Posted on by lhl

Asia Times, This war is brought to you by… (a really informative article)

The lexicon of the Bush doctrine of unilateral world domination is laid out in detail by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in Washington in 1997. The ideological, political, economic and military fundamentals of American foreign policy – and uncontested world hegemony – for the 21st century are there for all to see.

PNAC’s credo is officially to muster “the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests”. PNAC states that the US must be sure of “deterring any potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” – without ever mentioning these competitors, the European Union, Russia or China, by name. The UN is predictably dismissed as “a forum for leftists, anti-Zionists and anti-imperialists”. The UN is only as good as it supports American policy.

Interestingly, there’s an outline of Regime Change in Iran [PDF] up there. Leaving the gym, a friend and I were talking about the order of upcoming ‘regime changes’, and a stranger passing by interject “Syria, they suck.” I don’t think that a deeper probing on that statement would have revealed any insights, so I tossed off a, nah, how about France? The reply: “Maybe after Syria. Syria sucks.”

Posted on by lhl

After having to completely refill my credit card information to TicketWeb 3 times in order to complete an order (Bright Eyes, Cursive, Cat Power), I took a few minutes to write them about their need for better Contingency Design. Here were my points:

  • Initial client-side verification of fields, while not authoritative, would have saved grief on try #2
  • If you must break that Back button, then give pass-thru links that will prepopulate appropriately
  • This (pass-thru) should be happening anyway so that invalid field entries are highlighted (session state should be retained so that automatically loading the entry field step should prefill appropriately)

I have no doubt about 37signals claims 40% sales increases. If I was feeling the slightest edgier (and believe me, I’ve been on edge) I would have threw in the towel after the second try. Seeing as TicketWeb claimed over $15 in service charges, they can probably afford to send someone to a workshop.

Posted on by lhl

OK, I’m going to bed. Doing an Intermediate Web workshop tomorrow, unfortunately, lost last semesters presentation, so I’ve been redoing it. (It’s not really done (spot the deterioration as time goes on!), but whatever.) While I’m at it, I switched from using php.pres2 (good, but heavy and inconvenient) to Tantek’s presentation shell code (much more lightweight).

I’m still using most of his styles (removing as I get annoyed ;), although I’ve changed enough for it to highlight box model bugs in all kinds of browsers. I’ve also added a few features, like key events (very convenient) and slide permalinks (probably more useful). To do that, I’m taking advantage of the document.location.hash property. Haven’t used that in a long, long time. In keeping with the spirit, it is backwards compatible; I’ve added appropriately id/named anchors to each slide.

Sadly, I don’t think either of these will work with IE5 Mac, as well, I have no idea and am too lazy to experiment on how it does key events, and for both of them, I’m using event attachment, which I don’t think ie5mac supports either.