Monday, January 31, 2005

The Micro-Pundit:  Omnibus Spending Bills

These massive omnibus spending bills that Congress seems to like so much are getting out of hand.  Congress and the President love them, because everyone gets what they want.  The bills are so huge that no-one can possibly read them in toto before voting on them.  And since no-one can figure out everything in them, everyone gets some pet project approved or some special new rules change that gets added deep in the bowels of the bill.  Just as an example, the last omnibus bill had some public school voucher funding, a bit on how religious hospitals and insurance companies are no longer required to pay for abortions or contraception, and at least 9% MORE discretionary spending (ie pork).  These damn things need to stop happening.  Quite frankly, if I hear that the Legislative and the Exectutive branches of our government like some political bauble, that pretty much means we the people need to step in and take it away before they get into trouble with it.  And they’re starting to get the whole country in trouble with these damn omnibus spending bills.

I work for the feds indirectly, and I have friends and family who work much more directly for the feds than I do, so I realize many of the ramifications of my next statement.  I think that I’d rather see the federal government shut down for a couple of weeks than see another omnibus spending bill, even if that means the company I work for and all my federally-employed family and friends don’t get paid for several weeks.  That’s how bad I think these big budget bills are for the country.

Sunday, January 30, 2005

Tech Review:  FireFox 1.0

Like many people, I refuse to use Microsoft products when I can aviod them, so I don’t use Internet Explorer (IE) at home except when I have to.  That pretty much limits my usage of IE to visits to the Windows Update site for security patches.  So I’ve used Netscape Navigator 7.0 almost since it was released, and I’ve been quite happy with it.  But Navigator 7.0 was getting old in software terms and I had concerns about how well it would be supported in the future, so a couple of weeks after the Mozilla folks released FireFox 1.0 (FF), I switched over from Navigator.  I’m happy to say that I haven’t been disappointed by the switch.

The feature that I’m using the most often, and happens to be one of the most visible differences between FF and IE, is tabbed browsing.  I utterly despise cluttered taskbars (the bar at the bottom of the screen that lists all the programs that are open, in case you don’t know the lingo), and Windows XP puts every single program window as a task in the taskbar.  If you’ve got three Word documents open, that’s three tasks.  (You can turn this off for some individual programs, but not IE that I’ve found – yet another MAJOR bone to pick with Microsoft) Tabbed browsing, where each FF window appears as a tab within the main FF window, gets rid of this problem by keeping all the browser windows within a single task.  Add four IE windows, two of which are pop-up ads, and all of a sudden, XP puts your task bar into “pulldown” mode, where only one version of IE is shown and all the others are hidden.  In my opinion, this mode is even worse than a merely cluttered taskbar.

(I’ve found that I like tabbed browsing so much that I’d pay money on spreadsheet or word processing software that offers the option for “tabbed documents” in place of the annoying Window pulldown menu.  I know Word doesn’t offer it – does Corel?)

This gets me to the second feature of FF that I positively love – the pop-up blocker.  IE lacks a really good pop-up blocker, so every ad that pops up quickly sends the task bar into “pulldown” mode again.  But FF blocks every single pop-up advertisement that tries to come across, and FF is configured to block everything as the default.  If you really want to be endlessly annoyed by pop-ups, I suppose you could turn the blocker off.  I haven’t yet found a site with pop-up ads that get around FF’s blocker, so I’ve been able to surf the web happily.  And this feature operates totally behind the scenes, so you know it’s working only because of what you don’t see, not because of what you notice.

Another behind-the-scenes feature of FF is its cookie and security management. Some of the worst spyware offenders come along with advertisements that are contained in the HTML of the site you’re visiting.  When you load the main website, the offending ads dump cookies that track your web habits, purchases, etc. and regularly report back to the mother ship.  FF gives you the opportunity to set several different levels of control for cookies, from allowing them from everywhere to blocking all cookies.  These days, it’s unwise to block all cookies, especially since many sites require them, but it’s downright stupid to allow every cookie onto your computer.  FF lets you set up security to block all cookies originating from a site other than the one you’re currently visiting, as well as several other options.  The option I use prompts me to accept or deny every cookie that a site wants to put on my computer.  While this does slow me down when I first visit a site, the sites I trust are allowed to put cookies on my computer while the others I deny.  And for the sites that I’m not sure I trust but that still require cookies, or sites that require cookies that I’ll only visit once, there’s a handy little feature in the prompt:  “Allow for Session.” This option allows the site to put the cookie on my computer for the duration of my visit, but then FF deletes the cookie as soon as I’m done with the site.  This is the best cookie management option I’ve ever seen, and I strongly applaud Mozilla for creating it.

The main browser add-on that I like is the option to add your own RSS feeds to the bookmark sidebar.  Unfortunately, it took me some time and a visit to Mozilla’s technical help website to get the functionality up and running.  My biggest complaint is that the personalized RSS functionality only shows up in the Bookmarks sidebar, and not in the upper toolbar.  Since I’m not a big fan of sidebars, not having an option that I’ve found to put the personalized RSS content into the toolbar is quit annoying.  I may request this feature out of a future release of FF, if there’s not already some way to do it I’m not familiar with.

While I’ve not run into this particular problem myself, a coworker of mine who used FF before going back to Mozilla took exception to the History pulldown menu.  In Mozilla, the History menu displays the most recently visited sites for all the current tabs, not just the history for the tab you’re looking at.  I see how not having access to all the history information could be inconvenient, so a configuration option to get all this history information would have been nice.  But since I only rarely use the History pulldown menu in any browser, I personally don’t really care much.

All in all, I’m very happy with FireFox 1.0 and I wish Mozilla luck in their browser endeavors.  I also heartily recommend that you switch over from Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator to FireFox at your earliest convenience.

For my next tech review, I’ll review Mozilla’s new Thunderbird email client. 

Friday, January 28, 2005

The Daily Mantra: Creativity

Creativity breeds creativity.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary: “Jihad”

jihad

1. an Arabic word that means the personal spiritual struggle of all Muslims to improve themselves

2. a term erroneously applied to the harapa being waged by Islamists against progress and civilization.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

The Micro-Pundit:  Torture and Navy Seals

I recently heard about how some Navy Seals are being punished for abusing prisoners in Iraq.  Some of the Seals recently faced non-judicial punishment, while a few others may face courts-martial for their roles in the abuse.  I realize that it’s not practical to hold any soldier to the same standard that civilians are held to – simply doing a soldier’s job in war would get him or her thrown in jail for murder in peace time.  But I find that the entire concept of non-judicial punishment for torture repugnant.  And when I heard that the charges before the courts-martial would be the military equivalent of a misdemeanor, I was floored.  Breaking the United State’s treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions and breaking federal law is a misdemeanor?  That’s simply wrong, and it sends the wrong message to the soldiers, to the REMFs who ordered the torture (or who sat back and just let it happen), and to the world.  Everyone directly responsible for the torture, anyone who ordered that torture occur, anyone whose lack of oversight let the torture happen, and anyone who helped create the conditions that led to the torture in the first place should be locked up for many years in a federal prison.

Unfortunately, that includes key pieces of the Justice Department, the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and the White House, so it’ll never happen. 

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

The Daily Mantra:  Sinus Headaches

Staying hydrated keeps the nasty painful sinus headaches away.

Monday, January 24, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary: “Inhumane”

inhumane

1. lacking the beneficent attributes associated with humanity, esp. pity and compassion

2. the natural conditions of those existing the tyrannical rule of either individuals, governments, societies, or cultures {examples: soldiers in combat, the disabled in Japan, sex slaves, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib detainees}

Sunday, January 23, 2005

pMachine Pro 2.4

pMachine Inc. has decided to discontinue their original pMachine blogging software.  Apparently, their new Expression Engine software (which, I must admit, looks quite cool, albeit costing more than I can afford and justify with my current readership) stole so many pMachinePro customers that it didn’t make economic sense to continue upgrading pMachinePro.  But before they discontinued pMachinePro, they released version 2.4 and, far more importantly, they made pMachinePro totally free!

This means that I now have the tools to do multiple blogs on my site at the same time, divide up my mailing lists, put out multiple and different RSS feeds, parse other RSS feeds here, ping multiple servers to generate traffic, even blacklist and whitelist email accounts, phrases, IP addresses, and URLs.

As Eric Cartman says, “sweeeeeet.”

I’ve already performed the upgrade from 2.3 to 2.4, and it was pretty much painless so far as I could tell.  Watch this space for further site upgrades over the next several months.

The Micro-Pundit:  The US vs. Iran?  Part 2

I noticed something on January 21, the day after Bush II was crown…, er, inaugurated.  On Inauguration Day, Dick Cheney began pounding the war drums again, this time against that bastion of so-called evil, Iran.  If you think back to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, you might remember that the Administration began justifying the invasion in much the same way, with the Vice-President and various chicken-hawk Cabinet members declaring that Saddam Hussein was about to get nukes and was working on biological weapons, and that he was planning to use them on Israel and the whole of Western civilization.  The Vice-President is again stepping forward into the role of Agitator-in-Chief and premier chicken-hawk.

Here’s a couple of news links you might find interesting.

• The BBC News
• The LA Times

I’ll keep people appraised of the likely march to war against Iran.  Maybe if enough of us keep this up, we’ll be able to stop this one before we’re even more screwed than we already are in Iraq.

Prior blogs on this subject:

• The Micro-Pundit: “The Coming Wars” by Seymour M. Hirsh

Saturday, January 22, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary: “Harapa”

harapa

Arabic word for “war against society,” a Hell-worthy offense in Islam which describes the true nature of what the Islamists are cynically referring to as “jihad”