'Six months to the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Florida flight school where two of the suicide hijackers trained received letters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicating that the men had been approved for student visas.'

And people wonder why I'm not willing to turn control of things like, say, what websites out children can and can't see, over to the government. Everybody's winging it...

The Jabber framework approaches a critical turning point in its evolution: How the API for connecting other Radio/Frontier stuff works. Actually, we've stepped a bit past it, with the release of .7, which has a first cut at such an API. And I've learned a few things.

Right now, the whole API centers around the idea that you may possibly have multiple Jabber connections. Every call takes a "connection reference". That's not really a big deal. The problem comes when the connection is terminated, which has been happening on my at least once a day. (Not just my Radio client, either, but the various IM clients I'm using for testing, too, so it's not my code.) The problem with the current API is that when you register to receive events, you register on a per-connection basis. If the connection drops, boom, no more event notification.

In case this is your primary way of getting info about the Jabber stuff I'm doing, I've released a .7 release of the Jabber verbs, which can be obtained by downloading or updating your current copy. Big news is the introduction of an event system, which makes responding to things easy, now. You can write a bot.

Almost forgot, it's Pi Day!

This is a sample post from Jabber to make sure that what I sent to radio-dev works correctly.

The post was sent via Jabber, but the link, this paragraph, and the addition to the Jabber category was later done by hand.

[via dangerousmeta!] More articles like this and I could almost... almost!... call myself a member of the left... though they still wouldn't have me. :-)

It's not that I disagree with most of the goals of the left. But once identifying problems with some success, the left engages in a full-fledged retreat from reality, proposing solutions based solely on ideologies already twice-removed from reality, with no input from facts or history. (I speak broadly here, of course.) Sure, I'd like a world without war, too, but I can tell you we won't get there with any number of multicultural parties in the Student Center.

Here's some food for thought: In our civics classes in the US, we are all taught that one of the key differences of our government is that all three major branches of the government have checks and balances on each other.

While true, this obscures the true point, which is that all three branches of government are accountable to the other two. Accountability is the real key. The genius of 1776 was in the creation of a government where nobody occupied a position where they were not accountable to anyone else.

'The NDIC said five types of people should be targeted, including previous drug offenders, legalization advocates, anarchists and people promoting "an expanded freedom of expression" that pushes the boundaries of the First Amendment.'

Assuming you read the article (so you have the context)... I wonder what exactly "an expanded freedom of expression" is supposed to mean? Not sarcastic.

I also question the legitimacy of targeting legalization advocates. I am not one myself, but saying a currently illegal activity should be legal is the exact same act as claiming a currently legal activity should be illegal, which the NDIC does all the time, in their never-ending quest to eliminate second-order causes like "raves". Punishing or marking someone because they are participating in the governmental process is not something that should be done in a democracy.

Dave's resuming a serious pitch for what he calls the World Outline. While we don't know exactly where he's going with the idea, it's more interesting then you might think on the first cut. Or at least what I've thought of the idea is more interesting then you might think.

He calls it "parallel to the HTML web, a new way of webbing." I don't know that I'd say parallel to the web... 'course, I'm not Dave... because that often gets translated in people's minds to "serving the same purpose as the web". In my understanding, the "new way of webbing" part is much more interesting.

I just flipped by Dateline:NBC, where they are smashing cars into barriers and rating the cars on how expensive the repair bills are. It seems that cars have gotten so safe today that the tabloid magazine news shows have to make up tests for cars to fail.

That's about how meaningful those tests are. You can always generate failure by making up arbitrarily wierd and useless criteria.

Disclaimer: My dad is a testing engineer for one of the Big Three car companies, so I have some familiarity with the other side of the story. ;-)