• Halliburton Pulling the Plug on GI Communications

The Engineer & The Manager

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.

“I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is, technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.”

The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”

So I’ve been poking around the new Blogger (quite nice) and its new features. I enabled my profile for kicks and it looks like it counts by userid. This got me interested enough to see who else w/ a lower account ID had their profiles enabled. 250 clicks later, it looks like the only profiles earlier enabled are Ev and Biz.

I probably could have written the script in about the same time… to run increment while gEBTG(‘h1’)[0].firstChild.nodeValue == “Profile Not Available”… OK, anyway a few thoughts

• Link the profiles up w/ ACLs or Orkut and you’d get… LiveJournal?
• The hot keys should really cancel the events so they don’t trigger browser UI stuff if possible (event.cancelBubble(), e.preventDefault()/e.stopPropagation()) (see js)
• Hey, didn’t I mention I was going to do an analysis of GMail code? I think I’ll try to get around to that soon…

Thing I’d like to see in Tiger (OS X 10.4):

• Better keyboard support – it’s really sad how tabbing through dialog boxes (and checkboxes!) works (or more specifically doesn’t). Even when it sort of does, they all work differently (sometimes its arrow keys, hot keys, or tabs. wtf?), and having the space bar and enter key do different things is just bizarre
• Fonts are a mess regardless if you’re using the Fontbook or a third party app like Suitcase. Love how random Cocoa applications get their text completely gibberized/overlaid with lots of fonts.
• Powering up/down – it’d be nice to schedule auto-mounging (based on location) on powerup and wakeup. Also, would be interesting to autodetect location when possible based on network. Have some thoughts on writing a util for that, so if it doesn’t come I may end up getting a chance to write one
• X11 – multiplane windows, transparent window support, dock icons per applications, keyboard buffer binding (honestly, can it be that hard to add a cmd-v?)
• Better application binding support — I’ve started popping off Applescripts, which are fine except for the creator code binding totally screws up ‘default application’ binding
• iCal – actual pubsub
• AppleScript – better GUI scripting; macro recording

• The Misunderestimated Man – How Bush chose stupidity. (GWB is Bizzaro Bush)
  

  A fourth and final quality of Bush’s mind is that it does not think. The president can’t tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. “Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.” By leaping to conclusions based on what he “believes,” Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).

• Frontline: The Jesus Factor – Examining George W. Bush’s personal religious journey, its impact on his political career and presidency, and the growing influence of America’s evangelical Christians. — sobering…

  (notes: unsurprisingly he believes that non-Christians are going to hell. undoubtedly he thinks that he’s not going there… Being evangenical means never having to say your sorry? Only Christians have received faith-based funding… Hooray for taking advantage of blind-faith to justify all kinds of sausage-grinding activities. Didn’t he swear to uphold the Constitution?)

• Monkey Media Report (fast becoming a daily read) hits it right on the head:
  

  A wide variety of officials in the administration had advised Bush to apologize on Wednesday when he gave interviews to two Arab television channels and were puzzled when he did not, senior U.S. officials said. An apology had been recommended in the talking points Bush received from the State Department and elsewhere, the officials said. Senior administration aides then made a push overnight for him to say he was sorry during his news conference with Abdullah, the officials said.

  Yeah, you read that right. Ignoring the advice of his own administration, the President avoided a simple, direct “I’m sorry.” Is there a better definition of incompetence? But wait, the idiocy continues. Despite the latest round of stories claiming Bush has now said the words, what he really said [rm] was that he’d, ahem, told King Abdullah he was sorry. If you think the difference is trivial, well, you’ve got your head up your ass. Rest assured the lack of a direct “I’m sorry” is being noted with disgust all over the world.

• TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB – Seymour Hersh’s scathing write-up in the New Yorker. If you don’t read anything else about this whole mess (you’d probably need to be hiding under a rock … or in grad school to miss it).

I don’t think I know anyone who’s going to be voting for Bush in the fall, but if I did, I think I would have to urge them to think about what kind of person GWB and how his decisions have impacted our country in the world…

• Metroid Cubed – now this is stupendous
• Another script to set energy saver settings via pmset – good ideas; I have some code for setting wakeup timer events etc — when I get a chance I really should work on an integrate OS X power-manager scheduling in menubar tool

German authorities are on a roll, nabbing the Phatbot and Sasser worm authros (21 and 18yo’s respectively). It seems like these guys are better programmers than 99% of those coming out with Brick Science degrees. Shame they couldn’t find better things to do with their talents.

• Sasser Worm Analysis
• Phatbot Trojan Analysis – uses a WASTE-based botnet — wow

Saw an ad for the platform GWB ran for office on and thought I’d do a search. Looks like he ran on the same platform in 2000. The first paragraph from a George W. Bush for President 2000 Campaign Brochure:

I’m running for President because I want to help usher in the responsibility era, where people understand they are responsible for the choice they make and are held accountable for their action.

Very respectable intentions. Sadly the actions of the administration have made it abundantly clear that this is, well, a lie.

Someone on /. mentioned Microsoft was the largest company in the world and a bunch of people jumped all over that, berating him and saying that Microsoft was nowhere near the largest. Oh, I guess they’re right, seeing as they’re only #3 in market cap:

Company Name	Ticker	* Market Cap $	Last Close	52wk Range	* Shares Outst.
General Electric Company	GE	302,360.10	30.00	34.57-26.90	10,078.67
Exxon Mobil Corporation	XOM	282,857.16	43.25	44.24-34.90	6,540.05
Microsoft Corporation	MSFT	278,287.11	25.78	30.00-23.60	10,794.69
Pfizer Inc.	PFE	277,247.18	36.36	38.89-29.43	7,625.06

It is interesting comparing the tear sheets on these companies. Damn is it profitable being evil doing good business.

Also, admittedly, Walmart simply dwarfs everyone else w/ an employee count of 1.4M (of course, most being part-timers being paid close to minimum wage)

helmintholog: In what dungeon dimension:

Can the words As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility. not be followed by these. The president has therefore accepted my resignation.?

It seems an offence against grammar that they were not, as
if the meaning of the word had simply been abolished and when Rumsfeld
spoke of “responsibility” he was in fact using an Azerbaijani term for
boiled sweets, which just happened to be a homonym for the English word.

It reminds me of the time when a Soviet-ear poet was jailed for
seven years for foul crime of denying that freedom of speech existed in
the Soviet Union. Destroying the meaning of “democracy” seems to me
much less serious than destroying the meaning of “responsibility”.
Plenty of fairly decent societies have functioned without much
democracy. In the end, perhaps, democracy is largely a mechanism for
forcing the powerful to take responsibility. But no society is worth
defending – no society is even a society – where “responsibility” means
nothing at all…

Back to web/tech/geek links soon; need to wash the taste out of my mouth.