Ken Adelman makes some great points:
After Mandela's ad hominems and hypocrisy came the zinger: "They just want the oil," he said of Bush and Blair.
Were that true, they could "just" get "the oil" quite easily, by scrapping the sanctions the U.N. imposed on Iraq a dozen years ago. Lifting these sanctions would free up all Iraqi oil, much more quickly and easily than war.
That's precisely why the French appease Saddam. "They" -- indeed -- "just want the oil." Hence they care little about Iraqi suffering or Saddam's hell-bent drive for weapons of mass destruction.
Moreover, Iraq's huge oil reserves prove two key points. First, just how desperately Saddam clings to his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. His refusal to scrap them 12 years ago, as he pledged, cost Iraq more than $100 billion in lost oil revenue, perhaps as much as $200 billion. That's a lot to forgo for a WMD arsenal. But it's WMD that Saddam values most. No price his people pay is too high for his personal ambitions.
Second, Iraq's having gobs of oil shows how principled America and England are. For unlike the French and Russians, our leaders -- both Republican and Democratic, Labour and Conservative -- have willingly sacrificed acquiring cheaper oil to force Saddam's scrapping his WMD arsenal.
Moreover, Iraqi oil is not just there for the grabbing after liberation. Iraqi oil fields have become as dilapidated as has Iraq under Saddam. The successor government will need huge resources to modernize and expand its oil equipment for exploitation.
Lost my feeds again (after I had to CTRL-ALT-DELETE it), bastards. It froze viewing a PowerPoint file, so I don't know whether it was the PowerPoint viewer, Internet Explorer, or Syndirella that was the cause of the crash.
Either way, however, it's Syndirella's fault that it lost my feeds. How can you just lose data? Does it keep the "list of feeds" file open all the time? What a PITA.
Ah, that could do it. Syndirella seems to store the list of feeds along with all of the individual feeds' data (cache of posts, feed settings, etc.) all together in a flat file. So if it happens to crash while it's updating any feed, or even when it's marking an item in a feed read, the master data file will be open and data probably lost when Syndirella dies.
Two via Erik: Neat caching stuff from Russell. Check out http://www.ircache.net/cgi-bin/cacheability.py.
And via Erik, via Matt, check out the MySQL Control Center (drool). Two other products, MySQL Front (which I currently use) and SQLyog were recommended in the comments on Matt's site, in addition to the must-have, phpMyAdmin
Via Erik, via Andre, I've just discovered Maverick:
Maverick is a Model-View-Controller (aka "Model 2") framework for web publishing using Java and J2EE. It is a minimalist framework which focuses solely on MVC logic, allowing you to generate presentation using a variety of templating and transformation technologies.
Maverick is simple to use - this is a minimalist framework that anyone can understand easily. This is not a "kitchen sink" framework that tries to provide everything you need to build a web application; there are plenty of great database connection pools, application servers, validation frameworks, templating languages, etc already out there.
This is not a framework designed by people who build frameworks; Maverick is designed and built by people who build web applications for a living and were disappointed with the complexity and invasiveness of existing open source tools.
Since I'm close to getting the design right in my CMS 
hopefully ideas from this thing will push me in the right direction (before I stop caring!). And heck, maybe I can go ahead and just use the PHP version of Maverick, Ambivalence (hey, that's a coincidence, isn't it?).
Thursday, February 6, 2003
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CF, why pick that piece of trash?Cold Confusion. Is it finallyreally a OO...
ColdConfusion: Sep 5, 8:36pm