del.icio.us links for 2005-10-31

• Quentin Tarantino's REPUBLIC DOGS: Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle vs. Quentin Tarantino (humor mashup weird)
• Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace: How not to be seen (anonymity crime culture howto privacy surveillance travel)
• Bluetooth can knock out Wi-Fi signals | TG Daily: Among the devices that can drag down your Wi-Fi performance, are microwaves, cordless phones and even Bluetooth devices. (bluetooth mobile network wifi wireless)
• TIME Magazine Archive Article -- How The Coast Guard Gets It Right -- Oct. 31, 2005: So how is it that an agency that is underfunded and saddled with aging equipment--and about the size of the New York City police department--makes disaster response look like just another job, not a quagmire? [via O'Reilly Radar] (politics productivity us)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-29

• Kubla Khan: (poem)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-28

• George Takei, ‘Mr. Sulu,’ says he’s gay - TELEVISION - MSNBC.com: LOS ANGELES - George Takei, who as helmsman Sulu steered the Starship Enterprise through three television seasons and six movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of Frontiers... (gay georgetakei startrek)
• Bad Brothers Racing - Jet Powered YSR Motorcycle: Yamaha YSR-50 powered by a Cummins ST-50 turbocharger converted into a gas turbine (cool howto jet motorcycle weird)
• Girls: fancy an SMS-fired Bluetooth vibrator? | The Register: Stimulate her inbox (bluetooth sex sms toy weird)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-26

• FAQ: How Real ID will affect you | CNET News.com: Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. (bush declan evil liberty politics privacy rfid security)
• Former Abu Ghraib General: Torture Is Continuing; Order Came From Very Top: The General commanding troops in Iraq whose career was ruined in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, Janis Karpinski, appeared on the Alex Jones Show yesterday and made some amazing revelations. (abughraib bush evil iraq torture war)
• Sploid: Pentagon's Able Danger system predicted USS Cole attack: Senior Pentagon officials were warned not to let the USS Cole dock in Yemen two days before terrorists attacked the ship five years ago killing 17 sailors, according to Congressman Curt Weldon, who said the crucial intelligence was gleaned from the former (abledanger bush evil news politics security terrorism)
• The Onion: America's Finest News Source (humor news theonion us)
• Trick-Or-Treaters To Be Subject To Random Bag Searches | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: WASHINGTON, DC—Responding to "a possible threat of terror and fright," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Monday that trick-or-treaters will be subject to random bag searches this Halloween season. (bush halloween humor politics terrorism theonion)
• Queer Eye Team Denounces Recent Wave Of Vigilante Homosexual Makeover Groups | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: NEW YORK—The stars of the popular Bravo reality show Queer Eye For The Straight Guy spoke out Monday against the recent rash of vigilante homosexual makeover groups, whose members have left hundreds of Americans inappropriately and tragically made-over. (crime fab5 gay humor theonion)
• NASA Chief Under Fire For Personal Shuttle Use | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: CAPE CANAVERAL, FL—NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has yet to respond to recent allegations that he used NASA space shuttles on as many as one dozen unauthorized outings to such destinations as New York City, the French Riviera... (humor nasa theonion)
• Wired 13.11: Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone: Consumers want an iPod phone that will play any song, anytime, anywhere. Just four little problems: the cell carriers, the record labels, the handset makers, and Apple itself. The inside story of why the ROKR went wrong. (apple drm evil greed hardware ipod mobile motorola mp3 music nokia p2p riaa telephony usability)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-25

• blummy - The bookmarklet management bookmarklet: blummy is a tool for quick access to your favorite web services via your bookmark toolbar.It consists of small widgets, called blummlets, which make use of Javascript to provide rich functionality (such as bookmarklets). (ajax del.icio.us tool web)
• Media ignored Bush administration's machination ... [Media Matters]: The story that the Bush administration may have defied a June 2004 deadline and delayed a report on outsourcing until after the 2004 elections, then edited the report to generally support the practice, has failed to gain any media attention. (bush economics evil media news politics)
• FBI Net-wiretapping rules face challenges | CNET News.com: New federal wiretapping rules forcing Internet service providers and universities to rewire their networks for FBI surveillance of e-mail and Web browsing are being challenged in court. (bush calea declan evil internet liberty network politics privacy surveillance)
• Mermaids, Dinosaurs Deemed Terror Targets: The mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs are probably not very high on the list of terrorist targets. Neither is the stegosaurus at Dinosaur World in Plant City. Yet both facilities were sites the federal government wanted "hardened" against attack. (bush dinosaur funny mermaid terrorism)
• Theme from Shaft as it might have been written by Geoff Chaucer: Wha be tha blake prevy lawe That bene wantoun too alle tha feres? -- SHAFT! -- Ya damne righte! (chaucer funny issachayes mashup)
• VeriSign and ICANN strike monster net deal | The Register: VeriSign has dropped all its lawsuits against internet overseeing organisation ICANN, agreed to hand over ownership of the root zone, and in return been awarded control of all dotcoms until 2012. (dns icann internet news politics verisign)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-24

• NCAA Football Polls - CBS SportsLine.com: AP Top 25, Coaches Poll, BCS, Harris Interactive, SportsLine 119 (football ncaa poll reference sports)
• Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com: Cory Burnell wants to set up a Christian nation within the United States where abortion is illegal, gay marriage is banned, schools cannot teach evolution, children can pray to Jesus in public schools and the Ten Commandments are posted publicly. (charlestonsc politics religion southcarolina us weird)
• Tony Bourke - Super Smack: Super Smack is a benchmarking, stress testing, and load generation tool for MySQL (and PostgreSQL). Super Smack was originally written by Sasha Pachev, and then hosted and maintained by Jeremy Zawodny. (benchmarking database mysql postgresql sql tool)
• Money for Nothing: Billions of dollars have disappeared, gone to bribe Iraqis and line contractors’ pockets. (bush evil iraq politics war)
• Concurring Opinions: Making Universities Pay for Government Surveillance: The federal government is requiring universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications. [via Politech] (calea evil infrastructure liberty network politics surveillance telephony voip)
• The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society: Cthulhu LIVES! (cthulhu movie)
• MySQL AB :: MySQL 5.0 Now Available for Production Use: MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today announced the general availability of MySQL 5.0, the most significant product upgrade in the company's ten-year history. (database gpl mysql software sql)
• NASA - How We'll Get Back to the Moon: Before the end of the next decade, NASA astronauts will again explore the surface of the moon. And this time, we're going to stay, building outposts and paving the way for eventual journeys to Mars and beyond. (moon nasa news science)
• Inside the Mind of a Censor: Five Reasons Jack Thompson is Right: ...and Five Reasons Why He's Not (culture gaming rant)
• Worldandnation: Ruining my credit was easy, thief says: "Using my identity, he charged more than $40,000 in just a few days: suits, computers, an all-terrain vehicle, lawn equipment, stereo equipment, you name it. It took more than a year and untold hours of exasperation to clear up my credit." (crime economics evil fraud howto privacy)
• Brent Scowcroft "Breaks Ranks" with George W. Bush in Major New Yorker Article: This critique by Scowcroft hardens the foundation of critique that others have recently put in place -- particularly from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former State Department Chief of Staff under Colin Powell... (bush evil iraq politics us war)

So much for that

I really can't be motivated to blog every day, but I do post several links to del.icio.us every day, so if by some chance you actually read this, you really should subscribe to my del.icio.us feed.

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-20

• Keith Devens - Wiki: ProgrammerFonts: Programmers have very particular font needs. A font for programming must be monospaced, extremely readable, and must sharply distinguish between similar characters, such as capital O and zero and the number 1, capital I, and lowercase L. (art design fonts free)
• SI.com - NBA - Man gets longer prison term to honor Larry Bird - Thursday October 20, 2005 12:10PM: Larry Bird not only is leading the Pacers, it appears he is also leading fans of his to request longer prison sentences. (larrybird news weird)
• Church of Reality: The Church of Reality is a religion based on the practice of Realism, believing in everything that is real. Our motto is, "If it's real, we believe in it." [via BoingBoing] (funny reality religion science)
• Breast Adjustment Doc Suspended - October 19, 2005: A Michigan chiropractor has had his license suspended after state investigators charged that he fondled two teenagers after telling the girls that their breasts were "uneven" and in need of adjustment. (boobs michigan news us weird)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-19

• Boing Boing: Joi "007" Ito's feature film debut: Joi Ito vs. Austin Powers: The Guy Who Blogged Me (austinpowers boingboing funny image joi_ito mashup)
• Identifont - identify fonts and typefaces: Welcome to Identifont®, the unique font identifier that enables you to identify a font from a sample by answering a series of simple questions. It is ideal if you want to match an existing typeface, or identify a typeface you have seen in a publication. (art fonts reference search software tool typography)
• New Scientist Breaking News - Astrology is scientific theory, courtroom told: Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday. (astrology creationism evolution science)
• Schneier on Security: Terrorism Law Used to Keep Pedestrians off Bicycle Paths: Sally Cameron does not look like a threat to national security. But the 34-year-old property developer has joined the ranks of Britain's most unlikely terrorist suspects after being held for hours for trespassing on a cycle path. (evil liberty politics schneier uk)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-18

• FAL.net - Horrton Hears a Heart: by Edgar Allan Seuss [via BoingBoing] (comic drseuss edgarallanpoe funny mashup)
• Knowing When To Quit: Prioritize Then Quit! (howto productivity)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-17

• The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla's Weblog :: Owner of a Lovely Butt: Yes' Owner of a Lonely Heart as the bed track and Sir Mix-a-Lot's Baby Got Back as the vocal track (bigbutts funny mashup mp3 music rap rock sirmixalot yes)
• Google.org: Google.org will include the work of the Google Foundation, some of Google’s own projects using Google talent, technology and other resources, as well as partnerships and contributions to for-profit and non-profit entities. (google)
• Virtualization — Server Virtualization Open Source Project – OpenVZ – Supported by SWsoft: Virtualization is a framework or methodology of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. Techniques create multiple isolated partitions (Virtual Machines (VM) or Virtual Private Servers (VPS)) on a single physical server. (linux virtualization)
• Boing Boing: Wal-Mart photofinishing narcs out student who made anti-Bush poster: Wal-Mart called the police on a high-school student who brought in a pic of a homemade anti-George Bush poster for photo-finishing. The Secret Service went to the kid's high-school and confiscated the poster. (bush evil liberty politics walmart)
• Boing Boing: EFF cracks hidden snitch codes in color laser prints: Many color laser printers hide information about your printer's serial number and the date and time of your print job in every job you print. Now EFF has decoded the information-hiding scheme on the Xerox Docucolor series... [C Doctorow] (boingboing evil liberty printer privacy)
• Jonathan Coulton » Blog Archive » Thing a Week 5 - Baby Got Back [via BoingBoing]: This week is a cover of Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot (note: he is not an actual knight). I’ve wanted to cover this song for a long time, because it is excellent - there’s a wonderful message in there for those of you who have big butts. [J Coulton] (bigbutts folk funny jonathancoulton mashup mp3 music rap sirmixalot)
• NSO: Adaptive optics produces ultrasharp images of sunspot [via BoingBoing]: This ultrasharp image of sunspot AR 10810 shows several objects of current scientific interest. G-band bright points, which indicate the presence of small-scale magnetic flux tubes, are seen near the sunspot and between several granules. (astronomy photo science)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-15

• Boing Boing: Catastrophic motorcycle pileup photos: "Here's a slideshow made from a set of sequential digital photos taken of a large motorcycle pileup as it happened along a freeway somewhere in a Russian city." (disaster motorcycle photo russia)
• Schneier on Security: Playmobil Security Checkpoint: Now you too can play airline security. (funny schneier security toy)
• Universe Today - Spitzer's Stunning Portrait of Andromeda: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took this amazing photograph of our neighbour galaxy, Andromeda. The image was made by stitching together 11,000 separate images of the galaxy taken over the course of 18 hours of observations by Spitzer. (andromeda astronomy photo)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-13

• The Noguchi Filing System [via BoingBoing]: New documents (envelopes) are added at the left end of the "envelope buffer," and whenever a document is used (i.e., the envelope removed from the shelf), it is returned to the left end of the bookshelf. (boingboing howto japan productivity usability)
• Head in a Jar [via BoingBoing]: Step 1: The first step of course, is to find a bottle. Step 2: Obtain the head of a corpse. I got this one from a homeless person last spring. Juuuust kidding. (art howto weird)
• OBSCURESTORE.COM: The Obscure Store and Reading Room (news weird)
• The Snowflake Method for Writing a Novel: you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story (art culture design howto writing)

al Qaeda letter truth or bullshit?

CNN.com - Al Qaeda in Iraq: Letter to al-Zarqawi a fake - Oct 13, 2005

Let's consider the possibilities.

The letter is real: If so, does it matter? Isn't this pretty much what we would expect them to say?

Things may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. Because of that, we must be ready starting now, before events overtake us, and before we are surprised by the conspiracies of the Americans and the United Nations and their plans to fill the void behind them. We must take the initiative and impose a fait accompli upon our enemies, instead of the enemy imposing one on us, wherein our lot would be to merely resist their schemes.

The letter is fake: If so, this raises the question of who wrote it. al Qaeda claims it was the Black (White) House. I don't think this possibility can be ruled out, but others could have faked it as well to provoke this sort of incident. If the White House did fake it as a means to drum up support for continuing the occupation of Iraq, it brings Bush another step closer to impeachment.

However, I doubt the Bush administration would try this particular stunt right now when there is already too so much public scrutiny of whether or not they fabricated the reasons for going to war in the first place. Maybe that's giving them too much credit.

Ultimately, does it really matter? Using a letter allegedly from al Qaeda as a justification for your foreign policy seems monumentally stupid. Plus, it seems unnecessary. While I believe going to Iraq in the first place was a terrible idea, we also cannot just cut and run. We went in, destroyed their infrastructure and defenses, and until we make them self-sufficient and able to defend themselves from hostile neighbors (Iran, Syria, insurgents), we can't leave.

Tags: bush war iraq

Georgie And Harriet

Georgie And Harriet: "Bush-Miers Texas correspondence reveals mutual admiration society"

Write early, write often

Joi Ito wrote:

Write early write often - Don't wait for your ideas to be completed. When you have some inspiration, get it out of the door quickly. Update the post or write new ones as the thought or story unfolds.

So I'm going to give it a try for awhile

Related link: The Elements of Meaningful XHTML

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-12

• Physics goes abstract (October 2005) - News - PhysicsWeb: An image processing technique that is used to analyze galaxies might also have applications in the world of abstract art. (art fractal physics science)
• Penny Arcade: Tangled Webs And So Forth: "The reality is that we may never know who baked your PSP into this flaky crust." (comic funny gaming)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-11

• Linux NFS faq: This document provides an introduction to NFS as implemented in the Linux kernel. It links to developers' sites, mailing list archives, and relevant RFCs, and provides guidance for quickly configuring and getting started with NFS on Linux. (faq filesystem howto linux network nfs reference)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-10

• Joi Ito's Web: Blogging style: Tips from the master (blogging howto writing)
• Nuclear Elephant: mod_evasive: module for Apache to provide evasive action in the event of an HTTP DoS or DDoS attack or brute force attack. Designed to be a detection and network management tool, and can be easily configured to talk to ipchains, firewalls, routers, and etcetera. (apache security)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-07

• CollaborativeRank -- del.icio.us search engine: According to this site, I am an expert on pirates. Well blow me down! (del.icio.us search)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-06

• The Chicken of Tomorrow: Java is teh suck (java programming rant sucks)
• Web Sudoku - Billions of Free Sudoku Puzzles to Play Online: Sudoku (数独) is the number placing game taking the world by storm. The rules are simple. Enter digits from 1 to 9 into the blank spaces. Every row must contain one of each digit. So must every column, as must every 3x3 square. (free game japan web)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-06

• The Chicken of Tomorrow: Java is teh suck (java programming rant sucks)
• Web Sudoku - Billions of Free Sudoku Puzzles to Play Online: Sudoku (数独) is the number placing game taking the world by storm. The rules are simple. Enter digits from 1 to 9 into the blank spaces. Every row must contain one of each digit. So must every column, as must every 3x3 square. (free game japan web)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-05

• WWW SQL Designer: Interactive drag-n-drop UML-style database designer (administration ajax database design gpl mysql programming sql xml)
• Pictures Free Download: bigfoto.com, the royalty free photo agency offering free use of all pictures (with link or reference). (art design free image photo reference)
• NoctemWare - Quake 3 Arena CE [via BoingBoing]: "We thought it would be fun to do it, so we ported the recenly-GPL-released Quake 3 Arena from iD Software to Windows CE 4.2 for Pocket PC..." (fps free game pocketpc quake)
• Regular Expression Library -- presented by ASPSmith.com Training: Regular expression for validating US Social Security Numbers. Accepts optional hyphens or spaces as formatting characters. Parses the three subfields of the SSN into three named sub-strings (SSN1, SSN2, and SSN3) to facilitate program use. (programming regex ssn)
• SIOX: Simple Interactive Object Extraction: SIOX stands for Simple Interactive Object Extraction and is a solution for extracting foreground from still images with little user interaction. The underlying method is fast, noise robust, and can also be used for segmentation of videos. (art extension gimp gpl image photo software video)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-04

• Neutron stars: Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of some massive stars. They pack roughly the mass of our Sun into a region the size of a city. (astronomy physics science)

del.icio.us links for 2005-10-03

• LA Weekly: Dining: Counter Intelligence: Griddle Me This: Okonomiyaki is simultaneously crisp and gooey, sweet and savory, bland and funky as hell. When you are presented with your first okonomiyaki, you don’t know whether to kill it or to eat it. (culture food japan okonomiyaki weird)
• O'Reilly: What Is Web 2.0: But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom. (ajax blogging google history internet rest rss software web xml)