Hitchens on his book

The staff at Beliefnet emailed me (and, presumably, a bunch of other bloggers) to invite us to link to an interview with Christopher Hitchens. ((Do others bloggers get spammed with suggestions as to what they should blog about?)) I read it, and I’m happy to do so: he’s in good form. They also suggested that “my readers” (hello out there!) might enjoy their “Atheist or Believer” quiz. Hmmm… didn’t I take this one a couple of years ago? Let’s see… yep, same questions, including the ridiculously equivocal ones. Anyway, my result was unchanged: Adamant Atheist. What a surprise.

Upgraded to WP2.2

I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.2. The only issue that I ran into was that the Category Cloud widget didn’t work until I upgraded from 1.1.1 to 1.3. Otherwise, it was completely painless: deactivate plugins, unpack the distro zip on top of the existing files, run the upgrade.php script, and reactivate plugins. ((Remembering to jot down which plugins I was running before the upgrade…)) No, I didn’t make a backup, although perhaps a zfs snapshot would have been prudent….
As to the new features: having sidebar widgets built-in is nice, and the drag-and-drop widget editor now works properly in Safari. On the other hand, I’m not sure about the new preview mode: it’s more accurate, but I miss having the HTML and output on the same page. We’ll see. Having full ATOM support is most welcome, and overall I think that 2.2 is a clear step forward.

Californian priorities?

From sfgate:

Based on current spending trends, California’s prison budget will overtake spending on the state’s universities in five years. No other big state ((The article notes that several small states already spend about the same on prisons and state colleges – including Massachusetts!)) in the country spends close to as much on its prisons compared with universities.

One of those flights….

I’m presently in the RCC at Denver Airport, waiting for my flight home to Seattle. The flight from Boston was “interesting”, to put it euphemistically. As we approached Denver from the northeast, there was a wall of severe thunderstorms ahead of us. A couple of flights managed to slip through a gap, but everybody else coming from the east was routed south, flying right along the storm front, until we were south of Pueblo, CO(!). This caused lots of grumbling from the pilots (channel 9 was buzzing), and several flights were close to declaring fuel emergencies. (Or perhaps they were just trying to pressure the ATC folks.)
It was a good weekend in the Boston area, especially the opportunity to take my grandson, Tommy, to both the zoo and a farm. Best moment was when a silverback gorilla lumbered up and sat down next to Tommy, separated only by a sheet of glass…..

X-country

Off to Boston tonight: SEA-IAD-BOS, getting in around 10:15AM tomorrow. Home (BOS-DEN-SEA) on Monday evening. I hope Channel 9 is working…..

The ultimate coffee table book for grey-bearded geeks

Back in February of 2006 I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and posted a few photographs to my gallery. Time to make way for the professionals: Scoble is reporting that a beautiful coffee-table book of photographs from the museum has just been published: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers. What’s more, Scoble’s included links to several video clips: an interview with the book’s photographer, Mark Richards, and an earlier tour of the Museum with the legendary Gordon Bell (here and here). ((Note that I’ve had problems with the Gordon Bell clips on my Mac; I think Flip4Mac and VLC are getting in each other’s way, trying to handle this weird Windows Media stuff.))
Conveniently, I have a coffee table of exactly the right size….

Obey the law, obey the courts… and get prosecuted for doing so

The state of Justice in Cheney’s America: a navy lawyer is being prosecuted because…

… he mailed a New York law firm a list identifying detainees who were being held at Guantánamo.
The government had a legal obligation to disclose the names…
The Pentagon mounted a number of increasingly absurd arguments in defending this suit, principally saying that it was entitled to withhold the names of the detainees because it would “invade their privacy” for this information to be disclosed. The federal court hearing the matter was not amused by these evasions, and ordered the disclosure of the data. Accordingly, under federal court order, the data was turned over to the AP and published.
So the names of the detainees were required to be disclosed. Their non-disclosure was a criminal act. A federal court compelled their disclosure. And now a Guantánamo JAG is being prosecuted for disclosing the names.