random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians
“We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening.”
More on conditions from Reuters. Daily Kos has a writeup (comments) on casualty reports from Russian Intelligence (GRU), available publically at Iraqwar.ru (next-day human translation).
George McGovern writes a scathing indictment and historical reflection on the Bush Administration in this month’s The Nation.
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy’s observation: “What an immense mass of evil must result…from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.” Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was “undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated.” The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that “was never threatened and probably never comtemplated.”
(via mark, who’s writing again, including some poetic stanzas)
Hmm, Howard Dean has a new official blog, following Gary Hart’s lead, but it’s just not the same. Why? Because Gary Hart’s been writing his blog himself.
I never thought that much of him before, but since reading Hart’s recent postings, I’ve begun to respect him a lot more. There seems to be something much more genuine and personal about it that I can’t pin down. Maybe it’s the warm fuzzy feeling of personal connection in an increasingly impersonal world.
Can blogs really change the political landscape currently dominated by monolithic media, and lack of substantive dialogue? My natural inclination is towards doubt, but I can’t help but hope.
South Park + War Protest – flash, en español
Got an email the other day on PNAC.info, a new site dedicated to collection, analysis and dissemination of information about the Project for the New American Century.
Do Surgical Masks Stop SARS? (short answer: no)
Posted about e-sheep’s Thin Ice; it’s actually part of a series called ‘our leader speaks’. Really worth the clicks, really well put.
Accordian Guy: BLOGS SAVE LIVES (What happened to me and the new girl (or, “The girl who cried Webmaster”)
Don’t mind the dust, it should clear as I work on things. Thought I’d put it up along with a writeup of some stuff I’ve been twiddling with.
I’ve been putting off forever on writing an extended treatise on the weaknesses of CSS, ie why people do find working with CSS to be so painful. While that drags longer treatise drags on, one of the tangents it sent me exploring was on the nature of why there were no mechanisms for even simple gridbags type layouts in CSS2 (whereas it was almost intuitive with table layouts). There are no less than 25 Three Column Layouts currently listed in the css-d wiki. Almost all of them have weaknesses/bugs.
Considering that the majority of web sites were constructed with gridbags in mind, it seems almost inconceivable that this issue hadn’t been addressed over the course of creating CSS (a second revision no less). Well, maybe not, considering some of the other fundamental flaws built in… A digression for another day.
This thinking about tables, of course, led me to the obvious. The CSS2 table box model of course, specifies table layouts. Via the display property, one can use table mechanics for semantically neutral container elements. While for some, it may not seem much of an aesthetic improvement, but there are several properties that directly address CSS weaknesses, including:
Of course, in the course of preparing this, it occurred that I should probably check how it works in some browsers. A quick check shows that it doesn’t work for IE/PC. [check on laptop – IE/Mac, Safari, Opera] According to the spec, the display property is optional and may be ignored by HTML UA’s.
Using the table box model doesn’t solve the fundamental weaknesses in property specification, block relation, or flow control, but if you’re using a user agent that supports display assignment, it may be a worthwhile avenue to persue as a stopgap.