Justin's Journal

Is McDermott pulling a Jane Fonda?

Okay, less than a week after Senator Tom Daschle blasts President Bush for outrageous accusations that democrats aren't interested in the security of our nation, a fellow Democrat opens his mouth in Bagdad and pulls a Jane Fonda.

McDermott was accompanied to Iraq by Reps. David Bonior of Michigan and Michael Thompson of California. He suggested Bush was trying to provoke a war with Iraq, and said the president might "mislead" the American people on the extent of the threat from Iraq to get his way.

Now, I'm not so positive we need to invade Iraq but I certainly don't count Iraq as our friend and look at them as truely an enemy. One doesn't give one's enemy, especially if one is a US federal lawmaker, propoganda ammuntion like this and still claim to be interested in the security of our country.

A Case to Define the Digital Age

Jane Black has a commentary on the upcoming Supreme Court hearing on the extension of copyrights in Business Week Online. The court decision is about whether or not Congress exceeded its authority in granting an extension to 70 years past the death of an author in CTEA The article does a good job of pointing out both sides of the argument but there is a definate slant in favor or not extending copyrights.

Basically, there are two questions to be answered in this debate, does extending copyrights promote the "progress of science and useful arts" as stated in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution and do the courts have the jurisdiction to make this decision? That last half makes up the majority of the argument for the government, in my opinion and that gives me hope that they have little ground to stand on in their argument.

Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with Disney maintaining their rights to "Steamboat Willy" but the problem is that "Steamboat Willy" wasn't the only works affected by CTEA, it also prevented the works of Robert Frost from entering the public domain. That's the real pity. Without these works being able to pass into the public domain I fear that they will eventually become lost and that's the pity.

In the end, the battle is much larger than Mickey Mouse. "The real concern isn't that Mickey or Happy Birthday [enter the public domain] but all the other stuff -- classical music, little-known films -- that gets incidentally restricted in order to protect a few valuable, perennial works," says American University law professor Peter Jaszi. This case is about what's fair game in the Digital Age. So far, what's fair has been dictated by the entertainment Goliaths.

Do true friendships ever die?

Shelley commented on fading friendships and it got me to thinking. I mentioned in her comments about three close friends that I've lost touch with. I know where they are and they know where I am and it wouldn't be that big of a trick to find their phone numbers. In fact I got one's phone number from his mother just the other day and I intend to call him here in a few minutes. I don't expect to be calling him very often though. Don't get me wrong, he's still someone that I could knock on his door at 3:00 A.M. needing a place to crash and he'd point to the couch, the same goes with him showing up on my doorstep, it's just that life prevents us from remaining buddies. It happens, we grow apart but we don't stop caring about each other. We're still good friends, just no longer buddies.

At some point I think every relationship will evolve into one where constant communication is no longer needed or that relationship will fail. Please don't take that to mean that communication is no longer needed, its just that the relationship is no longer dependent upon anything more than just knowing that the other person can be counted on when needed. If those needs only pop up every five or ten years you still know that person will be there if possible. Of course spousal relationships generally requre meeting a need a tad bit more often than that.

FOAF-a-matic -- Describe yourself in RDF

There's some hype going on over FOAF RDF files. FOAF-a-matic will help you build your own FOAF file. My file is here. If we kinda, sorta know each other and you have FOAF data you would like for me to include in my file drop me a line at justin@dallasbay.net.

Reflex Suppressors

It's interesting to note that in a country with much, much more restrictive gun laws than the US Reflex Suppressors are legal to use.

The Web's future: XHTML 2.0

Meryl points to a developerWorks article on XHTML 2.0. Gone are the <b />, <i /> and <img /> tags and I was surprised to learn that I agree completely with the direction this is going. Read the article and lets see if you agree with me.

Gone Wireless

Friday I picked up a wireless routher for the house. I bought the Belkin Wireless Cable/DSL Gateway Router because I could get it for under $100 after the rebate. I fully expected to have to bring it back because no one in the store could tell me that it worked with BellSouth's IFITL brand of DSL. I'm happy to say that it works like a charm. I had no configuration problems and the only problems I ran into was trying to get the PPPoE drivers on my desktop machine from interferring with the network connection on that machine while I was trying to get things working. Those drivers are gone.

I haven't had an opportunity to find what the range is but it works everywhere inside my house that I've tried it. I'll start mapping out the boundries outside over the next couple of weeks. Much needed rain visiting us this weekend and predicted for next week make hold up the entry on that, though.

Meth lab found in back room of judge's chamber.

How does one stop a drug problem that is this prevalent?

Why do we bother? XHTML 1.0

Yesterday Scott Andrew grabbed my attention with a silly little blurb about yellow jackets. Today he's grabbed my attention by making me think about why I bother attempting to keep this site validating with the newest spec from the W3C. I do it so that I can prove to myself that I can. I now have two compelling arguments to drop it back to HTML 4.01... at least for the foreseeable future.

After reading those two articles I started wondering about my motivation for changing from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0. I did it for the same reason that I changed my Blogger template to output XML and then wrote the PHP scripts to convert the XML files into HTML. I was playing. I did it for the same reason that I then created another PHP script to provide an RSS 0.91 source of this data. I was playing. That's the main reason I keep this journal or weblog up and running. I like playing with the technology.

Well, I also like writing and expressing my opinion.

Yellow Jackets

Scott Andrew has a thing or two to say about yellow jackets. I'm not too fond of these wasps myself. I do have an allergy to their sting, though the only reaction I've had to them so far is swelling over large portions of my body and a rash spreading far from the area that was stung. Due to this allergy I've found myself learning to tolerate stinging insects and learning to live with them without agitating them.

So, how green are you?

Some of Senator Barbara Boxer's (D-Ca) old green allies are finding out about political chess the hard way. It seems that these mountain bikers, who usually support Sen. Boxer's environmental policies have found themselves on the opposite side of the fence on some specifics of Boxer's California Wild Heritage (Wilderness) bill (S 2535) even though they are in general agreement with the bill. That didn't keep Sen. Boxer from finding (or inventing) another group of mountain bikers who fully support her bill. "Foul!" the first groups cry. I guess they just weren't green enough.

W3C HTML Validation Service Results

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle this. I was checking out the errors I would get if I tried to go with XHTML 1.0 Strict and it looks like I'm going to have to do a bunch of error checking and replacing workaround markup I've introduced into this blog over the past 20 months. It sure is a reason for getting a very good grounding in regular expressions.

Justin's Journal

For the last three months I've been battling all sorts of things vieing for my time so I've let this weblog go while I took care of life. I've been wanting to do some tweaking on the PHP code that I use to power this site to get it outputting valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup. I took a little time this afternoon and got it almost there. The thing that is holding me up is that I'm not real good with regular expressions and I need to locate URLs within my <body> tag in my XML file and replace all the "&" with "%26". The XML file that stores the data for this blog is located at http://www.dallasbay.net/journal/current.xml. If anyone has a snippet of PHP code that will do this for me I would appreciate being pointed to it. Once I get things validating at XHTML 1.0 Transitional I'll then start making the changes needed to go to XHTML 1.0 Strict. After that I'll set down and wonder if there is any reason to worry about going any further down that road..

Anti-Gravity

Got an idea that you want to keep to yourself until you have it developed? Just convince everyone else that the idea is wacky and no credible scientist, journalist, etc. would ever consider the idea seriously. Maybe Nick Cook is on to something.

America Time

The Ugly American^® inside of me likes this idea: A Savage Plan for a Gentle America: New York Mean Time. It would probably be about as "in your face" to our enemies as one could get.