This Register article: Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days is worth it’s own post. Some very worthwhile issues brought up, and it also highlights the need to move beyond Google and into contextual searches. KartOO of course, is one example of how this might work (HTML version), although my interest recently has been about establishing local context via personal trust networks.

This doesn’t help the masses though if they don’t have a digital identity with which to establish a trust network from… Hmm, well, requires more thought…

Pseudo-code for a path-restricted chown script:

* Check User/Path Mapping (user perm)

* Get/Clean Input

* Get real path (follow symlinks)

? If User && Path OK

  * Make chown system call

Noah Friedman has a great buncha GPL’d scripts including a nice symlink-resolve script that’ll unfurl symlink’d paths. woo

Here’s another one, called symlinkdir that looks much cleaner (and has perldocs) [doesn’t do absolute path conversion, need to add] Oops – this thing isn’t very complete, it doesn’t handle cases where parents are symlinks but the requested folder/file is not.

Wired article on the Hawash Fiasco:

According to The Washington Post’s November investigation, at least 44 people have been arrested and detained as material witnesses in post-Sept. 11 terrorist probes. The paper was unable to determine hard numbers because of secrecy surrounding the cases.

Joe Celko on Trees in SQL using nested sets. Search: linked lists, directed graphs, nested trees, SQL

• SQL Graph Algorithms – comparison of real-world solutions.

“I just picked up a copy and it looks great! You are right about the whole approach and my stuff stinks.” – Joe Celko

• SQLTeam: More Trees & Hierarchies in SQL – the depth and lineage optimizations are exactly what I’ve done in prior implementations
• Joe Celko, DBMS 4 parter (Mar-June 1996):
• A Look at SQL Trees
• SQL Lessons
• Nontraditional Databases
• When Good Data Goes Bad
• PostrgreSQL alpha implementation
• [Newsgroup links]

Semi-related: panelbox.org has Data Modelling links, jwz on message threading

CSS2 Spec, 10.8:

Empty inline elements generate empty inline boxes, but these boxes still have margins, padding, borders and a line height, and thus influence these calculations just like elements with content.

Why then doesn’t line-height work for <br> tags? I’m not quite sure… Hmm, there was some discussion a while back (more: 2000, 2001 on www-style (now with search!).

The simple solution is to just move on a do what works I suppose (display:block; addin margin). But it is bothersome.

Hixie has some styling tests in his Evil Tests: Styling HR, BR Elements.

If <br> has been traditionally treated as generated content and not an empty, non-replaced, inline element, maybe in that context (or others), something like <line> does make sense.

CNN: Ex-CIA director: U.S. faces ‘World War IV’

It will be America’s backing of democratic movements throughout the Middle East that will bring about this sense of unease, he said.

“Our response should be, ‘good!'” Woolsey said.

I’d be happy if there was some backing of democratic movements here at home.

Jim Moore (Berkman Center, Harvard), writes about the rise of a global social movement (read: Internet) as a “second superpower” (see fallout) that can keep the US (gov’t) in check. Interesting read, but well, it doesn’t work right now because people have a lot more in common with sheep than ants.

He does address the fundamental problem with all democracy, though. It depends upon educated informed members. A quick check at the national polls will show why the US is so dysfunctional. How many people can pinpoint Iraq on a map? How many people believe that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the WTC? What’s the most popular News channel? How many know, let alone care about the civil rights they’ve lost? And lastly, how many people believe exactly what they are told?

I slipped in some transparency back on my site. This apparently slows scrolling to a crawl. A new design should be going up soon anyway, so should be a temporary thing.

Alain’s Epson 9600 Diary – sharing his experience w/ this large format printer. Also, be sure to check out the latest at Luminous Landscape, some good links, including a Foveon/Sigma SD9 and Canon 1DS analysis (30MB PDF).