Archive: October 26, 2004
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If you haven't gotten the clue by now, I'd like to mention that you probably shouldn't be using any of the many nuke based projects.
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I didn't expect this interview with Linus Torvalds to be interesting, but it turned out to have a very good section in the middle:
Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?
Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.
So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should not try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.
In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had expected to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.
Joel Engel at the Weekly Standard has an article that attempts to explain why Jews keep voting for Democrats, via Roger Simon. Maybe this will lend some insight into the strange phenomenon of Jewish votes for Democrats.
FOR NEARLY SIXTY YEARS, since the birth of Israel, American Jews have faced accusations that they care more about the well-being of their ancient homeland than of their home. Well, barring some unforeseen circumstance, the canard of dual loyalty should be retired forever on November 2, 2004. On that Tuesday, Election Day, up to 80 percent of American Jews will pull the lever for John Kerry, thereby proving that they not only do not care about Israel's well-being, but that they don't mind making common cause with people who wish them ill. Or worse.
The evidence is overwhelming that acceptable anti-Semitism has moved from right to left on the political continuum, and that its philosophical home now resides in the Democratic party, which has become less the party of liberals than of leftists. Even before Al Sharpton stood as a presidential candidate last year, Democratic politicians genuflecting for black votes--Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and Hillary Clinton, for example--often trekked up to Harlem to kiss his ring. And yet, this was a man who in previous years had either led or instigated two anti-Jewish demonstrations, one in Crown Heights and one in Harlem, which together resulted in the deaths of eight people. Does that matter to Democrats and John Kerry? Apparently not. Sharpton was rewarded with a choice slot at the Democratic National Convention, something that is impossible to imagine being given to the likes of former Republican David Duke, whose incitements have frankly born far less blood than Sharpton's.
(To finish reading.)
I'd like to make a note that absolutely positioned CSS layouts are not easy to extend. I indicated that I'm in the process of converting my wiki to MediaWiki. I've currently got it integrated with my the rest of my site -- by which I mean that all requests for the wiki go through my dispatcher (front controller).
Now I'm just customizing the template to look like the rest of my site. I started working with the "monobook" skin, which is the default you see everywhere, including at wikipedia.org and at the author's site. It's got 900 lines of CSS to wade through. Most of what I'm doing is just ripping chunks of everything. But as I put in pieces of my own template, everything is all funky because it's absolutely positioned. So I'm going to mostly have to start from scratch with the template and the CSS -- I'll just take some pieces of the CSS to put back.
I'll post code showing how I've customized everything after I finish.
(This post was poorly written... I'm going to bed)
Drudge is reporting that NBC News is reporting that the weapons cache the NY Times "reported" on yesterday was already gone when our troops got there, back in April 2003!
Yet again, the media bias is the story, not the story they told you. I'm angry. Also, as I understand it, the IAEA was the source for the NY Times story. So, not only is the "mainstream" media trying to unseat the president, but so is a U.N. agency!
As Drudge writes:
Why is the U.N. nuclear agency suddenly warning now that insurgents in Iraq may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives -- in early 2003?
NBCNEWS Jim Miklaszewski quoted one official: "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."
There's not much else to say. Notice in that Drudge report how many times the respective TV news networks mentioned the stories. I saw the BBC today going into all this detail about the weapons. It was disgusting, knowing even then that it was an old story, and watching them put on this patently political show.
In any case, this is a big story, and I feel like rounding up what others have to say about it. I'll do that in a bit.
Ok:
Update:
Update:
Update:
The story is getting more detailed and complex.
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Tuesday, October 26, 2004
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new⇒Perl 6 1.0 in March?
Doh, my mistake. I'm aware of therelation between Parrot and Rakudobut I'...
Keith: Dec 2, 1:03am