John Hawkins: In Defense of Rick Santorum
Santorum has also been criticized for not approving of the gay lifestyle, but again way too much is being made of his comments. Some people are taking the legal argument Santorum made and saying that he tried to compare homosexuality to incest and bestiality. He did make that comparison, but in a legal sense, not in a moral one. In fact, Santorum explicitly said there was no comparison between homosexuality and bestiality near the end of the interview.
So not only do I not support removing Santorum from his leadership post as some critics have demanded, I don't think he has anything to apologize for. As a matter of fact, I think Olympia Snowe & Lincoln Chaffee should have explained that Santorum's comments were taken out of context instead of criticizing him and the people who are deliberately twisting the Senator's words for no other reason than to demagogue him should be ashamed of themselves.
Woo, going to see Phone Booth.
And it was good.
Simon has a really cool new feature for his weblog. Check it out.
Comments work again. They were disabled for a while because I was working on my CMS code that handles form submissions. It took me a lot longer than I expected to get this stuff done because of a bunch of different things.
As part of the process, I wound up making a whole "cookie framework" so now it's really simple to deal with cookies from within my CMS. PHP's built-in cookie handling sucks (the only characters that are allowed in cookie names are those that are valid for PHP variables). Plus, I actually validate cookies according to a generated checksum, so if cookies are tampered with on the client side they'll be ignored (and then deleted, mwa ha ha). I may even include an option to encrypt cookies automatically, or on a per-cookie basis. Pretty cool.
Another thing that held me up and frustrated me a whole bunch is that I had a bug in one of my libraries. It's like generational garbage collection... you check the code you've written more recently for errors, and then you keep going further and further back in your code until you finally track down what it was. Within my custom markup language parser I'm using for my config files, as well as to serialize cookies, I had a line that was basically like "return substr($str,0,$len)". It turns out that if the string is empty (which means that $len would be zero), that returns false, not an empty string like I expected.
Plus, along the way I wound up changing a few other things about how my CMS works, how models are loaded, etc. etc. For instance, now that all data validation can be done in the code for the "action", I don't need to do it anymore in the model function that's called to save data. So that simplified the model code a lot.
So, it turned out to be a much bigger job than I expected, but my CMS continues to rock and get better 
Now that I have the form framework in, I can finish up my wiki, get a real backend administration interface going, etc.
Periods in cookie names are translated into underscores. Fsnth*&$F08OU(7.
It took me so long staring at everything to figure out why my code wasn't working. I should have debugged it quicker, but it just didn't occur to me that the name I'd be sending wouldn't be the name I'd receive.
It has an easy solution... I'll just base64 encode the name, but what a pain in the ass.
Friday, April 25, 2003
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The Elegant Universe
Well I have finally found the crazyguy that preaches useless nonsencein A...
Joseph Baxter: Jan 7, 11:07pm