There's no question that it was extremely fortunate that this multi-nation plan was exposed when it was, even though it's likely that either Iran or North Korea have already managed to create enough fissionables for a few weapons. It would have been far better if it had been exposed earlier, but an additional ten year delay would have been catastrophic.

There is equally no doubt at all that those revelations were a direct consequence of the war the US is prosecuting, most especially in Iraq. It is by no means clear that without our war there would have been a significant chance of the plot being exposed until too late.

Nothing returns the joy of weblogging like a new weblog management system. ;-)

In his book, Dr. Atkins recommended against consuming Nutrasweet while trying to lose weight, citing studies that suggest Nutrasweet inhibits weight loss. (I don't there's actually anything specific to the Atkins diet in that regard.) He recommends Sucralose be used instead, which as artificial sweeteners go is pretty cool: It can be used to cook with, it definately doesn't taste exactly like sugar but it's easily the closest of any artificial sweetener I've tried, and of course it has no calories in it.

[re: signing weblog comments] There could be a niche for a minimalist “sign this text” application, if PGP were to soak into general net infrastructure. - Mark Pasc

Pondering the comment issue, I've come to the same conclusion. PGP and GPG are a little too excited about high levels of security, and seem to feel that it's more important that everybody immediately jump to 100% then to allow a more gradual use of the system. (As a result, nobody does; a better way to get people's toes in the water then WWW commenting I can't imagine, but that's not an option, so instead of a 90% solution, we get a 0% solution.) I'd like to see a key type that explicitly says "I'm a low security key! My public component may be hosted on a somewhat insecure webserver, and there is at least some responsibility on the part of my owner to make sure I'm still secure!"

Incidentally, I'm planning a mini-review of PyDS against Radio Userland in a while here, but here's one thing I've gotten to work in PyDS I could never get in Radio Userland (without doing unsupported hacking on the Weblog core): Posts without titles, that actually can modify the generated HTML instead of just sticking an empty string in the template.

As you can see, I like to put boxes around my titles, and in Radio Userland, an empty title results in an empty box. Yucky. So I always wrote a title, even if I had to stretch. I'm thinking this may have inhibited some of my more off-the-cuff comments... like this one.

Reading the comments in this Roger Simon post about the President's Sunday interview reminds me of one of my fond wishes: Just once, I'd like to hear the President publically say something like "You know, it's easy to point out that I'm not the best speech giver in the world. It's a lot harder to plot the course of the free world." Something to just cheese off as many pundits as possible, while being politically a null statement (except for the effects of cheesed-off-based punditry). Along with being fun for me, it might even prove to his benefit since the Democrats really need to control their bretheren who feel inclined to put forth rants of questionable sanity; those folk would be unable to resist frothing at the mouth.

In my last post, I dissociated the concept of "outlineness" from a graph, and showed at least the skeleton of a data structure that allows the power of graphs while preserving the nature of an outline.

In this post, we will fix a flaw in the model built up to that point, which is that there is no way to obtain a list of parents, given a node, only a list of children. For various reasons, this is necessary to building an outliner, so this flaw must be fixed.

Rand Anderson's (update: sorry about the misspelling!) previously-mentioned blog post brought his Executable Abstractions weblog to my attention, and I noticed something interesting about it; namely, that while it was obviously a generated weblog it didn't match the profiles of any of the many blogging systems I am already familiar with.

A little digging on the homepage led me to PyDS, which is basically Radio Userland in Python. (Not Frontier; the aspects that Radio Userland added to Frontier, the News Aggregator, the Weblog, Tools, nice Preferences screen, etc.)

Rand Anderson blogs about Iron Lute and his preferred outliner Leo:

Seems he's aware of Leo (my outliner of choice) but wants an outliner that allows the use of the outline structure for all content (as opposed to having a body for free text associated with each tree node, as Leo does).

I'm pretty committed to Leo and it's author's vision for Leo going forward, but Iron Lute is worth keeping an eye on.

I want to be able to discuss Iron Lute's planned license in a posting in response to somebody's blog here, but first I need to discuss it. So here are the licensing plans I have for Iron Lute. I'm very interested in feedback on this.

I'd would like Iron Lute to be open source, likely GPL with explicit exclusion of plug-ins (i.e., you are explicitly allowed to create new Node Types, etc., and release them under any license you like). (This is not quite the LGPL because you still can not take Iron Lute and build another application around it; limiting as I will means you can "connect" Iron Lute to your application but that you can not just pick up Iron Lute and make it be your application.) But that depends on the usage and support pattern it receives.