I'm continuing work on my new weblog system, which should allow commenting and just generally modernize things.

I've got the basic HTML rendering working, but I've got to write the RSS feed now, and categories aren't quite up yet.

I really ought to scare-quote "write" because it's hardly worthy of the term. Throwing together a weblog with Django is pretty trivial. For instance, Django has a module for generating RSS so I won't really be "writing" RSS support so much as hooking it up to my particular idea of what an "entry" is. So far I've only had one complaint about Django, which is that the admin site doesn't quite handle properly normalized databases as well as I'd like. (I wanted to have a "text" table, that entries, comments, and other things could link to, but I couldn't convince the automatically-generated admin site to make text creation and entry creation into one step.) I can see why people coming from Java would get so excited about Ruby on Rails.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

This is a test of my weblog system. If you see this post, my transfer to my new host account has succeeded.

My previous web host was a free account from a former coworker. It was a small account and I always tried to maintain a small footprint; static HTML pages, no dynamic features like a comment system, low bandwidth usage, etc. Unfortunately, I drew some fire from a website defacer and caused my former coworker some work. I decided that wasn't polite, so I've switched services to something I'm paying for and can ask for some kind of support.

A general comment I've wanted to post several places lately, especially after seeing this sort of thing:

I'm all for alternate suggestions on how to deal with the problems of the world right now. I'd be absolutely stunned if our government (including not just the Bush Administration but also Congress) was handling everything optimally, just on general principles. But I see so few suggestions that don't boil down to:

• Give all our enemies everything they want.
• Hope this is somehow interpreted as a sign of great strength rather than great weakness.
• Also, bask in the sudden loving adulation of the world.
• Retreat from any task in the world that is hard.
• Wait for our enemies to grow in strength until they can eliminate us. (In particularly advanced cases, change this to "help our enemies grow stronger until they eliminate us.")

I wish that last one was just rhetoric, I really do, but there are a lot of people who actually want to eliminate us.

Non-programmers should read this entire article to see the arguments presented in a neutral-to-you context. (Unless you have strong baseball opinions in which case the first bit may not be quite neutral.)

Programmers should read this because it's true, even if you're not a Perl programmer.

I've learned to be careful about the definitions for the words I use. Our lives have become more complicated and even as our vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds it's still not enough. Ever finer and sharper distinctions must be drawn in order to convey the information; I can spend a good ten pages just defining "censorship" and "free speech".

Today's word that is bothering me is the word "mismanagement". Lately it seems to mean one of two things: "Less than absolutely perfect" and "crimes committed in the context of a large organization". This is as opposed to the "natural" meaning of "a failure to correctly organize and execute a plan to drive many people towards a given goal with effective resource use".

Leiberman Scenario watch: Lieberman said in an interview:

The fastest growing political party in America is no party, which is to say, that the fastest growing group of voters are unaffiliated with either party. That’s a market statement on the two major parties.

I read the declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate document.

My choice for the key paragraph, capturing both the opportunity and danger of our present course succinctly:

If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives. Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.

It's a short document and I would recommend reading it, rather than waiting for people to digest it for you. The full report might be a bit much but this segment is the size of a long blog post.

Dear image spammers: If you're going to take the time to convert your text into an image, why oh why do you insist on using the ugliest fonts you own? Unantialiased Courier? Microsoft Terminal? That looked ugly when it came out somewhere around Windows 3.0!

You know you're doing badly with your font choice when the grossly-overused Times New Roman would be a step up.

This really struck me. A lot of the truly partisan division could have been avoided if we'd just all started from the premise that by golly, figuring out how to respond to the events of the world is really darned hard, and the fact that somebody disagrees with you is not prima facie proof that they are therefore blackest evil.

What would the past five years have been like, I couldn't help wondering, if debate and criticism had proceeded atop the civil platform of agreement that the President was really trying to do his best in a terrible crisis that almost no one had anticipated? Imagine that everyone had been sober and serious all along, as if the responsibility were theirs and not someone else's. Imagine that the opposition to the administration's policies had been more substantive than personal, focused on alternative proposals rather than autopsies of irrevocable decisions past. Imagine that all of us were dealing with today's reality instead of pet grievances from months or years ago. Isn't it possible that the critics might have had more impact on events, that the defenders of American policy might have listened and responded more thoughtfully?