How to win friends and influence people

From Think Progress (via HuffPo, where the European commenters are understandably outraged):

Today, President Bush held a press conference in Vienna, Austria as part of a diplomatic visit to Europe. He was asked by a member of the press why approval for his policies, particularly on national security issues, was so low in Europe. Bush explained that Europeans didn’t take the 9/11 attacks seriously. “For Europe, September 11th was a moment. For us, it was a change of thinking.”
85 Europeans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Bush added that “some people,” presumably Europeans who disagree with his policies, believe it’s “OK to condemn people to tyranny.”

I wonder if this is part of the new emphasis on diplomacy that Andrew Sullivan was talking about.
(On the other hand, perhaps “change of thinking” simply means “hysterical abandoning of our Constitution and values”, in which case Bush was quite truthful.)

Cringely nails the "Net neutrality" issue

Cringely gets to the heart of the matter.. Right now, it’s all about VoIP:

One thing ISPs supposedly aren’t allowed to do is to ban packets completely. If they tried that by, for example, restricting all Internet video or VoIP phone service to a particular provider, the courts would fill with lawyers filing Restraint of Trade lawsuits. So the ISPs take the air carrier approach of not denying passage to anyone, but wanting to give priority boarding to their most loyal frequent fliers. That’s the heart of their argument.
But the other position ISPs like to take is that of the common carrier, which supposedly doesn’t know the difference between one packet and the next, and is therefore not liable if some of those packets carry kiddie porn or terrorist communications. The ISPs, you see, want it both ways.
And they’ll probably get it, because they have the lobbying clout.
[…]
Where this Net Neutrality issue will hit home is for Voice over IP telephone service, which becomes pitiful if there is too much latency. That’s what this is all about, folks: VoIP and nothing else. The telcos want to use it to keep out the Vonages, Skypes, and Packet8s, and the cable companies do, too. It is a $1 trillion global business, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the ISPs will do anything to own it, but it isn’t about movies or music or even AJAX apps — at least, not yet.

UPDATE: There are also some excellent pieces on the topic over at Jim Lippard’s blog. Too many to link individually….

Delicious Library – promising, but…

Over at present simple, badaunt writes about Delicious Library:

I discovered that Delicious Library is a way to catalogue your books. Just point any FireWire digital video camera, like an Apple iSight®, at the barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item’s cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.

So of course I downloaded it, plugged in my iSight, and started playing.
Basically it works. Wave the bar code on the book at the iSight, getting the angle and lighting right, and the lookup takes a couple of seconds. Great. However, like badaunt, I can’t imagine actually scanning my whole collection. It would take forever, it would require a fair amount of manual intervention (see below), and when I’m done, what use is it?
But I’d love to be able to use it as an adjunct to blogging. For example, I’ve recently been on a Jack McDevitt kick: I picked up Chindi at an airport bookstore, enjoyed it, followed with Omega, and over the next few weeks I worked my way through another four or five of his books.
Now, it would be brilliant if I could have prepared that last paragraph by scanning a few McDevitt books into Delicious Library and clicking a button to generate a chunk of HTML with thumbnail covers, links to Amazon.com, and so forth. (XMLRPC upload to the blog would be nice, but cut-and-paste is adequate.) However right now Delicious Library offers no easy way to work with the data in the library. The Export... option just dumps out a ton of stuff from the Amazon.com page in plain text; Print... just lists thumbnails and titles in a PDF, and Mail... generates an email message per book with the cover and a link.
What I’d like is the ability to define a template, using predefined variables for the various fields of the item record (title, author, publication date, publisher, Amazon cover thumbnail URL, etc.) Then on command the app could simply expand a copy of the template for each selected item in the library, replacing the variables as appropriate, and dump the whole lot onto the clipboard, ready for me to paste into my WordPress composition window.
I mentioned manual intervention earlier, and I have to say that the bar code scan approach is by no means foolproof. For example, I just tried to scan Jack McDevitt’s Infinity Beach. The application read the UPC – 099455007993 – and mapped it into The Lone Ranger Vol. 2 DVD. Eventually I discovered that the way to correct this was to update the “Details” field labelled amazon® # with the ISBN – 0061020052 – and then instruct the app to Reload details from Amazon.com.... In the first dozen books I tested, I ran into this twice, which is somewhat depressing. Oh, well.
The price is OK ($40; the demo version allows up to 25 items), but Delicious Library needs to be a little more open and extensible to meet my needs. Maybe it could be AppleScriptable…?
UPDATE: Mike, the Major Domo at Delicious Monster Software, assures me that they’re working on the features that I suggested. He also provided a workaround for the scan error (look inside the front cover…). I’m impressed, and I’ve volunteered to be a beta tester.

The life of Iraqis who work in the Green Zone

A grim account relayed by Guardian blogger Brian Whitaker:

Just a few days before the president’s visit, Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born US ambassador in Baghdad, sent a disconcerting cable to the state department in Washington. Headed “sensitive”, it painted a grim picture of life in “free and democratic Iraq” as viewed through the eyes of the nine Iraqi employees in the embassy’s public affairs press office.
[…]
“Some of our staff do not take home their American cell phones, as this makes them a target. Planning for their own possible abduction, they use code names for friends and colleagues and contacts entered into Iraq cell phones. For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members for translation at on-camera press events. More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate.“

UPDATE:Full text here.

An Inconvenient Truth

On the hottest day of the year so far in the Boston area (over 94 in Waltham, MA), the fellowship went to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Our verdict: four enthusiastic thumbs up. The critics are right, this is an outstanding movie. As Roger Ebert put it:

When I said I was going to a press screening of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a friend said, “Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor…ing!” This is not a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore’s concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

If you haven’t seen the film, please do so. If you can’t, consider buying the book, or borrowing it from your local public library.
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(And yes, after watching this movie I deeply regret that I didn’t buy the Prius. Oh, well. I hope my future choices will be wiser.)

Flamboyant

Since my copy of the new Pet Shop Boys album Fundamental arrived from amazon.co.uk, I’ve been listening to nothing else. It’s easily the best work they’ve done in the last ten years. If you buy a copy, be sure to get the de luxe version with the bonus CD, Fundamentalism. In addition to different mixes of some tracks from Fundamental, this includes a couple of original gems. Check out this video for “Flamboyant”. It reminds me of watching TV at 4am in a Japanese hotel, unable to sleep because of jet lag and completely incapable of understanding what’s the TV program is all about…. (“Lost In Translation” got it exactly right.)
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[I wish the “blog video” feature of YouTube understood WordPress….]

82 minutes of frustration, and then magic

The England vs. Trinidad & Tobago match just ended. For the first 82 minutes it was horribly frustrating to watch: England had possession two-thirds of the time, but were incapable of putting the ball where it needed to go… in the net. And then Rooney came on and inspired everyone, and Beckham put in the perfect cross, and Crouch kept his eye on the ball for the first time in the match. 1-0. And at the 90th minute, Gerrard pulled off a beautiful, lightning-quick, feint right, lunge left, shoot sequence to make it 2-0. Delightful. Just don’t leave it so late next time – OK?

Being An Oxymoron

A breath of fresh air from liberal evangelical Tony Campolo

I’m one of those pro-life Christians who is convinced that the outrageous number of abortions each year are more due to right-wing economic policies than to Roe v. Wade. In a society where many poor women must work outside the home at a ridiculously low minimum wage just to survive, yet have no access to daycare for their children, we should not be surprised if they seek abortion when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Yet many of the Religious Right Christians who share my pro-life sentiments tend to oppose enacting legislation that would enable poor women to give birth and keep their children. No wonder one of our critics says, “Evangelicals are people who believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Too often it seems like we care about protecting the unborn, but we’re not willing to provide for the born.

The reinvention of Jini proceeds apace

Rob Gingell once observed that “those who do not use Jini are doomed to reinvent it.” Today Warren brings us up to date on the way this reinvention is happening in the WS-splat world:

How deliciously ironic that the WS architects are (badly) re-inventing executable bytecode (BPEL), types (XSD) and interface centric service development (SCA).

I’ll reserve judgment on his “(badly)” evaluation, and simply note that I can remember a conversation with one of the people involved in SCA in which we were lamenting the fact that software engineers are notoriously ignorant about the history of their discipline….

Swiftian satire

Jonathan Swift was the most brilliant satirist of the 18th century. From the outrageous “A Modest Proposal” to the subtle delights of “Gulliver’s Travels”, he demonstrated that the stiletto of satire could be more effective than the bludgeon of outrage. And now the blogosphere has its own Jonathan Swift. Here’s a sample of his work, from Ann Coulter Tackles the Menace of Widows and Grieving Mothers:

Coulter is understandably frustrated at how the liberal media fawns over these women and hangs on their every word, while she has struggled to get her message out through the occasional television appearance, talk radio, college campus tours, her syndicated column, her website and her bestselling books. The media seems to believe that these women deserve some sort of special status just because they happen to have lost a loved one, even though they lack Coulter’s long list of credentials. These narcissistic women persist in believing that their loss was somehow greater than that of the rest of the country who watched it all happen on television.

Brilliant. And then there’s the case of the suicides at Guantanamo:

Admiral Harris contends ominously that the suicides are in fact an act of war against the United States. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” Harris said. Asymmetrical warfare is a tactic used by a weaker enemy to surprise and disorient his opponent. In order to restore symmetry to the battle, our side will have to engage in increasingly self-destructive tactics of our own and abandon certain principles and ethical values that hold us back and hand our opponents weak points they can exploit to strike back at us, a strategy we are already using with some success in Iraq.