I just heard on a podcast some interesting quotes from noteable republicans from back in the Clinton/Bosnia days:
“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today�
–Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)
“[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.�
–Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)
“I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.�
–Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)
“Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?�
–Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99
“If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.�
–Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush
“You can support the troops but not the president.�
–Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)
“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.�
–Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)
Many of you may already know about this, and I’ve been running it for a long time on my system, but I just realized I haven’t blogged about it, and that several people have remarked on it when they’ve seen it on my system so…
When Windows XP first came out, one of the first things I did was switch the theme back to the “Widows Classic” look (which basically looked the same as Windows 2000), because I couldn’t stand the way the default XP theme looked. I think it was mostly the color scheme, but I heard it referred to as the “Playschool” theme several times and it really seemed like an appropriate summary - I really didn’t like it.
Anyway, some time ago I came across this Royale Noir theme and have been using it on my XP installation ever since. It’s basically an alternate color variation of the “Royale” theme distributed with Media Center Edition. A download link and very simple installation instructions are at the bottom of the link in this paragraph.
Ubuntu Studio is a new distribution / variation of the latest version of Ubuntu, customized for Audio/Graphics/Video production.
It looks pretty cool, and I love the idea of bundling the “best of breed” applications of those types that are available, making it easy for new users to get up and running without trying to determine which of the many choices out there they should go with and how to set them up. This is the same approach they took with their base system, and (in addition to keeping it on one CD) I personally believe it was the primary factor that rocketed them to the front of the line for new Linux users choosing a distro.
Even if you don’t want to download the whole thing, if you’ve got an Ubuntu install already you can just add their repositories and pick and choose what you want. Heck, even if you don’t want the audio / video stuff, you can just use their theme, which is a cool alternative to the Ubuntu default.
That’s right - and Ed Felten was kind enough to offer a number generator which you can use to get a unique one that you can stake your claim on.
This comes in the wake of this fiasco in which companies behind the HD DVD encryption system claimed that the key itself (which is merely a 128 bit number) was part of their “intellectual property”, and issued takedown notices accordingly.
The good news is that there’s a lot of numbers to go around, but you still might want to hurry because they aren’t infinite - it’s the gold rush of the 21st century! Just don’t take 0F 10 3D 94 41 4D B1 E3 5A 14 12 0D AD 12 5B 54 - that one’s mine! And I better not see anyone posting it on Digg either…
Just a quick announcement / note that all of my currently supported widget plugins work “out of the box” with the widget system included in the latest WP release (2.2).
I still plan to go back and update the documentation a bit to reflect the new state of the WordPress world and the fact that widgets are now natively supported as well as catch up on some new feature requests, but until then, here is quick list:
I still haven’t decided on the tagboard one, but I’ll probably end up picking it back up if I can find the time.
The new release of WordPress looks pretty exciting. I haven’t made the move yet, so I can’t comment on that user experience (although Dan did run into one catch that is likely to cause some grief for people who have customized their sites currently).
Just looking at what’s changed, though, there are some very promising new features from a development point of view:
- “Widgets” are now included in the core system: Even though this is actually the cause of Dan’s frustration (mentioned above), in the end I think it’s an excellent decision. That kind of feature really should be in the core system, because there should be one standard pattern for widgets that plugin authors can write code to support. Up until now, I (and I’m sure many other plugin authors) frequently get asked for support for some of my plugins that I have designed to work as “widgets”, based on the original widget plugin by Automattic. It often turns out that the user is using some other variation of “widgets”, and it makes it very difficult to support them.
- PHPMailer for e-mail: This one probably actually isn’t too big a deal for most regular users, but it does bring much nicer mail functionality into WordPress that can be capitalized on and used by plugin authors. WPMU has actually had this since 1.1, so it’s good to see it moving in to the standard user version as well.
- jQuery: jQuery is a javascript library that makes writing javascript code easier and more consistent. It’s similar in purpose and in features to Prototype, which WordPress has included for quite some time, but it’s good to see that they’re now including both. They aren’t using it for much yet in 2.2, but since it’s there it’s available for you to reference if there’s a situation (or personal preference) that calls for it rather than Prototype.
There are lot of other changes, including ones that usually accompany every major release: performance improvements, additional plugin hooks (my personal favorite), etc. All in all, this release seemed to be very focused on making developers happy, which I applaud.
Last Friday, I took Emma to Simi Valley to compete in the district speech meet, since she won in her category in her local school one. This is her and her friends from school who were also there competing in other categories.
She did very well. I thought some of the other kids were way too over-exaggerated in their presentations, but apparently the judges like that sort of thing, because those were the ones that received the highest scores. All the kids were seated up front with the parents and judges at the back of the room, and each kid in turn stood up at the front facing the rest of the room to give their speeches.
One kind of funny but eventually uncomfortable part was one of the girls that was sitting in the back row of students would turn around and make faces to her parent after some other kid would do something that she didn’t think measured up to her standards. At first her mom laughed, but then it got pretty embarrassing as she realized that the parents of the kids she was mocking were also sitting right there watching her do so.
Afterwards we went by the T.O. mall for lunch and some mother’s day shopping, which Emma enjoyed. She got the day off of school because of it, but she was very concerned at first and we had to assure her that, since it was a school activity, this would not count against her perfect attendance record.
Every now and then I need to remind myself of this simple truth:
<Censored version>Don’t argue on the internet; it’s stupid.</Censored version>
PS - This remark is not intended to any insult any people who may actually be stupid.
In preparation for taking my car in for work yesterday, I finally got around to replacing the tubes on my bike to get it back into riding condition.
Now all I have to do is start riding it more.
