Ten Reasons Why

From the Washington Post, Chirac Urges French School Ban on Muslim Headscarves:

French President Jacques Chirac asked parliament on Wednesday for a law banning Islamic head scarves and other religious insignia in public schools. . . “Secularism is one of the great successes of the Republic,” Chirac said in an address to the nation. “It is a crucial element of social peace and national cohesion. We cannot let it weaken.”
Chirac said he would push for a law to be enacted in time for the school year that begins next autumn. Islamic head scarves, Jewish skullcaps and large crucifixes would fall under the ban.

Sigh. Just when I thought we might be able to refer to “freedom fries” as “french fries” again, Chirac has to go make an ass of himself.
For the record, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal secular agnostic. Effective separation of church and state requires the government to stamp out government-mandated or -sponsored religious symbology (the Ten Commandments do not belong in courthouses, for example).
However, governments shouldn’t require individuals to stamp out their own personal expressions of faith in public settings.

Culture

Joel on Software writes about biculturalism. In this case, the two cultures under discussion are Windows programmers and UNIX programmers:

Suppose you take a Unix programmer and a Windows programmer and give them each the task of creating the same end-user application. The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface. This is appropriate for a culture in which 99.999% of the users are not programmers in any way, shape, or form, and have no interest in being one.

Technology & Internet

From an article, BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution, by Steve Gilmor of eWeek:

One such candidate is peer-to-peer, as resurrected in the form of Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent. It’s an elegant protocol for distributing files, one that takes advantage of “the unused upload capacity of your customers.” BitTorrent breaks up files into shards that are uploaded around the network as the file is downloaded by multiple clients. The more popular a file, the more endpoints exist. You download a file with BitTorrent by simultaneously collecting shards, assembling them together locally as they arrive.
Map this to RSS feeds: the more popular the feed, the more nodes on the network serving pieces of the feed. That would allow rapid downloads by many users by distributing the data across multiple sites. It’s a digital Robin Hood, redistributing the wealth from the server to a network of peers. BitTorrent does cryptographic hashing of all data, so feed owners can be confident the file reaches its target unchanged.

Link via Scripting News.

Syndication & Aggregation

Via Mezzoblue comes this self-paced course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that is free for a limited time.

Technology & Internet

Alan Levine at CogDogBlog points out that VersionTracker now has RSS feeds, and that the orange-on-white XML icon, instead of pointing to the actual RSS file, directs the user to a separate web page explaining what syndication. Alan thinks this will make me happy.
Boy, he couldn’t be more wrong. This appraoch is even worse than the status quo.

Read more…

Syndication & Aggregation

New MT Wiki to serve as a knowledge base for MT-related things. (Link via CogDogBlog.)
Speaking of Alan at CogDogBlog, I finally caved in, took his lead on MT spam management and installed the MT-Blacklist plug-in. I also started using the MT-CloseComments plug-in to close older comment threads.
All this even despite the crystal-clear validity of Mark Pilgrim’s explanation of why trying to combat weblog spam this way is futile in the long haul.

Movable Type

Doc Searls is is on the right track:

My advocacy here is on behalf of syndication. I don’t want to get into technical arguments, unless they’re about language, which is where my own technical expertise lies.
Yesterday I said I thought Nova Spivak’s “meta” talk was too vague, and that “syndication” was a better word to describe what RSS (which he likes) does.
While “syndication” may be more specific, however, today I’m not sure it’s not misleading, unless we redefine it, which I think we can.

And the day before:

The act of syndication is a statement about the willingness of something to be known. I think that’s the key. This “meta” business sounds to vague to me. When I explain RSS to people and use “metadata,” their eyes glaze. When I use “syndication,” their eyes shine, because they know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a real word.

In my experience, emphasis on the XML aspects of syndication induce the same kind of eye-glazing.
I’m not sure where Doc stands on the little orange icon, but shifting the focus onto the process of syndication and aggregation is the right direction. Focusing on the value of and removing technical impediments to that process (as opposed to making the process all about the data format that makes up its guts) is what will take the tech mainstream.
[Note: I orginally drafted this post on Monday morning, but didn't post it until this morning (Wednesday). When doing so, I forgot to change the Authored On date, so, chronologically, it got posted two days in the past. I've updated the timestamp to indicate the actual posting time, not the time of drafting.]

Syndication & Aggregation

The dullest blog in the world.
I shall refrain from comment.
Link via Doc Searls

Weblogs

And the award for Quickest Thinking In Use of Technology 2003 goes to….

When officer Jason Zier pulled over a 1992 Mazda 626 on Thursday afternoon, the vehicle’s registration had expired. By the time he’d finished writing up Sean Leach for the infraction, the car was legal again. That’s because the 36-year-old Jersey City man had a cell phone, a friend with a computer who he could reach and the foresight to use the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission’s online registration service.

Via Gizmodo

Technology & Internet

Just Say No to Microsoft is a site that lists alternatives to major Microsoft software packages.
I’m a big fan of the Mozilla Firebird browser, Mozilla Thunderbird mail client, and OpenOffice office suite as replacements for Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Microsoft Office.
Now I’m eager to check out Ability as an alternative to Microsoft Access (since OpenOffice doesn’t come with a database manager) .

Technology & Internet