Man, all these people in capital hill up in arms about the Pledge of Allegiance ruling (the “Under God” wasn’t even added in until campaigning by religious groups in 1954, see history). Our sock puppet president chimes in declaring that our country needs “commonsense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God.” While historical revisionists of the Christian right (you know, like those Creationists) like to claim that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation (most accounts say otherwise). Possibly also of interest: Words of our American Founding Fathers, Notes on the Founding Fathers and the Separation of Church and State, The Founding Fathers on Church and State, The Faith of our Founding Fathers, American Masonic History

Aaron Boodman has posted a screenshot of Muse.net (coming Monday apparently). This is a web based mp3 organizind application which is SOAP based and w/ an open API that looks like it does some very cool stuff (very similar to the stuff I’d started working on, but much farther along). The great thing is the open API however. Once of the developers is Ian Rogers, who used to work at Nullsoft.

Here’s Ian’s Music Collection and a link to the Muse.Net PHP SDK. I’m really interested in the project, and would be interested to know if they plan on having different pricing schemes for where your tracks are being stored / streamed from and if you just want to do digs with their API’s?

You know, I’ll take a few minutes off from working and just take some time to mention how incompetent the external design firm we’ve contracted at is. I’ll say that I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of the HTML/CSS code delivered to us. It’s pretty good, and one of the few things they’ve delivered that I’ve been happy with. Surprisingly (for such an established firm) it’s been the visual design that’s been supremely lacking. Things like missed deadlines have been pretty bad (we’re talking about several months of slippage with constant promised (and missed) deliveries), but the amount of bad design is just inexcusable. A style guide that was promised has yet to be created, and it’s obvious from what we’ve gotten, both in terms of design comps and even final code, that there has been little thought given to design consistency. As late as 2 weeks ago, new visual elements were being introduced, and there was no stable visual language as far as line widths, font sizes, color, etc. When they delivered two of their ‘final’ templates earlier this month, there were entirely new elements that we had never even seen before, much less approved.

What spurred me to take the time to write though is that while I’ve been working on these things pretty heavily the past few weeks, I just noticed that the colors in the CSS files are completely different shades than in the HTML of the templates. I have no idea what kind of crack they’ve been smoking over there, but I’m sure it’s some good shit.

God Netscape 4 sucks. It turned 21 bytes of static structural markup (thats an h3, p, and hr tag) into about 700 bytes of table and spacer image code (generated from a php function now to avoid nesting problems and (thinking positively) gives us an easy way to dump all this extraneous table code when, one day, in the far future, the administrative bigwigs upgrade browsers…). Damn you browser, why won’t you die already?

Somehow, while I recognize the whole WorldCom thing to be a really bad thing, it doesn’t seem that important to my life. Perhaps it has to do with the level of cynicism I already harbor with regards to the current state of the global economy and financial systems, or perhaps simply its lack of relevance and direct impact on my existence (especially with the hours I’ve been putting recently at work).

I’m not quite sure where my time is going now adays. I’m not really browsing the web as much as I used to. I’ve weaned myself off of boingboing, mefi, and just about everything else. I absolutely have no life to speak of, and even though I’m pulling some long hours, there are still large chunks of time that seem missing.

Before I get back to work (deadlines), here’s some random crap I’ve found over the past few weeks (I’ve been really lazy about getting these up):

• The Transformers Archive – The entire original series, #1-80, plus the Headmasters Miniseries and movie tie-in. Pretty impressive. Scarily enough is that somewhere in a garage, I still have about 3/4 of those issues. Transformers were the first comics I got, and sort of kicked of a few years where I got really into comics and illustration.
• John Dvorak, king of moronic tech filler and exceptionally clueless punditry (even for a tech columnist) blasts Apple’s new ad campaign primarily by insulting and mocking the physical appearance of the people in the ads. He questions whether Mike (sic) is a real person (it’s Mark bonehead), is mean to KCRW’s Liza Richardson seemingly just out of spite, blasts Dave Haxton for his glasses and pocket protector and asks who could possibly identify with him (*bangs on Dvorak with clue stick* – perhaps all those UNIX guys and programmers who are switching to Macs in droves thanks to OSX? I personally know at least a half dozen people who would never have considered using a Mac until OSX, but are now happily chugging away on TiBooks or iBooks), and then finally ends complaining about Aron (sic) being creepy looking in his photo. Hey, if you really wanted to find out why he switched instead of presuming, why don’t you read the web page Aaron put up about it? God. Reading Dvorak articles makes me understand how some people can so venomously hate Katz. Same effect, I must imagine. (oh, and as far as execution, the Register did it better (and got the names right at least). in school they kick you out for plagiarism)
• warchalking looks pretty cool (it hit /. the other day). Of course, there are also more high-tech options, like netstumbler. Of course, what I don’t get about that is that it seems you’d have to be online to access the ap db.
• The new Matrox Parhelia is out, and while it has neat features and I’ll probably get one (can’t live w/o real dual monitors on Win2K), even at it’s steep price and (at least for the price) relatively mediocre performance.
• Apple Service Manuals – pretty nifty if you need to do any digging.
• k5 has some articles on our favorite dead horse, copyrights and ip: The RIAA, Fair Use, and You, Digital Rights Managment: Promoting Science and Art, or Monopoly Power?
• /. reports on ScummVM developments. Some interesting talk, and of course a pointer to the project on sourceforge

Oh, which leads to one last bit that’s just really damn cool news. Toys for Bob, the guys behind the original Star Control games have made an official announcement of a port of the 3DO version of Star Control 2 to Mac, Linux, and Windows. Star Control 2, for those who might not be aware, is one of the best computer games ever made. (shacknews has some comments too).

Andy suggested I take a look at Easynews. Yeah, it’s pretty cool, although sort of hard to search (only available once you’re in a group).

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, by esr.

I threw my drive in the freezer yesterday and when I reattached it, it actually spun up. I was able to archive the albums I’ve ripped onto 8 CDs.

Here’s an IBM article on Customizing Apache for maximum performance. A little while ago there was a /. discussion on Building a Scaleable Apache Site. Some interesting posts there, including a link to how eToys architected their site w/ mod_perl and an article by local guru Dan Kegel on The C10K problem, which is a points to all kinds of interesting stuff, like Rik van Riel’s Linux Performance Tuning site.

Some other interesting stuff on /.: Distributing Unix Knowledge Among Admins, Parsing Algorithms and Resources, The Great American Road Trip, Weblogs as Base for KMS.

This is pretty damn interesting too: Mitnick Testifies Against Sprint in Vice Hack Case. Hey, Kevin Poulsen (google) (check out the just for kids link, those wacky guys at the doj) is editorial director at Security Focus now. I remember when he started out writing for zd a few years back…

I think the real question about Palladium, is how much do you trust Microsoft?

Ha. Last week I finally resolved to ripping my entire CD collection (EAC/LAME). I set up a second machine and a spare 10GB hard drive and started ripping on both my main system and the second machine. I actually was making pretty good progress. I had about 80 albums ripped. Woke up this morning to find the hard drive has apparently died.