a study on the link between sentencing guidelines and deterrence. I have no idea if it's true, as I said, but it was interesting to read about.

Well, there goes an entire day down the tube.

I don't think anybody will be surprised to hear I won't be voting for Kerry come November. But ... one of my favorite writers, P.J. O'Rourke, won't be voting for him either. "How come?" I hear you plaintively ask. Well, I'll let him tell you.

WTF?

Since nobody reads this page and it's really just my bookmarks, here's where CapLion explains how to break in a new engine. Lee needs this now, and I hope to be needing it shortly.

Holy effing crap. Read and be boggled. Assume for the sake of argument that this is not a completely fictionalized account; shouldn't this kind of behavior warrant investigation and/or changes in TSA/FAA policies to prevent "untoward" consequences?

"Holy crap", I say.

Well, dag! And here I've been wasting all that energy folding my shirts the old-fashioned way, when Japan has perfected the Insta-Fold technique!!!!1! We're doomed! Doomed, I say!

Dag! That's going to leave a mark! J. Milt Heflin opens up a can of whoop-ass on some media types who pooh-poohed the efforts of NASA space personnel on EVA. w00t!

Well, now I just feel inadequate. Last time we (the family) went to Walt Disney World, we were there for like five days and I didn't get the feeling we'd seen everything there. Or really even a large percentage of everything there. This guy, however, rode every ride at The Magic Kingdom (all 41!!) in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Holy effing crap.

BWA ha ha ha ha ha! I don't see how they could even walk after all that.

P.S. Yes, it's a joke. The Constitution didn't actually sail until 1797, according to the official website of the ship.

I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood what you said. They found how many whats again?

Ouch. Michael Moore comes in for yet more vitriol. I haven't seen the film, but I have seen Mr. Moore interviewed on the teevee several times recently, and his ickiness comes wafting out of the teevee like a noxious cloud.

Lee loves him, of course, which is one of the reasons why I have to thwack Lee in the back of the head every now and then.

Yet more people continue to weigh in on the connections between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. I hear you ask "who?" Well, President Bill Clinton is who I've got in mind now.

Well, damn. Just between you and me, President Bush is weak on: Saudi Arabia and his (obviously) close relationship with them, the amount of conflict-of-interest running throughout the State Department and his continued non-efforts at getting them to play on our side of the game, and heaps of social issues not least of which is the whole ugliness of the "assault" weapons ban. So why, then, do The Left continue to shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly trying to wing President Bush on anything having to do with Iraq? How many times are you going to make the exact same underestimation of how much homework he's done? Case in point: THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH: Joe Wilson: A Botched Niger Mission?

I had put these in the comments section, but they're important enough to put at the top level so you can notice them.

The New York Times > National > 9 / 11 Panel: U.S. Must Focus Intelligence

The New York Times reports that the 9/11 commisioners themselves state that there is no substantial disagreement between their views and the publicly-stated view of the Bush administration vis-a-vis ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed-Columnist: The Zelikow Report

It turns out that the rhubarb was engendered not by an official commission judgement, but rather by a leaked interim memo prepared by the commissioner's staffers. Let me repeat that: it wasn't the commission's judgement at all.

Amazingly enough, the commission is distancing itself from the report by saying they don't get involved in what their staffers do in their spare time. I'm just boggled that they'd let that get out and be attributed to them. "Nonpartisan" my rosy red butt.

BWA ha ha ha ha ha! Too late, Mr. Jenkins. You were an F7 back at question 2

I fell into Oddpost because Joel Spolsky sent me there. I must say I'm staggered with what those guys have done with a browser window. It's incredible. One of the founders, in fact, has his very on blog about Oddpost and his feelings in general: Oddblog

www.oddpost.com is the address if you're looking for an incredible web-based email client for a quite reasonable $30/year subscription fee.

Raymond Chen has been a developer at Microsoft since the beginning of time (approximately). In his blog, "The Old New Thing," he often explains the archaeology of Windows. Not that his explanations excuse their misbehavior necessarily, but I'm almost always curious about how things got to be the way they are. He might be going into the blogroll here in the near future.

Ooooh ... let me bookmark this HOWTO on "How To Beat A Speeding Ticket." In my youth I could have used this a lot more, but it may yet come in handy.

To this I can only reply "duh." Did we really need a study to tell us that? I would have thought that was obvious.

Finally! A bit of boating lore I can support.

Lee, I'm looking directly at you when I say that Richard Clarke states that he approved the flights containing Osama's relatives out of the country right after 9/11. "So what?" I hear you say. You'll forget that and come back nattering something stupid after watching Michael Moore's upcoming film Farenheit 911 and I'll have to remind you that it was yet another Bush-hater who let them go and not anybody related to the President.

Mark my words, young man.

Why, Jon Stewart didn't sound like a partisan hack at all. Are "The Daily Show" writers that far left that they're dragging Jon Stewart over to "I can almost see the moonbats from here" territory?

The Belmont Club has an eye-opening article about how our new high-speed news coverage continues to evolve and react, so that even now we're not really sure when we know anything. "Very thought provoking," I say.

"Bayonet Brits kill 35 rebels" according to The Sun. The article goes on to say that this is the first bayonet charge since the Falklands War. Way to go, Tommies! We don't need no stinkin' bullets when we have sharp pointy bits at the end of a stick!

There's nothing quite as mad as a mad Englishman, don't you know, and boy am I glad you're on my side of the conflict.

Woo hoo! We're on the way! Yet another gummint monopoly is poised to fall (boy, do I hope so anyway)

Dag ... Ralph Peters is calling for Rumsfeld's head. That's a bad sign, I think.

Hee hee hee!

I haven't written anything about the War on Terror in quite some time. I have two big reasons, really: (1) I'm stupidly busy with work and (2) I don't know what to say. As far as point #1, that's just the nature of the beast when you're trying to start up any business enterprise, and software consulting isn't an especially simple field to be in.

As far as point #2, I'm just ... boggled. I don't have any grand sweeping suggestions for how to solve the whole problem; I only have the observation that we can't go backwards but must push forwards through victory or else we can look forward to a never-ending succession of 9/11s until we are all under Shari'a law (or dead). I don't advocate genocide. I am absolutely opposed to genocide. Genocide is bad, mmkay? Am I making it absolutely clear that "killing them all" is a bad idea?

The problem is I don't know what else we have as options. Although I thought last year that President Bush was the right man to drive us through to victory, I'm not entirely sure anymore. He seems to be disengaging, and whatever momentum the "democracy building" process might have had seems to be dissipating with each day. Perhaps it's because Iraqis aren't capable of self-government (which is just a stupid theory on it's face, not to mention revoltingly racist). Perhaps it's because things are actually going okay but our overwhelmingly "Anybody But Bush" media are determined to establish that Iraq is the new Tet. Perhaps it's because the President's team didn't have a contingency plan in case the Iraqis didn't all fall over themselves welcoming back Chalabi.

The only thing we have going for us is that the United States military forces are on the ground and are in charge. There is no more resourceful, adaptable, admirable collection of citizens anywhere in the world. As always, there will be some criminals in any group that size, but the armed services are so much better than any other group we could have in place that there's no question about letting them leave before they're done.

So how do they get done? The Marines in Falluja have bottled up al-Sadr quite effectively, and Iraqi forces are taking more control of the situation there. Hooray! A small pocket of "victory" there in the Sunni Triangle. Except, of course, that the Iraqi military forces there include quite a number of ex-Baathists; Saddam's general officers seem to have just hopped over to a new flag and off we go. How can we not be conflicted about that?

The civilians in Najaf are demonstrating, demanding that the militants get the hell out of their neighborhoods and go the f*ck home. Hooray! There's no "but" here; the Iraqis are doing what they ought to be doing, what we would be doing if it was happening in our neighborhoods. An untrammeled victory for the forces of liberal democracy (small 'l', small 'd').

Iraq is a country the size of California. What the hell else is going on over there? Where did the 3ID and 4ID go? They're not even peripherally in the news. I'm quite confident they're not sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, but I have no idea what they're doing. I hope, whatever it is, that it's a good thing.

I'm betting that Jonah Goldberg is calling it exactly right.

Have I linked this before? Rumsfeld Fighting Technique

The Things I Will Do if I Am ever the Hero. Superb reading for one and all.

What? Michael Moore was lying? That can't be ... he's a paragon of truth-telling, isn't he?

I can't stop grinning like an idiot at this. I might have to send him a buck or two.

Now, that's just weird.

Now this is freakin' cool. It's a summary of other news sites headlines, where the color of the box codes the category of headline, and the size of the box codes how many news sites are carrying the story. What a fabulous idea, and it's going right into the ol' bookmarks.

BWA ha ha ha ha ha. Finally, a plug-in we can all be happy about.

Well, there goes another hunk of time. You people need to quit writing things that encourage me to spend that much time investigating. Just stop it.

Holy crapping crap. I know I'm not a tough guy, but damn!

Microsoft even publish a tool to purge that sort of information ... they just can't be arsed to use it, I guess.

Strike that out indeed.

The GAO released their report on DOD software development practices.

Why?

"The Department of Defense (DOD) has been relying increasingly on computer software to introduce or enhance performance capabilities of major weapon systems. To ensure successful outcomes, software acquisition requires disciplined processes and practices. Without such discipline, weapon programs encounter difficulty in meeting cost and schedule targets. For example, in fiscal year 2003, DOD might have spent as much as $8 billion to rework software because of quality-related issues.

GAO was asked to identify the practices used by leading companies to acquire software and to analyze the causes of poor outcomes of selected DOD programs. GAO also was asked to evaluate DOD's efforts to develop programs for improving software acquisition processes and to assess how those efforts compare with leading companies' practices."

$8B isn't much to the DOD, but it's a lot of money to everybody else.

What does the GAO recommend? Let me grab a highlight:

Software developers and acquirers at firms that GAO visited use three fundamental management strategies to ensure the delivery of high-quality products on time and within budget: working in an evolutionary environment, following disciplined development processes, and collecting and analyzing meaningful metrics to measure progress. When these strategies are used together, leading firms are better equipped to improve their software development processes on a continuous basis. An evolutionary approach sets up a more manageable environment - one in which expectations are realistic and developers are permitted to make incremental improvements. The customer benefits because the initial product is available sooner and at a lower, more predictable cost. This avoids the pressure to incorporate all the desired capabilities into a single product right away. Within an evolutionary environment, there are four phases that are common to software development: setting requirements, establishing a stable design, writing code, and testing. At the end of each of these phases, developers must demonstrate that they have acquired the right knowledge before proceeding to the next development phase. To provide evidence that the right knowledge was captured, leading developers emphasize the use of meaningful metrics, which helps developers, managers, and acquirers to measure progress. These metrics focus on cost, schedule, the size of a project, performance requirements, testing, defects, and quality.

In a review of five DOD programs, GAO found that outcomes were mixed for software-intensive acquisitions. The F/A-18 C/D, a fighter and attack aircraft, and the Tactical Tomahawk missile had fewer additional cost and schedule delays. For these programs, developers used an evolutionary approach, disciplined processes, and meaningful metrics. In contrast, the following programs, which did not follow these management strategies, experienced schedule delays and cost growth: F/A-22, an air dominance aircraft; Space-Based Infrared System, a missile-detection satellite system; and Comanche, a multimission helicopter...

So agile software processes work? Wow! Who'd a thunk it! I am so tempted to print this out, highlight a few key paragraphs, and send it along to a number of deserving clients.

"Come on, honey! You don't want me to develop *CANCER*, do you?" Let me know how well that works for you.

BWA-hahahahaha. Pwned!

Now that takes some serious balls.

Now that's a fun commercial. I don't know that it makes me want to buy an iPod (more than I did before watching), but I certainly enjoyed the homage.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and opine that she's merely the first one.

BBC chairman to quit over Hutton: now that's accepting responsibility. I applaud him (and them) for admitting their duplicity.

Well, sure it's a Photoshop job, but you still should look at it. BWA-hahahahaha!

Oh, my aching sides. My good friend Mr. Panthorn claims he's ordered a gross of these, and I'm reasonably sure I believe him.

Oh, my aching sides. I read "The Credit Card Prank" and thought I was going to hurt myself laughing. I hope you have the same reaction.

NOT WORK SAFE!!!

EroTech Industries announces a new adult product: the LoveLump(tm). I'm not entirely sure this is a joke, which makes it even funnier

fidius.org: What's My Pirate Name? "Dirty William Kidd", it says, which I'm pretty sure isn't quite right.



I got "Dirty Sam Flint"
(You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr! )

Man, that's a lot of rebooting. How much money are we talking about again lost to the "reboot activity tax"?

Everybody's already seen the French Military Victories page, right? I just stumbled on it today which shows you how far behind I really am.

SOE Shoots Itself In The Jimmies

Two days ago, an SOE employee announced on the Star Wars Galaxies page that the next hotfix would change the loot drop tables to include the mythical Holocrons. Finding a holocron would give you a hint as to what you needed to do next to unlock your secret Jedi character slot.

Then they pushed the fix back a day.

Today, the hotfix went in. I checked the server on which I play at 8:00 and people were already logged in killing NPCs for all they were worth. By noon, a person whom I know electronically had killed nearly 2,000 Meatlump thugs and had found exactly zero holocrons. People were calling in sick, taking vacation days, skipping class, what have you just so they could finally (FINALLY!) get a hint about becoming a Jedi.

At 13:00 Eastern time, they revised the patch notes to remove any mention of adding holocrons to the drop tables. That's right ... they silently decided not to put them in.

What could have been the single biggest day in terms of SWG excitement by the players has instead turned into yet another high hard one from SOE. I don't know whether it's due to error, malfeasance, or just plain f*ck-up-edness but they managed to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear.

Don't get me wrong ... I'm not cancelling my account, nor will I quit playing. I'm just saying that this is symptomatic of SOE's general state. They might have fixed quite a large number of things, but they somehow manage to screw the pooch every single time. Good job, fellows!

It's good to see that the Catholic Church has its priorities straight.

David Kay's testimony before Congress is online. This is about the state of Iraq's WMD programs as determined by the inspection teams sent in after the Three Weeks War. I won't taint you by commenting. Yet.

BWA-hahahahahaha! Take that, you evil Lords of Redmond! I will lick the salty tears of anguish from your cheeks!

CNN says that the FBI is going to be arresting somebody for writing the "Blaster" worm. Here's their story. The bit that I find most curious is this paragraph:

A witness reportedly saw the teen testing the infection and called authorities, the official said.

I'll just let you sit and think about what that must mean for the two people involved. Doesn't the informant necessarily have to be part of the accused's circle? I mean it's not as if you can watch somebody typing away in another cubicle and figure out what they're doing with any real accuracy. They'd pretty much have to be giving you a demonstration, wouldn't they?

Mark Steyn has a few things to say about the California recall election, most of them quite funny and right on the mark:

I had a brief conversation with Bustamante at the 2000 Democratic Convention and he didn’t seem entirely there. A few months later, he was giving a speech in honour of Black History Month to the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and carelessly referred to the Negro Labor Council as the ‘Nigger Labor Council’. He carried on speaking, apparently oblivious, until it occurred to him rather a lot of people seemed to be walking out. I’d love to see a Republican use the N-word at a Black History Month dinner and live to tell the tale. But what’s relevant here is the delay between the unfortunate error and realising he’d made it.

Lee, you need one of these for your house.

Gawd love Ralph Peters. He's quite obviously a man who isn't afraid to come right out and tell you what he thinks in small words.

Yet more pictures of me in my Star Wars Galaxies alter-ego.

Progress is being made. I know Lee won't be satisfied until we find an actual missile with a nuke warhead and Saddam giving it a big hug while saying "It's mine, and keep your filthy mitts off", but reasonable people (i.e. not Lee) will eventually be satisfied, I think.

In one fell swoop, Robert X. Cringely describes a potential business that can (1) provide music downloads cheaply, (2) isn't illegal, and (3) pisses off RIAA. I love it. If I had $2,000,000 hanging around, I'd be all over this like white on rice.

This email archive has a quick statement by an anonymous IBM source about how SWT (the Eclipse widget set) came to be and why they think AWT/Eclipse is teh suXor.

Rachel Lucas opens up on a particularly deserving specimen of homo stupiditous. It's so moving, I'm all teary-eyed. <sniff/>

Some time ago, Kathy's brother Michael called and told Kathy about this new massively-multiplayer online role playing game, set in the Star Wars universe. After the two of them talked about it a while, she told me I should pre-order the collector's edition so we could try the game and see how it went. Being the easy sell that I am, I dashed right off to EBworld.com to order our copy and then I promptly forgot about it.

On launch day, the box arrived. We were doing other stuff that weekend (I forget exactly what now), and so didn't get around to opening the box and installing the game until Sunday. That meant that we went to bed at a decent hour both Friday and Saturday nights. That was good, because I'm pretty sure that was the last time I went to bed at anything like my usual bedtime since (about three weeks now). This game is really good. There are bugs, of course, and I spend a bit of time complaining about them, but I also note that I'm spending all my leisure time playing the stupid game instead of doing other stuff so it's obviously more entertainment than the bugs are annoying.

Here's how addictive the game is: after playing less than a week, Kathy said I needed to upgrade another desktop machine so that she could have her own character and we could play together. After pricing upgrade bits, we wound up buying a pre-made HP Pavilion system for her, and she's been playing since. That's right ... we bought a computer system just to play this game. We're insane, obviously.

While in the game one day, we ran into a friend of Kathy's brother who told us his in-game hobby was taking snapshots of the other characters to post on his website. "Well, duh," I thought to myself. "I should be doing that as well." So, here is my first batch of snapshots.

BWA-hahahahaha. Oh, my aching sides ... this is high-larious: Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

"You want some of this? All you gotta do is stand up." That's pretty much what I heard President Bush tell the bad guys, and it appears I'm not the only one who heard it that way. "Woot!" for the President.

Bill Whittle finally posts Trinity in two parts. I continue to be amazed at the quality of the writing that falls off this guy, and further amazed at how perfectly he captures the essence of Americanism. Hooray for Bill!

Trinity Part I

Trinity Part II

Go and read. Now.

David Brin's "The Transparent Society" had quite an impact on me, not least because it crystallized a suspicion I already had towards people who claimed that if we all used PGP then the government would just wither away and utopia would arrive. Now, interestingly enough, MIT appears ready to test his theory of transparency.

I don't mind overdubbing so much; everyone makes mistakes and overdubbing just helps ensure that the finished CD is listenable over many sessions. I do, however, think that pitch correction like this is pretty dishonest. I'll grant that it's merely a question of degree; you could claim that it was just overdubbing if you cut-n-pasted individual notes that a musician happened to get just right, but we'd all recognize that as a travesty of the idea of performance. Pitch correction: okay as long as it's labelled.

Java Performance Tuning author Jack Shirazi went to JavaOne and watched a bunch of presentations on large-scale deployments. From this, he's generated all new tuning heuristics for your edification and pleasure.

I wish these guys would get over their anti-commercial attitude and get on teevee already. "Adult Swim" would be much improved if they had a few shorts like this in the rotation.

I'm gonna start a petition to MAKE them take some money from the teevee people!!!!

I'm laughing so hard my face hurts. I'm also running through my list of friends classifying each as "TweedleDee & TweedleDum" and "Ren & Stimpy" now, thanks.

Frank J. talks about hurricanes. I laughed out-loud enough to make people stand up out of their cubicles to see what was happening.

Cue the music! Dinesh D'Souza writes a stirring article on why he became an American. Most of these are obvious after-the-fact, but this is still well worth reading.

I wonder if this workflow engine will produce a stable release ... it sounds like a promising project. I wish them luck, which I suspect they're going to need since they've stopped COMPLETELY EFFING DEAD IN THE WATER to change build systems. I hope the "change the build system" need came across them because something in the old build system was fundamentally b0rken, not because they felt compelled to lemming off behind Maven (rant forthcoming).

Not quite the smoking gun we expected, but they are warm gun parts and we've got the guy who put them there too.

Yes, sir, Mr. Tim Blair sir ... we'll get right on that because we don't want that kind of result at all. No siree-bob.

Hooray! The only thing (and I do mean the only thing) I didn't like about IDEA was that you couldn't get the correct keybindings for it. As we all know, had there been a diety he would have wanted us to use "vi" for all time. And now, Rick Maddy has developed a "vi" plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. The world is saved!!!!

Mean Mr.Mustard has designed yet another t-shirt for me to buy. BWA-hahahaha. Ahem.

Hi. I'm Mitchell, and I'm a bright.