I could not agree more

I could not agree more with this excellent blog post by Steven den Beste. It's all about how the US is not interested in European wisdom and advice regarding our foreign policy, because the Europeans spent the entire Twentieth Century proving again and again that their wisdom and advice wasn't worth crap. An excerpt:

The Twentieth Century is a tapestry of European failure and American success. If there's any arrogance here, it's the one held in the capitols of Europe where they still think of the US as some sort of rambunctious teenager who is strong but stupid and needs to be led by older and wiser heads. Experience proves otherwise. We've made our mistakes, but we haven't set off two world wars. That honor goes to our good friends in the UK, Germany and France, who don't seem to understand why the US isn't eager to follow their advice.

Jef Raskin, who was part

Jef Raskin, who was part of the original Mac team, left Apple in 1982 (2 years before the Mac shipped), and hasn't done much since (wrote a book on user inteface design, invented the failed Canon Cat), gets interviewed by Business Week, and attempts to explain why Apple is a failure because they're not listening to his ideas on interface design. Oh, and all those iMacs, PowerBooks, and iBooks that Apple's sold? They're irrelevant. What really matters is the purity of your user interface. I understand why people pay attention to this guy about user interface stuff; he has some interesting ideas. But from what he says here, there's no good reason, other than perhaps politeness, to pay attention to what he says about Apple.

WTF? AOL in Negotiations to

WTF? AOL in Negotiations to Acquire Red Hat.

I always wondered, in an

I always wondered, in an I-should-look-that-up-someday fashion: How Did the U.S. Get a Naval Base in Cuba?

OK, this is Officially Weird:

OK, this is Officially Weird: The Condiment Packet Museum.

This Washington Post article runs

This Washington Post article runs down the makeup of the fraudulent bioethics committee that Bush has appointed to "advise" him regarding stem-cell research. Big surprise: on the bioethics commission, no bioethicists. Lots of "conservative thinkers." The executive director is a right-wing Christian zealot. The 17 member board has only a few scientists, and no advocates of theraputic cloning.

Jim Roepcke corrected me about

Jim Roepcke corrected me about my earlier comment about Web Objects. According to him, WO does what I want just fine. The problem is that no one at Apple knows anything about usability or linkage. So, I take it back: WO doesn't suck. Apple's Web site staff sucks.


And here's the link to the Power Manager article, although it didn't help my situation any (more's the pity).

Glenn posted a few pictures

Glenn posted a few pictures from Macworld, many of which feature us. BTW, no, we weren't that drunk, but yes, we are that fat.

Given some of the dumb-ass

Given some of the dumb-ass things that some school boards have banned, and in light of some of the discussions we've had with Sean about what is or isn't appropriate at school in the current climate, this Bizarro comic seems right on target. Oh, I used the word "target." Can that be interpreted as a threat of violence? Should we call the police? We have a No Tolerance Policy, you know...

Thanks to those who sent

Thanks to those who sent helpful tips about my TiBook problem, particularly Jesse James Garrett and Damien Barrett. The answer seems to be in Apple support document #14449, "PowerBook and iBook: Resetting Power Manager." No direct link from here, unfortunately, because (despite my high regard for those who love it) WebObjects sucks.

Later note: no joy. The Power Manager fix worked for a few hours, but that's all. On to nastier fixes that will either kill it or cure it. Sometimes, I just hate computers.

Three interesting iPod tidbits overheard

Three interesting iPod tidbits overheard in the Apple booth on the Macworld Expo show floor last week: "We just can't make enough of them. We actually had to stop the factory because we ran out of components, and had to fly people to Japan to source more." and "We're nowhere near maxing out the power of the iPod's hardware." and "We've got someone looking into using it as an organizer, but that may never happen."

I was at Macworld Expo

I was at Macworld Expo last week, and stopped by the O'Reilly booth to check out the competition. Designing with JavaScript, 2nd edition came out recently enough that I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, so I leafed through it and checked out the cover copy (as seen here). Note that bit about The first edition of Designing with JavaScript taught tens of thousands of web designers...? That just stunned me. In the more than four years it was in print, it sold less than 100,000 copies? More importantly (to us), it means that we've sold at least four times as many copies of our book (over three editions) in the same time period? Wow... I always thought of that book as our biggest competitor; it was surprising to find out that we killed it by that large a margin.

The Comfy-Chair Revolution is a

The Comfy-Chair Revolution is a good article from Tech Central Station, written by Glenn Reynolds, of InstaPundit.

Grump. Doc's blogging about how

Grump. Doc's blogging about how cool his TiBook is running 10.1.2, and I'm jealous. Not because he has a TiBook--I have one, too. Not because he's running 10.1.2 on it--so am I. I'm jealous because he's bragging about how he loves how stable it is, and how fast it wakes from sleep. Grrr.

Here's how mine wakes from sleep: open the lid. See the sleep light turn off and the screen go black. Hit Command-Control-Power, and wait for the computer to restart. And then, relaunch all my apps, hoping that I don't have any disk corruption (again).

I've searched on the web (MacFixit and Apple support, in particular) trying to find out if this is a known problem, with no success as yet. Everything I've found sounds like it was fixed a year ago or so, and I bought this machine less than three weeks ago.

Details: this happens with no USB or Firewire gadgets attached. It happens equally when I'm hooked up to the net via Ethernet or Airport. I haven't tried to see if it happens if I'm not hooked up, 'cause I always am.

They get it: Philips says

They get it: Philips says copy-protected CDs have no future.

Gary Wirtz, general manager of the Philips Copyright Office at its headquarters in the Netherlands, believes that copy protection technology will fail all by itself.


"Any kind of legal action would take years and we don't expect these [discs] to last that long. At the moment we are trying to reason with people rather than sue them.... It's not going to work, because any hacker can still make copies. It's only going to effect legitimate consumers and we know there have already been considerable complaints."

It's not enough that some

It's not enough that some ads piss us off. Now there's ads that use the scent of urine to attract dogs, who bring along their owners.

Got this last week, but

Got this last week, but because I was at Macworld Expo, didn't get around to posting it until now: ScamBusters Top Ten Scams for 2001. Pass this link along to all of your kind-of-clueless friends and relatives that have ever asked you about spam, or that have ever passed along any spam message. Remember, only you can prevent forest fires. For some reason, the Nigerian Fee Scam seems to be particularly big right now.

An article on antimatter from

An article on antimatter from CNN.com. Kind of a big flyer for that outlet.

Quote of the day: "Go

Quote of the day: "Go outside. The graphics are amazing."