random($foo) is the occassionally still updated blog of Leonard Lin. My pics are on Flickr, code is on Github. @lhl on Twitter. More »
The Brits are very thorough about their documentation:
MSN: Fahrenheit 9/11 Interviews and Commentary (via):
COURIC: And wouldn’t your movie have been better balanced if you had at least included some about Saddam Hussein’s own reputation?
Mr. MOORE: You guys did such a good job of–of telling us how tyrannical and horrible he was. You already did that. What–the question really should be posed to NBC News and all of the other news agencies: Why didn’t you show us that the people that we’re going to bomb in a few days are these people, human beings who are living normal lives, kids flying kites, people just trying to get by in their daily existence. And as the New York Times pointed out last week, out of the 50 air strikes in those initial days, the–we were zero for 50 hitting the target. We killed civilians and we don’t know how many thousands of civilians that we killed. And–and–and nobody covered that. And so for two hours, I’m going to cover it. I’m going to–out of four years of all of this propaganda, I’m going to give you two hours that says here’s the other side of the story.
shoos: Here’s how the timeline of the bin Laden flight authorization worked, from what I recall of Clarke’s hearing:
1) Clarke refuses to unilaterally authorize the flight(s).
2) He asks the FBI to look into it.
3) Dale Watson at the FBI gives it the okay.
4) Clarke authorizes it.Clarke takes sole responsibility for it, because he’s that kind of guy.
He was in charge, and the buck stops with him. It may have been a good
idea, for all I know. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and it may be that
the bin Laden flight was perfectly benign. But Hitchens’ article
utterly ignores that Clarke did not make the decision alone. He spins
Clarke’s statement of taking full responsibility for what was done
under his leadership into an implication that nobody else had anything
to do with it. In an article blasting another person for distorting the
truth, that’s significant.
LOLLAPALOOZA, 2004 CANCELS ALL DATES – err, that sucks. I was looking forward to it. Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Modest Mouse, Broken Social Scene, Walkmen, Flaming Lips, Pixies, Basement Jaxx, Wilco, Polyphonic Spree, Fire Theft…
An interesting phish got missed by one of my spam filters (these days I’m using Mail.app’s filter (LSA-based), BrightMail (hybrid), and CRM114 (SBPH/Markovian), with Procmail doing the sorting):
It was pretty obviously a phish, but Mail.app’s HTML rendering (it loaded the map even w/ images turned off?) and the nested encoded image-map url within proper link is pretty clever:
<lt;A HREF="https://web.da-us.citibank.com/signin/scripts/Iogin2/user_setup.jsp"><lt;map name="FPMap0"><lt;area coords="0, 0, 610, 275" shape="rect" href="http://%31%34%38%2E%32%34%34%2E%39%33%2E%39:%34%39%30%33/%63%69%74/%69%6E%64%65%78%2E%68%74%6D"><lt;/map><lt;img SRC="cid:part1.04000408.00060006@users-billing17@citibank.com" border="0" usemap="#FPMap0"><lt;/A>
Too bad Mail.app doesn’t have a show-only text option. Maybe it’s time to up the mime defanging in procmail.
Useful:
Here are the two most important things to know about computers
and the Internet:1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits
2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to
another very cheaply and quicklyAny new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers
will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press
is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at
speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you’ll get
junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you’ll get the
basis for a free society.And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record
execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that
Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s
with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.
MySQL < 4.1 doesn’t support subqueries. The manual suggests ‘easily’ using a temporary table and a join. Here’s a solution based on joins:
SELECT node.id,node.version,node.title,node.body,node.date
FROM node INNER JOIN node AS n2 ON node.id = n2.id
WHERE node.status='publish'
GROUP BY node.id, node.version
HAVING node.version = max(n2.version)
What this should do is return node information for published nodes with the latest version (primary key(id, version)). It seems to work.
No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history.
Padilla is functionally a convicted terrorist, first imprisoned and now thoroughly stigmatized, without benefit of any of the constitutional safeguards embodied in the Bill of Rights. He has not had the right to remain silent; he has not had access to his lawyer; he has not been allowed to cross-examine witnesses or even to know who they are.