Thursday, March 31, 2005

Writing a Get Well Letter to the Pope

If you've ever wanted to write a "get well" letter to the Pope, now is probably a good time. The proper greeting in a letter is "Most Holy Father" and the mailing address is:

His Holiness, the Pope Vatican City Rome, Italy

The Pope's courageous stand against Communism is especially worthy of mention in light of Ronald Reagan's passing. In fact, his pitched battle against the Soviet leadership earned him a bullet from an assassin.

On October 16, 1978, at age 58, he succeeded Pope John Paul I, fulfilling a prophecy made to him decades earlier by Padre Pio that he would become Pope. The monk also had a darker prediction to make: that Wojtyla's reign would be short and end in blood.

On May 13, 1981, that prediction nearly came true. Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish Muslim, shot and came very close to killing the Pope in St. Peter's Square. Documents released this year indicate that the Soviet hierarchy ordered the assassination in response to the Pope's tireless battles against Communism.

According to the documents, the KGB and the East German State Police -- the dreaded Stasi -- contracted with Bulgarian operatives in Rome to perform the assassination. The Bulgarians, in turn, subcontracted with radical Turkish groups that ended up unleashing Agca.*

On December 27, 1983, John Paul went to Agca's prison and met the man who had attempted to kill him. The men spoke in private and the nature of their conversation has never been revealed.

In more than 100 trips abroad, the Pope has attracted enormous crowds and traveled a greater distance than all other Popes combined. Possessed of great physical courage and stamina, his efforts at peacemaking and bridge-building between religions have been truly remarkable.

BrainBank: Spoken and Written Forms of Address

*In 1987, author AJ Quinnell wrote a fictional account of the Pope's assassination entitled In the Name of the Father. In light of the recently released documents, it is well worth reading.
 

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Our Top Story: Hitler Still Dead

The indispensible Best of the Web points us to this startling headline:

Harvard Study: Hitler Held Grudges, Craved Attention

Now that's what I call a hot news flash.

In any event, the article describes a detailed psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the OSS in 1943. The article reports:

The rare 1943 document was among the papers discovered in Cornell University Law School's collection from the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The psychological profile of the Nazi dictator is now available on the law library's Web site. The report said that if Germany were to lose the war, Hitler might kill himself. Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in late April 1945.

The interesting thing is that I recall reading this report years ago. It was in book form, probably published in the late 1940's or early 1950's and was titled, I think, "The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report".

There are some interesting tidbits in the report. While there is a prediction that Hitler would commit suicide, the recommendation for postwar treatment of Hitler is fascinating. The primary goal of the treatment was to prevent a living Hitler from becoming a cause celebre or some sort of martyred symbol of persecution:

...1. (a) Bring the Nazi leaders to trial; condemn the chief culprits [to] death, but proclaim Hitler mentally unbalanced. 1. (b) Commit Hitler to an insane asylum (such as St. Elizabeth's, Washington, D.C.) and house him in a comfortable dwelling specially built for his occupancy. Let the world know he is being well treated. 1. (c) ...Unknown to him, have sound-films taken of his behavior. This will show his fits and tirades... of everyone in the world, including the German people. 1. (d) Exhibit regularly to the public... selected segments of these sound-reels, so that it can be seen how unbalanced he is, how mediocre his performance on the customary tests...

Update: the book is still for sale, and I just found it on Amazon. I would have to read the Harvard study in more depth, but at first glance, it would appear these two have markedly similar content.

The study is available on the Cornell Law School web site.
 

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The UN wants to run the Internet

Here's something so sick it's almost laughable: the UN wants to run the Internet. Oh, they won't come out and just say exactly that, but a recent interview with the ITU's Houlin Zhao made it crystal clear what the UN is after.

Quick refresher: ITU stands for the International Telecommunication Union and it's an agency of the UN. Here's Mr. Zhao:

Today the management by ICANN (is something that) people consider to be management by the United States, by one government. People definitely want to see some changes. I think everyone would agree that a better arrangement is something that we're looking for.

Bzzzzzt!! Wrong answer! Now I know the UN has had a stellar year, what with:

The Oil-for-Food Scandal that ripped off, oh, about $10 billion for Saddam and his buddies (and we all know who they were). Not to mention some untoward payments to UN head Kofi Annan's son Kojo

The Sex Scandal in which women and children in the Congo were reportedly raped by UN "Peacekeepers"

Oh, wait, I forgot about the other sex scandal in which different UN "Peacekeepers" were linked to separate sex crimes in East Timor as well as prostitution in Cambodia and Kosovo

And that's just the recent stuff that's come to light despite the UN's incessant stonewalling.

From the head down, the UN appears to be rotten with corruption and, as an added bonus, populated with predatory animals possessing no more conscience than John Wayne Gacy.

News.com's Declan McCullagh, who is usually a steller observer of the technology scene, didn't ask Mr. Zhao the key question:

What in the name of Kojo Annan would possess anyone with a lick of sense to give the UN the keys to the Internet?

Brief history lesson: the US invented the frigging Internet. It was funded by US taxpayers through DARPA and matured as an artifact of the US military. Don't like it? Invent your own damn Internet.

Sure, the UN are just the folks I want running the Internet. Hey Kofi: here's a dollar - go buy yourself a big tall glass of shut-up juice. Or, better yet, resign.

From News.com: Interview with Houlin Zhao and from ISOC: Brief History of the Internet

Update 10/2/05: Wizbang Blog
 

Farmer Burns

Farmer Burns was a legendary wrestler who made his name during the turn of the century. His record was a reported 6000+ victories against only seven losses. He won the world wrestling title on several occasions including a victory over the much-feared "Strangler" Lewis.

The reason I bring up Burns? Combat conditioning guru Matt Furey has resurrected the Burns' legend in the context of bodyweight conditioning. As a longtime lifter with more injuries than I care to recount, I've become fascinated with using bodyweight exercises as an alternative to resistance training solely with iron.

Ever heard of Hindu pushups? Hindu squats? Divebomber pushups? Wall-walking? Reverse press-ups? Bearcrawls? Furey covers all of these in his (relatively expensive) courses. But there are also a variety of free resources on the web to learn the basics.

Among other things, Furey sells Burns' original conditioning and wrestling course. But it's also available free, online, courtesy of the folks at SandowPlus. When it was introduced in the early 20th century, the course cost the equivalent of several hundreds of dollars (at least). And it was quite popular, due to its useful illustrations (groundbreaking for their time) and practical advice.

SandowPlus: Farmer Burns
 

Simple AJAX

If you're wondering how Google pulled off their impressive Gmail user-interface, or why their mapping site is so freaking cool, then look no further than "AJAX".

AJAX stands for "Asynchronous JAvascript + XML", the latter of which is used to transport messages between client and server without having to refresh the entire web page.

In February, XML.com's Drew McLellan wrote an excellent overview of Ajax called "Very Dynamic Web Interfaces". His article, probably more than any other, introduced the tenets of Ajax to a wide audience.

Better still, the folks at ModernMethod have introduced SAJAX, one of the best compact libraries I've seen for simplifying an AJAX implementation. If you write in PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby, SAJAX is a great jumpstart on your first dynamic web app.

Check it out: SAJAX.
 

Google and Urchin

The folks at Google have decided to buy Urchin, the web analytics firm. Urchin provides both hosted and shrink-wrapped solutions for analyzing web site traffic. Urchin has some monster customers including (according to their site), P&G, NBC, SBC, EDS, and lots of other three-letter acronyms.

What's it mean?

If you operate a commercial web site, Google intends to provide you with all of the infrastructure you need to be successful. Google's AdWords campaign managment application drives traffic to your site. Urchin will help you analyze that traffic to improve ROI. Google's AdSense helps you generate revenue from that traffic, aside from any other revenue you may be earning from your core business.

What's next?

My guess is that Google will be entering the hosting business in a big way. Google's Blogger is already a free, lightweight hosting solution. Expect more heavyweight (fee-based) hosting solutions using Google's outrageously scalable infrastructure, coming soon to a web site near you.
 

Monday, March 28, 2005

You put the balm on?

I think you may have heard about the woman who was eating chili at Wendy's and bit into something hard. She spit it out... and it turned out to be a human finger. The stories imply that vomiting quickly ensued, followed by a projectile apology by Wendy's.

Of course, a lawsuit is more certain than William Hung getting shut out of a Grammy nomination.

I can so envision a Seinfeld episode with Jackie Chiles ("you put the balm on?") representing Elaine.

And a patriotic Kramer attempting to wrangle a business deal out of the debacle by harping on the protein benefits of human digits... and appealing to New Yorkers' patriotism by calling them "freedom fingers".
 

Defeating Solitaire

The WaPo's Robert MacMillan noted the following technical solution for the North Carolina State Senator who wants to prohibit state employees from playing Solitaire, Minesweeper, and other time-wasting games.

That prompted this alternate suggestion from reader Mark Colan: "When I was a developer at Lotus some time ago, we were under the gun for an important project. One team member spent entirely too much time playing Solitaire for our tastes. Someone came up with a Windows resource-editing program, exchanged the images for two cards, and installed it on his machine." The result? Every time he pulled a black 7, it would behave like a red 7 and vice-versa. "It did the trick," Colan said.

Big Music's Last Waltz
 

How the DMCA Affects Google Search Results

I did a Google search for "excel web" to find which companies were selling products and/or advertising in the spreadsheet collaboration space.

After the least search result, I noticed the following announcement from Google:

In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.

The link Google directs us to is broken, but contains the term KaZaA Media Desktop. Because KaZaA is a 'prohibited product', in that it can be used for illicit file sharing, the powers-that-be have blacklisted it. The RIAA strikes again.

Fortunately, there are other powers aligned on the side of good. Powers like Billionaire Mark Cuban, who wrote in a recent blog entry:

It doesn't matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry every single time... It just matters that they can spend more (than) everyone else on lawyers.

The day can't come quick enough when the geniuses at the RIAA are put out to pasture with their intellectual ancestors: the Edsel, Pets.com, and New Coke.
 

Sunday, March 27, 2005

North Carolina Solitaire Crackdown

From North Carolina comes a report that a State Senator wants to erase all game applications from state workers' computers. His belief: that preventing government employees from playing Solitaire and Minesweeper will recoup millions of dollars worth of productivity for the state.

...The solitaire crackdown here, though perhaps rare in its specificity, is part of a behind-the-scenes battle over personal time that's affecting not just unionized state workers in North Carolina, but sales reps in Washington and phone-bank workers in San Francisco. It goes straight to the issue of distractions from long days at the office and, more fundamentally, how much of their employees' time and concentration employers can reasonably expect to own...

This effort is, itself, a giant waste of time. It makes about as much sense as teaching Mandarin Chinese to Jessica Simpson.

If you've got bored, unmotivated and/or unsupervised employees, then I can guarantee they'll find ways to waste time.

Game installation: Are you going to search all employees as they arrive each day to ensure they don't bring in game discs? My guess is you can run solitaire off a floppy or CD if so inclined.

Convergence devices: Are you going to search all employees as they arrive each day to ensure they're not carrying in a PSP? New, personal entertainment devices like Sony's PSP -- a combo game-player/DVD -- will make it even harder to regulate game-playing activities.

Invented games: Should the state install security cameras and the personnel necessary to monitor them in order to ensure no one is goofing off? Remember the ESPN commercial where cube workers were using a nerf ball and an empty bookshelf to play "baseball"? And bouncing the ball from the floor to the second shelf was a "double"?

...the IRS has shown that over 50% of the time an IRS employee goes on a computer, he or she also hooks up to the Internet to shop, gamble or play games...

Perhaps this speaks to IRS management: I find it difficult to believe that the average Fortune 1000 organization routinely has 50% of their employees shopping, gambling or game-playing whenever they hook up to the Internet.

Scott Kirwin, founder of the the IT Professionals Association of America, pins the tail on the donkey:

"Managers, and in this case politicians, don't know how to effectively utilize the people they're in charge of... You have to ask yourself, if someone is so bored that playing solitaire is stimulating, then the problem is not with the game, it's with the job."

Exactly. Where is management in this equation? Have they not adequate tasked their employees? Motivated them? Supervised their work or verified their deliverables?

If I were Senator Allran, I'd worry less about which time-wasting technologies were installed on state computers... and a little more about a management philosophy that seems to encourage the wasting of time.

Is that a spreadsheet on your screen — or solitaire?
 

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Regime Change: Iran

The invaluable Regime Change Iran blog reports that, if one listens carefully, you can hear the faint drumbeats of war resonating throughout an already tense region (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt). The day when the Mullahs are out of power can't come fast enough. Unless, of course, you prefer that fundamentalist, homicidal maniacs possess nuclear weapons.

Dr. Jerome Corsi reports that on March 10, units of the U.S. Army's European Command stationed in Germany have been in Israel to conduct joint exercises with the Israeli Defense Forces designed to test their combined ability to down an attack of Shahab-3 missiles launched from Iran against Israel. Code-named "Juniper Cobra," these exercises test the linking of U.S. Patriot missile systems with Israel's Arrow-2 missile-defense systems. The Arrow-2 system is designed to intercept incoming missiles at high altitudes to reduce the fallout damage from nuclear warheads. The Patriot systems are a second line of defense, designed to intercept missiles at lower altitudes. Also involved in the exercises is a U.S. missile ship carrying Aegis anti-missile systems. U.S. military authorities deny that the exercises have anything to do with the current tensions over Iran's apparently determined drive to develop nuclear weapons secretly. Still, the scenario being tested involves missiles launched against Israel from a "red" whose identity is supposed "unknown," even though the aggressors just happen to speak Farsi. The last Juniper Cobra operation was reportedly conducted in 2001, just before the start of the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein. The point of this combined exercise has not gone unnoticed in Tehran. Iran retaliated by announcing this week that tests of the Shahab-3 missile conducted in September of last year proved they had made breakthroughs in the development of the intermediate-range missile. The mullahs stressed that the September test fulfilled all technical expectations, proving fast and accurate at a range of 1,700 kilometers, more than enough to reach Tel Aviv. In other words, the mullahs want to be sure we all know they have an improved version, a weapon maybe more sophisticated than Operation Juniper Cobra is testing against. This Operation Juniper Cobra is not expected to end until mid-April. Put this together with what appears to be a convergence of U.S. carrier battle groups in the region, and the preparations for war are hard to miss... ...Stalled talks can't last forever. What happens if the mullahs refuse to take active steps to destroy their centrifuge farms and dismantle their heavy-water facilities? Well, there is always the military option. That option is very obviously left on the table, even if the president doesn't talk about it very much.

Regime Change Iran blog: U.S., Israel preparing for Iran war?
 

More Research on Nigerian Fraud Was Needed

Ever wonder who falls for those idiotic "Nigerian scam" emails? How about a Harvard professor? Really. This is old news, but I'd never seen it before. Perhaps you missed it as well.

Apparently, Weldon Xu -- a researcher employed by Harvard -- was bright enough to scam $600,000 from coworkers... but stupid enough to lose it all to a classic Nigerian scam. Hmmm... Harvard professor, you say?

A Harvard researcher accused of conning $600,000 from coworkers lost it all to a Nigerian e-mail scam, the Boston Herald reported. Weldong Xu's lawyer described his client as "a gullible guy" at Xu's trial for larceny in Roxbury, Mass., after entering a not guilty plea. Xu, 38, until his arrest last week did cancer immunology and AIDS research for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and was a professor at Harvard Medical School... Xu reportedly solicited the money from 35 people, saying it would go to research into SARS. Police said Xu confessed there never was any plan to study severe acute respiratory syndrome and he "lied" to investors, including fellow researchers. However, his lawyer Arnold Abelow claimed Xu had every intention of doing the research until the fateful e-mail arrived. "He got sucked in," Abelow said. When police asked where the money went, Xu allegedly told police he lost it to a Nigerian e-mail scam promising him a $50 million return on his investment. "He fell for it," Abelow said. Xu was ordered held on $600,000 cash bail, the newspaper said.

More Research on Nigerian Fraud Was Needed
 

Peace Through Superior Firepower

Except for ending slavery, fascism, nazism and communism -- war has never solved anything.

Now comes word the the Sunni insurgents in Iraq are hoping for an "exit strategy". Let's hope the exit strategy is their continued obliteration unless they completely abandon terror attacks on Iraqi civilians, their country's infrastructure, and their liberators.

Many of Iraq's predominantly Sunni Arab insurgents would lay down their arms and join the political process in exchange for guarantees of their safety and that of their co-religionists, according to a prominent Sunni politician. Sharif Ali Bin al-Hussein, who heads Iraq's main monarchist movement and is in contact with guerrilla leaders, said many insurgents including former officials of the ruling Ba'ath party, army officers, and Islamists have been searching for a way to end their campaign against US troops and Iraqi government forces since the January 30 election... ...Sharif Ali said the success of Iraq's elections dealt the insurgents a demoralising blow, prompting them to consider the need to enter the political process.

Financial Times: Iraq's insurgents ‘seek exit strategy' "
 

Software Development at Google

There is a policy at Google to require its developers to work 20% of the time on a research project of their own making. Joe Beda explains a bit about the software development process at Google and lists five characteristics that distinguish Google from most other development houses:

1) One code base: everyone gets free-wheeling access to a large, well-documented software repository.
2) Switching teams: it's easy to work on multiple projects and switch teams without a bunch of formal (HR-driven) process.
3) Intranet: there is transparency into literally the entire company on the corporate intranet, without a lot of apparent worry about security and/or compartmentalization. Information can propagate to the correct parties in free-flowing and even unexpected channels.
4) Pet projects: the 20% 'pet project' is not just paid lip service, it is actively encouraged. In fact, Joe worries aloud that he will get dinged on his review for not working on his 20% project.
5) Interpersonal: there must be a great emphasis on social skills at Google -- and not strictly technical ability. New ideas are greeted with enthusiasm, brainstorming sessions, and the like. Technical elitists are probably not encouraged in this sort of environment.

I do take issue with one statement of opinion:

"One of the reasons that environments like Perl, Python, C#, Java, etc. flourish is that they have large and well through out libraries of useful code. For a variety of reasons, C++ has never had this"

Uhm, Joe, ever visited CodeProject? On SourceForge, for example, C++ is among the top couple of languages used for open-source development. So... I beg to differ. If you're talking platform-inspecific code, well, yes, other languages will have more generic libraries - but where C/C++ excels is in its raw performance. Running close to the metal usually entails some platform-specific features.

Joe Beda: How the Software Development Process Works at Google
 

Friday, March 25, 2005

FellowshipChurch.com: Why the Switch?

Picture credit: http://www.infocom.com
Terry Storch and Brian Bailey have operated FellowshipChurch.com, a full-fledged church management portal site, since 2001. In 2002, the site was overhauled using Microsoft's snazzy, new .NET tools: IIS, C#, ASP.NET and, of course, MS SQL Server.

By 2004, a confluence of factors caused the development team to re-evaluate their approach. Separate campuses; the maintenance burden entailed by management of additional web properties (FellowshipConnection and EdYoung.org among them); and a relatively small development team were all factors.

As the sites scaled, it became clear to the development team that continuing down the .NET path was probably not wise.

...In addition to our three in-house sites, we have a fourth that is developed by a local company in PHP using Linux and PostgreSQL. Time after time, they have been able to deliver simple and quick solutions that would take us twice as long in our current environment...

Brian blogged about the decision to move to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL [or Postgres] and PHP [or Perl]). He characterizes the top ten factors:

   1) Developers
   2) Complexity and speed of development
   3) Cost
   4) Get it running/keep it running
   5) Security/viruses
   6) Platform independence
   7) Community
   8) Examples
   9) Browsers
   10) The new guy

Read the whole thing.

As an aside, I'm an advocate for Visual Studio, ASP.NET, C# and MS SQL Server if you're certain you're tied in to Microsoft's server platforms. But if you look to the big boys to see their strategic direction -- say, Google's clustered Linux farm or Yahoo's adoption of PHP --the appeal and security of platform independence is undeniable.

Brian Bailey: Why the Switch?
 

Book Review: All But My Life

I recently had an opportunity to hear Gerda Weissman Klein speak of her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. You may remember Ms. Klein from the HBO Film based upon her startling story, which won an Academy Award. As a pampered, fifteen year-old Jewish girl in 1939, her idyllic family life came to an abrupt halt when the Nazis rolled into their small Polish town.

For a short period of time, her family was permitted to remain in their house, albeit in the basement. Over time, her family unravelled, shipped off one at a time. Her beloved brother, Arthur. Her father. Her mother. All disappeared, never to be seen again. By 1942, she began her journey through a series of increasingly harsh slave-labor camps, using an ability to speak German and a quickly acquired expertise on garment looms. Only through a series of fortuitous coincidences, sacrifices of friends, and even a few benefactors among her captors, was she able to survive the factories.

By 1945, the Nazis were on the run and their prisoners were forced to move back into Germany. Stripped of all possessions except for some photographs tucked into her ski boots (which her father had presciently demanded she wear the summer she left home), she survived the 350-mile winter "death march". Only 120 of 2000 girls survived the forced march and Gerda herself was liberated by American soldiers only hours from death: she weighed 68 pounds when Lt. Kurt Klein, who was to become her husband, rolled into town.

There are few, if any, more compelling first-person stories of survival against all odds. Perhaps John Ransom's Andersonville Diary qualifies. But those who are unfamiliar with the concept of true evil would do well to read Gerda's unbelievable story of human spirit, and courage without measure.

All But My Life
 

Thursday, March 24, 2005

I've been a Bad Boy (I guess)

I recently posted a note on the    J o e l    o n    S o f t w a r e   forum, an online gathering place of various eclectic -- and usually enlightening -- personalities. Think of Slashdot without the incessant flame wars.

I had answered a question about Digital River, the large software fulfillment house. One of the participants had asked about DR's reputation and commission rates. I responded as follows:

Digital River consists of many software fulfillment brands. Check out Digibuy for example: it's a DR property, handles fulfillment, and takes about 13% of your list price. RegNow is another one - it has a pretty popular affiliate program where download sites are incented to list you through a piece of the action. But you shouldn't ever have to pay anything over 15-18%...

The next day, when I checked the thread from the office, I noticed my message didn't exist. Had it been deleted? Apparently. If so, I wondered why it had earned this relatively rare distinction.

When I returned home, the mystery deepened. From the original browser -- the one I'd used to post the message -- the message still appeared in the thread, even after a page reload. Now I was more confused than Yogi Berra visiting CERN.

As an experiment, I posted a response to another thread. Odd. This one 'stuck' - meaning it was visible not only to my own browser, but also to external browsers (how could I tell? I use a series of proxies for... uhm... "testing" purposes). When I commanded other physical machines to retrieve the pages in question, they told me that:

the original message I'd posted didn't exist to the outside world... it only existed on my browser and the internal confines of some JOS discussion database

the second, test message I'd posted did exist... it was visible from all browsers

As a third test, I posted a new topic - a question. Once I checked my proxies, I discovered that this message, like the first, had been relegated to message purgatory. It was only visible from the original browser that I'd used to post the message. Elsewhere, it didn't exist.

Bugs in the discussion board system? Or have I been a bad boy and had my home IP address "blacklisted"? I have no idea, but it's either an interesting technical anomaly or a pretty cool security feature, depending upon the answer. Although it would be nice to know what earned the black-listing.

Update: the moderator(s) at JOS completely destroyed this message (which was cross-posted there as a question) and the several answers it had garnered. Methinks I angered someone there, though I have no idea what did it. Here's a list of my posts... if you can find one that's offensive, let me know.
 

Remember Flooz?

Flooz... the good old days of DotCom mania. I like the slogan. "Just what you wished for." What I wished for was an e-cash company that didn't sound like a term for harlot, wasn't represented by flaky, has-been actress, and actually made electronic payments easy. Oh, that's right - I'm describing PayPal.

Pando Networks is working on a way to deliver large files easily over the Internet, but the best part about the company is that the CEO, Robert Levitan, started iVillage and Flooz. Remember Flooz? It sold dollars that could be exchanged for gifts. Whoopi Goldberg stumped for it. Flooz survived the implosion of 2000. Then in 2001, one of its biggest customers, Cisco Systems, wanted to renegotiate a multimillion-dollar contract. Flooz survived that. Then the company noticed that gift buying didn't slow down after the Mother's Day/Father's Day/graduation season. The FBI informed Levitan that the Russian mobsters were buying Flooz credit as a way to launder stolen credit card purchases. Flooz survived that, too. Then the large credit card companies decided to withhold payments, in part, says Levitan, because Flooz was able to garner a higher percentage of each transaction than they were. The company was forced to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. It had 325,000 creditors, the largest number of creditors ever. The court allowed it to notify creditors via e-mail, a first. Levitan expected to face a hostile audience of several angry consumers at the first court hearing. "No one showed up," he said. The company called it quits on Sept. 10. On his first day of unemployment in years, Levitan decided to go to his Manhattan gym, where he saw the disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold.

Michael Kanellos, News.com: Remember Flooz?
 

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Japanese WW II sub found off Oahu

This news is a couple of days old, but interesting nonetheless. A University of Hawaii research team found the remains of a very large, World War II Japanese submarine called the I-401 (its sister sub, the I-400, is pictured at left).

"We thought it was rocks at first, it was so huge," said Terry Kerby, pilot of the research craft that found the vessel. "It's a leviathan down there, a monster." The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s. They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The submarines were designed to carry three "fold-up" bombers that could quickly be assembled. Kerby said the main hull is sitting upright and is in good shape. The I-401 numbers are clearly visible on the sides, and the anti-aircraft guns are in almost perfect condition, he said. An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission, which was never completed, reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities. When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the mission reportedly was changed to bomb the Panama Canal. Both submarines were ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor and were deliberately sunk later, partly because Russian scientists were demanding access to them. The submarine found Thursday is the second Japanese vessel discovered off Oahu by the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory. In 2002, researchers found the wreckage of a much smaller Japanese sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941, off Pearl Harbor.

Seattle Times: Japanese WW II sub found off Oahu (Hat tip: Michelle Malkin, picture courtesy of Steven's Armed Forces Site)
 

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

What's Up with Google's AdSense?

There's something odd going on with Google's AdSense service. And I mean odd in a good way, I think. Here's the mystery: I use Google to serve up ads on various of my web sites, this blog included. Google's AdSense produces the context-sensitive textual ads that you see on the right sidebar, for instance.

I've been using AdSense for quite some time -- since August of '03, really -- and have served up over 6 million impressions. My click-through rate -- meaning the percentage of ads that actually get clicked upon -- however, has historically been quite low. Lower than a bathysphere submerged in the Marianas Trench. Therefore, the earnings generated through AdSense, despite the number of impressions, has been relatively tiny: less than $1,000 since inception.

But starting in early March of this year, I noticed something odd occurring: my click-through rates were up... every day. Dramatically. Here's March, so you can get a feel for the difference. Instead of averaging, say, a dollar a day, the March daily average is nearly three bucks. What's weird? The number of impressions hasn't changed a bit.

So... what has changed? Are the ads getting better -- more 'contextually correct' than before? I don't know. But I'm not going to complain.

Takeaway: while one can't predict the future, if my results are indicative of AdSense overall, then Google's earnings are going to kick some serious butt this quarter. Act accordingly.

Tuesday, March 1, 2005	16,586	3	0.0%	$0.04	$0.73
Wednesday, March 2, 2005	20,172	4	0.0%	$0.03	$0.65
Thursday, March 3, 2005	19,448	8	0.0%	$0.10	$1.93
Friday, March 4, 2005	15,098	13	0.1%	$0.12	$1.86
Saturday, March 5, 2005	17,663	24	0.1%	$0.22	$3.89
Sunday, March 6, 2005	17,861	30	0.2%	$0.30	$5.38
Monday, March 7, 2005	17,915	25	0.1%	$0.21	$3.79
Tuesday, March 8, 2005	17,508	24	0.1%	$0.19	$3.26
Wednesday, March 9, 2005	15,965	13	0.1%	$0.12	$1.88
Thursday, March 10, 2005	15,185	43	0.3%	$0.34	$5.10
Friday, March 11, 2005	15,670	21	0.1%	$0.15	$2.37
Saturday, March 12, 2005	13,857	18	0.1%	$0.13	$1.77
Sunday, March 13, 2005	16,461	23	0.1%	$0.17	$2.73
Monday, March 14, 2005	16,712	18	0.1%	$0.17	$2.78
Tuesday, March 15, 2005	18,376	13	0.1%	$0.06	$1.09
Wednesday, March 16, 2005	15,847	22	0.1%	$0.17	$2.69
Thursday, March 17, 2005	14,477	18	0.1%	$0.13	$1.87
Friday, March 18, 2005	14,554	39	0.3%	$0.23	$3.35
Saturday, March 19, 2005	15,470	17	0.1%	$0.22	$3.38
Sunday, March 20, 2005	13,545	16	0.1%	$0.15	$2.06
Monday, March 21, 2005	14,876	21	0.1%	$0.23	$3.46
Tuesday, March 22, 2005	13,681	21	0.2%	$0.22	$3.00
Totals	356,927	434	0.1%	$0.17	$59.02
Averages	16,223	19			$2.68

 

Reuters: "Hitler Was Personally Behind Holocaust, Book Says"

Here's a headline worthy of Al-Reuters: "Hitler Was Personally Behind Holocaust, Book Says" (hat tip: Best of the Web). Gosh, and all this time, I thought Hitler actually disapproved of the slaughter and carnage! If only his evil henchmen hadn't violated his strict orders not to harm anyone, perhaps the Holocaust and the millions of other deaths during World War II would never have happened!

Al Reuters reports upon the revelation that Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Leader, took two of Hitler's closest attaches prisoner at the conclusion of the war. Based upon their interrogations, the KGB created a 'briefing book' detailing a psychological profile of Hitler. Two German historians unsealed "The Hitler Book" in Russian archives, which documents Hitler's rise to power through his final hours in the Berlin bunker. Of course, don't bother with Al Reuters' coverage: go directly to The London Sunday Times.

Here are some salient points culled from multiple articles.

THE bride wore a dark blue silk dress with a soft grey fur cape; the ashen-faced groom was dressed in the same crumpled jacket that he had been wearing for days, his Iron Cross First Class and other military decorations pinned to the lapel. The ceremony, held in a storeroom in a Berlin bunker as Soviet artillery rained down on the city, lasted only 10 minutes. When the couple emerged, Adolf Hitler kissed Eva Braun’s hand. There was speculation among aides that she was already carrying the Führer’s child. Within 24 hours the couple were dead — Hitler from a single bullet to the temple, his wife from biting on a cyanide capsule... The portrait that emerges is far more complex than the conventional one-dimensional depiction of a monster. Hitler, it seems, personally ordered those who crossed him, even over minor matters, to be sent to concentration camps but also had a wicked sense of humour, frequently mocking the pomposity of Hermann Goering, his number two. He was also fanatically devoted to his dog, Blondie. Among the episodes illuminated by the book is the flight of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s party deputy, on a doomed mission to Britain in May 1941 to try to instigate peace talks. Hitler’s immediate reaction was to conclude he must be mentally ill. Deeply embarrassed by the affair, he ordered the arrest of Karl Heinz Pintsch, Hess’s adjutant, who had known of the mission. “This shows beyond doubt that Hitler had no prior knowledge of Hess’s trip,” said Uhl. The book also reveals Hitler’s personal interest in the workings of the concentration and extermination camps. Linge and Günsche claimed that he had pored over the first blueprints of gas chambers and ordered more funding for the project. When Nazi troops were forced to retreat before the advancing Soviet armies, he also ordered gas chambers contained in camouflaged lorries to be sent to the front to execute prisoners of war and partisans. The description of Hitler’s mental and physical degeneration during the war is one of the most powerful elements. Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 proved an especially heavy blow to him. Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, treated him every second morning after breakfast with “stimulating injections”. Linge used to hand him opium. Hitler’s right eye also began to hurt so badly that the only way to ease the pain was to rub cocaine in it. He became increasingly paranoid that people were trying to poison him, demanding analysis of his soap, shaving cream and toothpaste. Even the water in which his food was cooked had to be examined. By the spring of 1945 it became clear that defeat was unavoidable and hopes of a successful German counter-attack against the Soviet forces were futile. On April 25 Linge was summoned by Hitler, who informed him that he and Braun were to commit suicide. “Get hold of some petrol to tip over our bodies and burn them,” he said. “Under no circumstances must you allow my corpse to fall into the hands of the Russians. They would love to bring me to Moscow and put me on show.” When Braun emerged after the wedding ceremony, Linge was struck by how pale she looked. “Good luck,” she told the butler. “I hope you manage to get out of Berlin.” The book does not address directly the question of whether Braun was pregant. But in its conclusion the historians claim that Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, who was captured with the others, confided to a cellmate who was spying for the Russians that she had been carrying a child. Uhl said the evidence was inconclusive. “We know that the autopsy on Eva Braun’s remains was simply not adequate because of the situation and shortage of medical equipment,” he said. “It’s certainly possible that they failed to detect the unborn foetus.” By the early hours of April 30 both Hitler and Braun were dead. Alerted by the smell of gunpowder just before 4am, Linge accompanied Martin Bormann, one of the leading Nazis, into Hitler’s office. The Führer was sitting on the sofa. He had a tiny, coin shaped wound on his right temple and two flecks of blood on his cheeks. There was another pool of blood the size of a dinner plate on the carpet and more spatters on the sofa and walls. On the floor were two Walther pistols, one by each foot. Braun was seated beside him with her legs drawn up. Her high-heeled shoes were on the carpet. Her lips were pressed together in a final spasm. *** Hitler also had a strange sense of humour. He allowed German soldiers in occupied countries to marry local women, but only after he saw photographs of the women. "Most of the women in the pictures were not especially pretty," the book said. "Hitler laughed and said once the soldiers who fell in love with these women sobered up again they would curse him for allowing them to marry." The book quotes the two aides saying Hitler mocked the United States when it declared war in December 1941. "He said their cars never win races, American planes look sharp but their engines are worthless ... He said they hadn't proven anything -- just mediocrity and advertising." *** Hitler was sceptical of Hermann Goering, his bombastic air force chief, and his claims to be able to win the war. Stalin noted an anecdote on page 276 of his paperwork where Hitler allegedly said after the Battle of Britain: "If the Luftwaffe can’t fly anymore then at least we can use his men to fight on the ground." Günsche and Linge said that far from being in the background, Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun was at the epicentre of Nazi politics for most of the 12-year lifespan of the Third Reich. One passage, concerning 1936, reads: "He was always accompanied by her. As soon as he heard the voice of his lover he became jollier. He would make jokes about her new hats. He would take her for hours on end into his study where there would be champagne cooling in ice, chocolates, cognac and fruit." But when Hitler burned the midnight oil speaking with his Nazi underlings or his generals, "Eva would often be in tears". "She felt a bird in a golden cage, her life unfulfilled as his bed partner," they said. Linge said that Hitler once ordered a doubling of the police guard on Braun’s Munich villa before the war, after she told the Gestapo that a woman had called her the "Führer-whore". Stalin, who ordered Hitler’s skull to be brought to Moscow after Red Army troops found his and Braun’s bodies in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in 1945, was obsessed with the minutiae of Hitler’s daily life. He wanted to know in particular about routine at the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain home in Bavaria. Linge told him: "Hitler’s conversation there was banal. At the dinner table he would praise the dresses of the female staff, say how difficult they must find it not being able to get their hair done or their nails filed on the mountain. "Hitler had a weird sense of humour. He would laugh at Eva’s lipstick on a serviette and then say: ‘Soon we will have replacement lipstick made from dead bodies of soldiers’." The book contains details about how his SS guards were detailed to buy him presents, how his dark moods were uplifted by photos in magazines of the early days of Nazism, and how he sat under the portrait of Frederick the Great, which he carted with him everywhere, believing he would give him divine inspiration to win the war. Günsche reported how Hitler once flew into a frenzy with his secretary, Martin Bormann, because Braun wanted to hire ten more serving girls over the 30-strong complement laid down by him for the kitchens. "I stamp whole divisions into the dirt!" screamed Hitler. "And I can’t get a few more serving wenches for the Berghof? Organise it now!" *** "Hitler told Himmler to use more trucks with mobile gas chambers so that munition needed for the troops wouldn't be wasted on shooting Russian (prisoners)," the book reads. "Himmler reported that the mobile gas chambers were working. He laughed cynically when he said that this method of murder is 'more considerate' and 'quieter' than shooting them," it adds. *** Adolf Hitler was so crippled with anxiety during his final days that he would scratch his neck and ears until they bled and demanded that his toilet water, as well as the water in which his eggs were boiled, be constantly analysed for traces of poison. *** The book is giving Germans a rare glimpse of the dictator, who is still presented in schools and public discussion as either mad or bad or both. Perhaps the most disconcerting revelation of the extracts in Bild is that Hitler had a sense of humour, albeit a particularly cold one. After an evening of small-talk and wise-cracking, Hitler told his guests: “The English believe that I’m sitting or cowering in the Chancellery, guarded by a fierce bulldog.” The truth, he said, was that he was having a good time. “It’s good that they can’t see me now. The Chancellery should be renamed the Happy Chancellor Restaurant.” The comments, reported by Günsche, came after an evening of concentration camp jokes that had his guests rolling with laughter. Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s court photographer, had turned up drunk. The photographer, Hitler said, should not stand too close to the stove lest the alcoholic fumes from his breath catch fire. On another occasion, Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, told Hitler the latest scurrilous rumour: that the immensely vain Hermann Goering, head of the air force, went to bed wearing medals on his pyjamas. “Hitler liked the story so much,” one Bild extract says, “that he ordered Hoffmann to make some medals out of gold and silver foil as well as a bombastic citation for bravery to be presented to Goering.” *** The butler’s testimony shows that Hitler was unable to form proper emotional relationships. His closest companion was his dog. They ate together frequently. When Blondi fell ill, Hitler had a special ration of eggs, lean meat and dripping sent. He received regular medical bulletins about the dog. “It was easier for him to sign a death warrant for an officer on the front than to swallow bad news about the health of his dog,” Linge said... Hitler decided to mate his beloved Alsatian dog, Blondi, and summoned a breeder to bring a pedigree male. Hitler asked his butler, after emerging from a briefing about the Eastern front, whether his dog had copulated. “Yes, my Führer, the Act of State has been completed,” Heinz Linge said with heavy humour. “How did Blondi take it?” “They both behaved like beginners.” “How do you mean?” Hitler was genuinely curious. “They both fell down.” Hitler burst into laughter *** The file suggests Hitler wasn't in charge of German strategy in the last days of the war, Eberle said. Hitler ``wasn't the engine of warfare by the time the fighting had reached Berlin,'' Eberle said. The accounts also show Hitler was personally interested in the development of the gas chambers that were used to kill about 6 million Jews from across Europe, Eberle said. He ``studied in-depth development projects that were presented to him by Himmler,'' Eberle read from the book, referring to Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of the deportation and murder of the Jews. There was only one copy of the file made in 1965 and put in another Soviet archive, where Uhl and Eberle said they found it.

Google News Search: Uhl Hitler
 

Monday, March 21, 2005

Mad Typing Skillz

How important is typing ability to a developer? I've always had a gut feel that it's quite important. It's important enough to ask the question, "How fast do you type?" in an interview. Because, in my opinion, the productivity of a developer who types via hunt -and-peck will suffer, no matter how smart they may be.

Consider the "fail fast" philosophy: it touts the importance of trying many approaches, knowing most will fail. Discovering which algorithms suck and which meet the challenge is important... and the rate at which you can make these discoveries is likewise key.

Thus, developers who succeed by "failing fast" are quite valuable.

When I was in high school, there was a "typing class" that was a standard part of the curriculum. Ostensibly the class was for would-be government employees, because the civil-service exam had a minimum typing speed requirement. I don't recall the rationale for my taking this class, but it turned out to be a great decision. Little did I know I'd be a developer someday and would need to hit top speeds on the keyboard.

Most years, a female would take the fastest speed honors in the class.

But in our class, a guy named Chuck Thornton and myself were always the top two. We had some brutal typing contests. Remember, this was the day and age of mechanical typewriters (not quite as antedeluvian as the Underwood pictured at top left, however). We would try and intimidate each other -- and all of the others in the class -- by not only typing as fast as we could but by pounding the crap out of the keyboard. The combination of the staccato, rapid-fire hammering was reminiscent of an assault on a machine-gun nest at Anzio.

My kids are both excellent typists. I suspect it has less to do with genetics or their early exposure to Mavis Beach Teaches Typing for Kids than their chocoholic-level addiction to instant messaging.

Joel on Software: Typing Software
 

Beirut Best-sellers

Ever wondered what's on the bookshelves in Syrian-controlled Lebanon? Here's your answer, direct from a bookshop in Beirut.
 

Sunday, March 20, 2005

The Genuises at Agence France Presse

The geniuses over at Agence France Presse -- or as I like to call them, the Paris bureau of Al Jazeera -- have decided to sue Google News for a minimum of $17 million. Their claim? That Google's news aggregation service reproduced snippets of AFP's copyrighted photos, headlines and stories without permission.

Attention, AFP management: this lawsuit is almost as sensible as giving your 16-year-old daughter permission to date Mike Tyson.

In fact, if these PHB's had the common sense that God gave a sea otter, they would have dealt with this "problem" (and they must think having traffic directed to their site, free of charge, is a problem) in one of the following ways:

Used a robots.txt file to tell the Google search bot ("GoogleBot") the areas of the site not to spider

Used a simple web server configuration option to deny access to the GoogleBot

Used another simple web server configuration option to deny access to the GoogleBot's IP addresses

Or simply have asked Google not to spider their site

Any one of these options would have prevented Google News from "stealing" AFP's precious one-sentence story summaries and thumbnail copies of images. But apparently, AFP has decided to invest in their legal department, not niceties such as IT or sensible senior management.

It reminds me of case, a while back, in which the geniuses at TicketMaster that sued various parties over "deep-linking" -- the practice of linking to content within a site as opposed to the site's main page.

News flash: don't want someone to deep-link to your site? Hire someone technically savvy enough to configure your web-site to deny deep-linking. Hint: there are these mysterious things called "cookies", or "referer headers", or other tools that can help implement a 'no deep linking' policy.

Although someone would have to explain to me why you wouldn't want more exposure for your content, more folks linking to it, and therefore more visitors and marketing exposure. Maybe we can ask the rocket scientists at AFP about that sometime.

PhysOrg: AFP sues Google for news aggregation
 

Saturday, March 19, 2005

I Want MTV... Off My TV

Rebecca Hagelin points us to Brent Bozell and his organization's study of programming content on MTV. Apologies in advance for the graphic (even though it's partially redacted) content.

...In 171 hours of MTV programming, PTC analysts found 1,548 sexual scenes containing 3,056 depictions of sex or various forms of nudity and 2,881 verbal sexual references. That means that children watching MTV are viewing an average of 9 sexual scenes per hour with approximately 18 sexual depictions and 17 instances of sexual dialogue or innuendo. To put this in perspective, consider that in its last study of sex on primetime network television, the PTC found an average of only 5.8 instances of sexual content during the 10 o’clock hour -- when only adults are watching. For the strong of stomach who want to know more about what comes on in the afternoon just as tweens and teens are getting off the school bus and turning on the tube in America’s largely unsupervised homes, here’s just one example: One Bad Trip 3/20/04 2:00 p.m. Human-sundae eating competition: Three guys lie on stage; whipped cream is placed on their legs and chests. The three girls each straddle a guy and lick the whipped cream off. Nate: “She’s eating whipped cream off some dude’s [bleeped ‘f---ing’] chest right now.” Nate: “If she goes anywhere near his junk, she is so wrong.” Next, the girls switch places and have whipped cream placed all over them, including a cherry on each breast. Guys straddle them and lick the whipped cream off. The camera zooms in close. Nate: “Some dude is about to eat [bleeped ‘s--t’] all over her body. Melissa, in a voiceover: “It’s a little bit strange having some random guy lick whipped cream off of me.” Then there’s the example of the standard MTV “music” content: Pete Pablo - “Freak-a-Leak” “How u like it, daddy (the way she do it from the front)? How u like it, daddy (the way she do it from the back)? How u like it, daddy (then bring it down like that)? “And she know why she came here And she know where clothes suppose to be (off and over there) [Bleeped ‘Sniff a lil’ coke, take a lil’ X, smoke a lil’ weed,’] drink a lil’ bit I need a girl I could freak with And wanna try [bleeped ‘s--t’] and ain’t scared of a big [bleeped ‘d--k’] And love to get her [bleeped ‘p---y’] licked by another [bleeped ‘b---h’] Cause I ain’t drunk enough to do that [bleeped ‘s--t’] I’ve previously written about how MTV seeks to manipulate America’s children and how broadcast networks are targeting America’s youth. Just thought you might want to know it ain’t getting’ any better. And in case you didn’t realize it, MTV is owned by Viacom, the same company that owns CBS (of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” and Rathergate fame.) Surprised?

Call to Action: Yes, this is the stinking, vermin-infested mindrot being spoon-fed to our kids. Harmful doesn't begin to describe it. What can you do? Call up your cable company or satellite provider... and get MTV off your set. Today.

Rebecca Hagelin: MTV keeps on rockin'
Cincinnati Cosmetic Dentist Cincinnati Dentist Blog

The Gloves are Off: Hillary and Kerry

The newly minted, neocon-model Hillary Clinton has opened up her bombing campaign on would-be 2008 contender John Kerry*. The first salvos were fired by Ann Lewis, director of communications for Clinton's Political Action Committee.

The Kerry campaign had "...a different message every two or three weeks,'' [according to] Ann Lewis... saying... Kerry...``kept trying to rationally convince, to put a presidency together, line by line, plan by plan.'' She said people ``don't vote for plans, they vote for presidents.''

Boston Herald: Clinton adviser: Kerry ran inconsistent campaign

* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way promised 48 days ago to release his military records and has yet to do so.
Cincinnati Cosmetic Dentist Cincinnati Dentist Blog

The Gloves are Off: Biden and Kerry

The forgettable "Slow" Joe Biden, whether on his own behalf -- or as a proxy for Hillary -- weighed in with his own demeaning thoughts on Kerry. This appears to be part of a concerted campaign on the part of the "national-security Democrats" to disenfranchise the anti-war Left bank: the Kennedys, Kerrys, and Pelosis. Will such an approach bring more centrists to the table -- or will it further fragment a party led by the mercurial Howard Dean?

On October 29th, Biden... heard, on the radio, that Osama bin Laden had issued a videotape in which he belittled Bush and promised to continue to “bleed” America. Biden... worried that Kerry’s reaction might seem tepid or petty. His advice to Kerry throughout the campaign—which, he complained, went unheeded much of the time—was to harden his message... “I’m on the phone, I e-mail, I say, ‘John, please, say three things: “How dare bin Laden speak of our President this way.” No. 2, “I know how to deal with preventing another 9/11.” No. 3, “Kill him.”’ Now, that’s harsh. Kerry needed to be harsh. And it was—Jesus Christ.” Here Biden threw up his hands. “He didn’t make any of it. Let’s get it straight. None of it. None of those three points were made.”

New Yorker: Can the Democrats make themselves look tough?
 

Friday, March 18, 2005

How to Justify Information Security Spending

Dan Lieberman, writing in Computerworld, has performed yeoman service on a topic near and dear to every CISO's heart: how to justify InfoSec spending to senior management. In interview format, Lieberman asks the reader to answer seven simple questions:

1. Is your digital asset protection spending driven by regulation? 2. Are Gartner white papers a key input for purchasing decisions? 3. Does the information security group work without security win/loss scores? 4. Does your chief security officer meet three to five vendors each day? 5. Is your purchasing cycle for a new product longer than six months? 6. Is your team short on head count, and not implementing new technologies? 7. Has the chief technology officer never personally sold or installed any of the company's products? If you answered yes to four of the seven questions, then you definitely need a business strategy with operational metrics for your information security operation.

Lieberman asserts that a strategy boils down to three key points:

Strategy: have you clearly decided upon a Business Unit security strategy?

Metrics: measure results in terms the business can understand and do so in the context of a security process

Marketing: reinforce the message with senior management, using in-field experiences

Indeed, the stakes are high. Organized crime is actively infiltrating business networks the world over. The cases you hear about -- such as the hackers who came close to ripping off 220 million Pounds from the Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui -- likely pale in comparison to those that have evaded detection.

In fact, we sporadically hear of an isolated case here and there, where hackers were busted in the midst of an exotic scam. But what about the truly elite blackhats, funded by global organized crime?

Read the whole thing.

Dan Lieberman: How to Justify Information Security Spending
 

Iran and Venezuela

The recent visit that Mullah Khatami paid to Venezuela and Hugo Chavez resulted in some interesting, if not hair-raising, statements. Here's Khatami:

...Each country that tries to do its will [or] be independent, is pressured militarily... We have to be strong to strike [back] against others for the aggression of other countries and to defend ourselves from the dangers of those who want to invade us...

I don't think invasion is the top priority on anyone's list. Stopping the world's foremost state-sponsor of terrorism from acquiring nukes, however, is.

...Now it is different than in the last century, when the great powers could have all [technology] exclusively... Maybe they think that our power depends on our military power... maybe they think our power depends on sophisticated weapons and weapons of mass destruction...

The Mullah's power depends on one thing: brutal repression of their people. When young girls are stoned to death, political prisoners are massacred, the worst of the worst terrorist groups are provided aid and comfort, well, then something needs to be done. And acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Mullahs... will... not... happen.

Of course, Hugo Chavez had to chime in, harmonizing on the tune of "resisting invasion":

...We have to be strong to strike [back] against others for the aggression of other countries and to defend ourselves from the dangers of those who want to invade us...

Yes, this is the great Chavez, the neo-socialist and friend of Castro, who believes he has been targeted by the U.S. for assassination... just like his good friend Fidel.

The Bottom Line?

It all comes down to dependence on foreign oil. Like it or not, oil fuels the economy of the U.S. and, indeed, the world. The Senate's decision to open up a small fraction of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) points to a strategy to begin achieving some measure of independence from the Mullahocracy and the "Socialchavists". Advances in fuel cell technology, hydrogen-based engines, and hybrids will also help us move to a world less dependent upon fossil fuel and the "Axis of Instability" that operates very close to home.
 

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Wolfowitz

I received an email from a friend today with the subject heading Bush must be stupid. It contained only a hyperlink to the news that the President will recommend Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has been a primary lightning rod for those opposed to the Administration's national security policies.

I've never understood the animosity some have for Wolfowitz. Certainly he bears responsibility for failed predictions... underestimating the cost of the war in Iraq, for instance. But now, as the world around us changes, due in no small part to his steadfast vision of a democratic Middle East, it is worth considering where his vision led us.

Last week, the New York Times's David Brooks gave us a glimpse at what may end up being Wolfowitz's legacy:

...with political earthquakes now shaking the Arab world, it's time to step back and observe that over the course of his long career - in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in Central and Eastern Europe, and now in the Middle East - Wolfowitz has always been an ardent champion of freedom... ...If the trends of the last few months continue, Wolfowitz will be the subject of fascinating biographies decades from now, while many of his smuggest critics will be forgotten. Those biographies will mention not only his intellectual commitment but also his personal commitment, his years spent learning the languages of the places that concerned him, and the thousands of hours spent listening deferentially to the local heroes who led the causes he supported... ...To praise Wolfowitz is not triumphalism... It's a recognition that amid all the legitimate criticism, this guy has been the subject of a vicious piling-on campaign by people who know less than nothing about what is actually going on in the government, while he, in the core belief that has energized his work, may turn out to be right. ...When he was ambassador to Indonesia, Wolfowitz gave a speech calling for political "openness." He was careful not to use the words "freedom" or "democracy" because under Suharto, Indonesians might have felt inhibited about talking in such bold terms. But they were comfortable with openness, and it became the subject of magazine cover stories and a great national discussion...

As far back as 2002, The Economist gazed at Wolfowitz and saw a "velociraptor": a man so far beyond being a hawk that he scared those enamored with the "realpolitik" viewpoint of accepting the status quo.

...But the most important reason [for his influence] is that history has moved in his direction. Mr Wolfowitz has been arguing for years that the world is a far more dangerous place than most people realise; that America needs to increase its military expenditure; and that the best form of defence is offence. September 11th may not have proved him right in every detail. There may be no connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11th atrocities. Rogue states don't form anything so coherent as an axis. But everybody now understands the premise. The velociraptor has been right before. In the 1980s Mr Wolfowitz vigorously supported Ronald Reagan's denunciation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”—a phrase the conventional-minded of the time regarded as bonkers. His willingness to trust his intellect against the weight of conventional opinion is admirable...

In a 2004 speech to Polish academics and officials, Wolfowitz stated his beliefs eloquently and mapped his vision to their worldview:

...he recounted the events of Poland’s darkest days, and the civilized world’s acquiescence to Hitler’s ambitions which preceded them. When Hitler began to rearm Germany, Wolfowitz said, “the world’s hollow warnings formed weak defenses.” When Hitler annexed Austria, “the world sat by.” When German troops marched into Czechoslovakia before the war, “the world sat still once again.” When Britain and France warned Hitler to stay out of Poland, the Führer had little reason to pay heed. “Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes,” Wolfowitz said. “And, yes, I do include Saddam Hussein.” He then laid out the case against Saddam, reciting once again the dictator’s numberless crimes against his own people. He spoke of severed hands and videotaped torture sessions. He told of the time, on a trip to Iraq, he’d been shown a “torture tree,” the bark of which had been worn away by ropes used to bind Saddam’s victims, both men and women. He said that field commanders recently told him that workers had come across a new mass grave, and had stopped excavation when they encountered the remains of several dozen women and children, “some still with little dresses and toys.” Wolfowitz observed that some people—meaning the “realists” in the foreignpolicy community, including Secretary of State Colin Powell—believed that the Cold War balance of power had brought a measure of stability to the Persian Gulf. But, Wolfowitz continued, “Poland had a phrase that correctly characterized that as ‘the stability of the graveyard.’ The so-called stability that Saddam Hussein provided was something even worse.” ...

History will be the ultimate arbiter, determining whether Wolfowitz's vision can stand the test of time. My money is on his vision and not the alternative, head-buried-in-sand approach of worshipping the status quo. In an age where a single terrorist can unleash catastrophe on the civilized world, Wolfowitz wants to make the civilized world bigger. His longstanding vision of human freedom continues to undermine authoritarian regimes and shake the very foundations of the planet.

In all likelihood, history will not speak kindly of his detractors. Instead it will speak of a man whose vision changed the world.
 

Interview with John O'Neill

The invaluable LGF points us to this fascinating interview with John O'Neill in the most recent issue of The American Enterprise. O'Neill, of course, is one of the SwiftBoat Veterans who had an enormous impact on the recent Presidential Election. And, according to O'Neill, they tried to convince the Democratic Party to nominate someone, anyone, other than John Kerry. The Swiftvets, far from being partisan, simply despised the idea of Kerry as President.

Coincidentally, today marks the forty-fifth day since John Kerry promised -- on national television -- to sign his Form-180, which would release his military service records. He has yet to do so. Anyone still undecided as to the truth behind his military service need only contemplate that Kerry, despite his promises, continues to stonewall on his service records. That should tell you all you need to know.

TAE: How and when did the idea for the Swift Boat veterans group come into being? O’NEILL: The one who conceived of this was Admiral Roy Hoffmann. He began contacting many Swift Boat people in January and February last year. At that time, I was in the hospital. I had given my wife a kidney for a transplant. I became a part of it in early to mid March. I was motivated by several things, the first and most important being a genuine fear of what would happen to our country, our national security, and our armed forces if John Kerry became Commander in Chief. The reason we had our press conference on May 4 was that we thought if we could come forward quickly, we might be able to prevent John Kerry from becoming the Democratic nominee and allow the Democratic Party to pick someone else, in which case we could all go home. TAE: At the Swift Boat veterans’ May 4 press conference you had an open letter calling Kerry unfit to be Commander in Chief. It was signed by virtually all of John Kerry’s commanders in Vietnam. Yet the story fell flat. The media ignored it. How did your group react to the media blackout? O’NEILL: We were shocked. We couldn’t believe it. I haven’t been involved in politics or media relations, and I thought the job of the media was primarily to report the facts. It was obvious to me that many hundreds of his former comrades coming forward to say that he lied about his record in Vietnam and that he was unfit to be President would be important information for Americans. I only then became aware of the bias of the media. TAE: How do you explain the media’s response? O’NEILL: The establishment media was very pro-Kerry. They were opposed to any story that was critical of Kerry, and I believe that they were captured by their own bias. We met with one reporter around that time. We told a story to him relating to Kerry’s service. He acknowledged it was true and terribly important. And he told us he would not print it because it would help George Bush. That’s when we began to realize we had a real problem on our hands. TAE: Is there anything other than pro-Kerry bias to account for the establishment media’s attitude to the story? O’NEILL: Perhaps a second factor is that there are very few veterans in the established media. It makes it very difficult for them to understand the story or to care about it. That’s very different from the situation 40 or 50 years ago when most people had served in some fashion in the armed forces or had uncles or brothers who had.

The American Enterprise: John O'Neill
 

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

BlatherWatch: Tom Teepen

It is through a lense of grim compassion that I view certain liberal pundits: Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen, for instance. This pair is so committed to their litany of failed predictions that they'll stick with them no matter how far out of whack they may be.

But I feel a certain sympathy for them: at least they truly are committed, along with being sour and inane. Who can blame them? History hasn't treated either kindly and, given the momentum of the Administration's sweeping initiatives, it's only going to get worse for them.

Thus, I do feel a sort of compassion for them... much like I have for an organ-grinder's monkey at the circus. After all, Dowd and Cohen are the tiny monkeys sitting on the shoulders of the heavyweight op-ed writers on their respective newspapers. Like clockwork, you can expect the Dowds and Cohens of the world to chime in with -- no, not an original thought -- hamhanded attempts at humor sprinkled with their traditional Democratic groupthink. In perfect harmony with the fever swamp, both have achieved a track record of spectacular, flame-out-at-the-air-show-and-smash-into-the-tarmac-with-blazing-explosion failures.

Thus, one can't help but feel compassion, not only for their poor track record, but also for the plain fact that so few people even read them anymore.

Other liberal pundits are simply... not all there. Their driveways don't go all the way to the garage. A few sandwiches shy of a picnic. The elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor. A guy like Tom Teepen comes to mind. He differs from the top-shelf liberal punditry on a couple of parameters: sheer ignorance, for one. A willingness to ignore reality. And, of course, astoundingly poor writing skills. Here's his latest gem, courtesy of Cox Newspapers. My comments are in bold.

Bush scores some early wins - By Tom Teepen - 03/15/05 President Bush guessed that the political tremors from unhorsing Saddam Hussein would crack brittle authoritarian regimes throughout the Muslim Middle East and hoped a democratic phoenix would rise from the rubble. So far the president is half right, and something is flapping around in the debris. The question is whether it is Bush's phoenix or a vulture. A phoenix or a vulture? Hard to tell where this is going, Tom... Iran holds out, a republic in name and a theocracy in practice, but movement elsewhere in the region is promising. Libya has resigned its nuclear ambitions. Syria has pledged to remove its occupiers from Lebanon. Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak says he will admit other candidates in this fall's presidential voting, turning another empty referendum into an actual election. The Saudis have permitted local elections, though of course for boys only. Palestinians and Israelis are talking, albeit at arm's length. A capitulation from Tom Teepen? After all of the years of flaming, poorly-written, anti-Bush rhetoric? Can it be happening? Someone pinch me. Not all, and perhaps not even most of this change is Bush's doing. There we go... that's the Tom Teepen I expect... Pariah Libya had been dickering for years to get itself back into the international game, even before Iraq was a gleam in Bush's eye. The potential for an Israeli-Palestinian deal mainly occurs because Yasser Arafat finally had the good grace to die and because Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is turning out to be as hard-nosed in peace as in war, is committed to withdrawing from Gaza and is prepared to see a Palestinian state created there and in the West Bank. Yes, it was all happening with or without President Bush, according to the deep-thinker... plans were already in motion... forces gathering... it was all just... just a coincidence, yes, that's it! Syria has pledged before - most recently in 1989 - to quit Lebanon, only to balk when international attention strayed. For at least the next several weeks, Bashar Assad means to keep two-thirds of Syria's Lebanese forces in the eastern Bekka Valley, still close enough and large enough to be intimidating. After the years of international failures in extricating Syria from Lebanon... now that the timeframe is weeks, Mr. Teepen still isn't gracious enough to extend credit to the Administration. All that said, those of us who considered the Iraq adventure ill-conceived and ill-executed - and still think as much - nonetheless have to concede that it is partly responsible for shaking up the Mideast in ways that at least potentially could settle out for the better. Partly responsible. Well, I guess it is hard to say in print, 'You know, for many years, I've been a blathering, partisan nincompoop... and completely wrong to boot. President Bush was right. I was too thick-headed to see it coming. I surrender... and hereby willingly sign up as a GOP fundraiser.' But in every quarter, the potential for all of this to go awry is equally strong. Egypt's numerous small parties could splinter the opposition and let Mubarak romp to a mock legitimacy. Even if Assad keeps his word - big if - Lebanese politics could break down again into the sectarian fighting - Sunni, Christian, Druze - that fueled a 15-year civil war, and Shiite Hezbollah, with proven fighters and a ready infrastructure, is there to pick up the pieces. The gingerly Israeli-Palestinian pavane toward peace is ever vulnerable to terrorist sabotage. There we go, Tom! Find the dark lining in the silver cloud... hoping against hope that the U.S. fails... excellent work! And, of course, the relative success of the recent election in Iraq aside, the construction there of a credible, able government that reconciles Sunnis, Shia and Kurds - and all of that in the teeth of a stubborn insurgency - remains far short of certain. Memo to self: Google Teepen's statements prior to the election. One would hope that you could give credit where credit is due... but that would be asking too much of a serial blatherer. Bush has sensibly so far declined to crow. We can all hope for good outcomes, but apparently the president has learned from Iraq, if nothing else, that the Middle East has an unfortunate knack for turning even apparently accomplished missions into damnable problems. Well, I guess this is as close to an admission of wrong-headedness that we'll get from Mr. Teepen. Just so long as he can continue to take no risks whatsoever and proclaim the Administration's failures whenever something, anything, goes wrong, Mr. Teepen's world will be just fine in his book. Thankfully, it's a book few read.

Tom Teepen: Bush scores some early wins
 

Saturday, March 12, 2005

The Fallacy of the Vanquished Democratic Party

There appears to be a new GOP meme wafting through the new media that goes something like this: the Democratic party "has been completely intellectually vanquished". That "we [continue] to tally up the 'I told you so’s.'". Or reveling in the seeming surrender of the MSM with their refrain that, "maybe Bush was right." And, of course, celebrating victories over partisan hacks disguised as unbiased newsmen.

But I think it's a mistake. There are legitimate opportunities for the Democratic party to make inroads, albeit on issues not quite so critical as national defense. Here are four issues on which I believe that the GOP is increasingly vulnerable:

Reliance on Oil - the GOP needs to put its money where its mouth is, and dramatically raise the fuel economy requirements for automakers. For years, lobbyists for GM, Ford and the usual suspects have been successful at preventing major changes in fuel economy standards. And that's an opportunity for the Democratic party to make real inroads on an issue that's hitting every American smack dab in the wallet. There's no good reason that fuel economy standards aren't aggressively raised each and every year... and that vehicles like SUVs and pickup trucks aren't classified correctly.

Social Security - Rather than insisting 'there's no problem' (instead of taking the intellectually honest, though ineffectual, line that Bill Clinton and Al Gore took in the late nineties), why don't the Dems stake out a plan that resonates with the American public? It doesn't have to be private accounts... but something that can salvage the system. After all, anyone with a grade-school education knows we have a problem.

Medicare - No one in either party is talking about the five trillion pound gorilla - Medicare. Look up unfunded liabilities in the dictionary and you'll probably see a picture of the Medicare logo. How about someone -- anyone, for goodness' sake -- coming up with a plan to attack the problem?

Bankruptcy Protection - The GOP is ramrodding a bankruptcy bill through Congress that appears to deliver a gift-wrapped box o' money to the credit-card companies, whose business practices already border on the obscene. Because most bankruptcies are caused by legitimate, catastrophic disruptions to personal cash flow (extended illness, job loss, etc.), the GOP is doing the public, especially senior citizens, no favor with this sort of tripe.

The Democrats need a beachhead. They can pick one or more of these issues -- all of which resonate with the baby-boomer generation -- and make hay. But simply opposing anything the Administration does is not a strategy. And that seems to be the only play in the Howard Dean playbook thus far. If the Democratic strategists get their act together, though, watch out. There are plenty of vulnerabilities in the GOP defensive line.
 

Friday, March 11, 2005

Book Review: Frederick Forsyth's Avenger

In the Tradition of Man on Fire

There are very few top-shelf revenge books. Certainly, A.J. Quinnell's Creasy series qualifies. Forsythe adds to the collection with Avenger, the story of Calvin Dexter. The protagonist is an attorney and triathlete who happens to be a Vietnam Vet. He served with distinction as a "tunnel rat", mastering the art of trapping Vietcong in the claustrophobic environs surrounding Cu Chi.

After returning to the States, he experienced a personal and painful family tragedy. From that point forward, Dexter devotes himself to bringing certain parties to justice. Parties that others fear or are protected by foreign governments.

One such party is Zoran Zilic, a monstrous war criminal who participated in some of the most gruesome crimes imaginable while Yugoslavia disintegrated. Zoran made the fundamental mistake of killing a volunteer aid-worker whose grandfather was a self-made Canadian billionaire. The grandfather, a World War II veteran, contracts Dexter to track down Zilic and exact revenge.

Two issues cloud Dexter's mission. First off, Zilic has fled Yugoslavia for parts unknown, having seen the writing on the wall. Secondly, U.S. counter-terror groups have positioned Zilic to run missions for them to help combat the rise of Al Qaeda. Zilic is one of the few persons trusted by the terrorist hierarchy and therefore is the perfect pawn. Thus, a mercenary vigilante like Dexter must be removed from the scene.

In intricately plotted detail, Forsythe describes how Zilic will be tracked down; how Dexter intends to accomplish his mission, come what may; and how the U.S. intends to deal with Dexter. Forsythe is still at the top of his game and "Avenger" -- trite name not withstanding -- is an outstanding read.
 

Book Review: Robert Crais' Hostage

It's like Reading an Action Movie

First off: I'll admit I'm not a fan of the author's Elvis Cole series. But Hostage is a flat-out barn-burner. Written in a series of third-person vignettes, each from the perspective of a person ensnared in the drama, the action is pulse-pounding and compelling. Give yourself a few hours because, as passe as it sounds, you -- seriously -- will not want to put this book down. And I'm not exaggerating in the least.

Within the first few pages, we encounter a trio of hoods who've recently been released from the pen. On the spur of the moment, they decide to rob a convenience store located in a ritzy, suburban neighborhood. In seconds, the robbery goes sour and they skeedaddle a ways down the road... until their vehicle suddenly dies. Exiting the road, they run into a high-end suburban enclave, and quickly end up in the backyard of a beautiful home.

Unfortunately, a father and his two kids are actually in the house. The trio invade the home, looking for a vehicle or an exit route. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the police show up a little too quickly, and the scene rapidly degrades into a hostage situation.

All is not as it seems, however. The accountant is no run-of-the-mill businessman. He is, in fact, a bookkeeper for the California mob and was only moments away from handing off some critical disks to a courier. The lives of many parties end up riding on the fate of the disks, from police officers, to mobsters, to the family in the house.

Three words: just read it. You won't regret it for a split-second.
 

Search Engine Optimization Trash Talk

There is one segment of eBusiness marketing that is both technically challenging and ultra-competitive. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, it's search-engine optimization. SEO is the art and science of moving certain search results up while pushing everyone else down.

SEO can mean the difference between a successful and a failing business. High search-engine rankings can mean exposure and, interestingly, less exposure for your competition.

For legacy businesses (e.g., a dental practice), SEO isn't quite so make-or-break a proposition. But it can still determine who will grow and who will wilt on the vine.

My two brothers-in-law are in dental practice with their father (yes, coincidentally, he's also my father-in-law). All are excellent dentists and my father-in-law, Tudy, served on the State Dental Board for over a decade, if memory serves. As an aside, Tudy was an excellent athlete in his younger days, having played baseball at the University of Cincinnati (he was Sandy Koufax's battery-mate) and lettered for Ohio's state championship swimming team. In any event, the family is active in the community (e.g., Big Brothers) and well-known for being among the area's finest dentists.

So, Marc, the oldest of the two brothers comes to me in a tizzy one day. He's searching for "City Dentist" on Google (city being our locale) and "City Cosmetic Dentist" and coming up with nothing, "We must be the one-hundredth search result."

Since this is one of my areas of specialty, I tell him I can take care of it for him. After all, I spent several years munching sushi with P&G's leading e-business geniuses (guys like Ted McConnell and Terry McFadden) who had some visionary ideas in this space. I've added a bunch of proprietary tools to the repertoire and can now legitimately claim some proven expertise in SEO.

Within a few weeks, the In-laws are the #2 result on "City Dentist" and #1 on "City Cosmetic Dentist". Marc starts trash-talking his competitor (we'll call him, "Wedge"). Wedge is one of these good looking guys who swung a gig on one of the TV network's makeover shows. Wedge knows what he's doing and has therefore rented out space on some of the dental link-farms to drive up his ranking.

Of course, Marc being Marc, he has to talk trash to Wedge:

"Wedge, when we get done with you, your dental practice will be nothing but a rumor." "Wedge, your search ranking is buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa." "It's okay, Wedge... seeing as you're #103, I know you try harder." "Wedge, you still a dentist in town? Cuz I can't seem to find you in Google anymore."

In all seriousness, SEO is an arduous, no-nonsense game. Real money and livelihoods ride on these rankings. If you do engage someone to handle SEO for you, make sure they can point to some real and current search results so you can judge for yourself. Just like any other business, there are those who know what they're doing and there are those who simply claim they know. The difference will be visible at places like Google.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Voices of Reason

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) on CNN: "So, at some point we've got to stop criticizing each other and sit at the table and work out this problem … Every year we wait to come up with a solution to the Social Security problem [it] costs our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren $600 billion more." It's a pity more Democrats haven't aligned themselves with this centrist voice of reason. Well, perhaps it's not a pity, for as long as the Michael Moore-led, Left Bank wing of the party dominates, they'll continue to lose elections.

Dan Rather, in the LA Times, "I've learned to trust the audience," explaining his removal from the anchor job at CBS News amid its abysmal ratings slide. When the audience disappears, so must Dan.

Benjamin Blatt reveals that New York Times reporter Chris Hedges may be positioning himself as Jayson Blair's successor. Regarding Hedges' claimed presence at the Battle of Khafji during Operation Desert Storm, Blatt calls out Hedges, "Your version of the events in Khafji doesn’t appear to correspond with objective reality. It makes me wonder about the content of the rest of your book." It looks like another proud milestone for the Gray Lady.
 

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Gun ban utopia sees an increase in violent crime

I couldn't help but insert some snide remarks on this interesting news (my comments in bold) from a newspaper in California.

In a pattern that's repeated itself in Canada and Australia, violent crime has continued to go up in Great Britain despite a complete ban on handguns, most rifles and many shotguns. The broad ban that went into effect in 1997 was trumpeted by the British government as a cure for violent crime. The cure has proven to be much worse than the disease. Crime rates in England have skyrocketed since the ban was enacted... the violent crime rate has risen 69 percent since 1996, with robbery rising 45 percent and murders rising 54 percent. This is even more alarming when you consider that from 1993 to 1997 armed robberies had fallen by 50 percent. Recent information released by the British Home Office shows that trend is continuing. Reports released in October 2004 indicate that during the second quarter of 2004, violent crime rose 11 percent; violence against persons rose 14 percent. The British experience is further proof that gun bans don't reduce crime and, in fact, may increase it. The gun ban creates ready victims for criminals, denying law-abiding people the opportunity to defend themselves. Is it really that difficult for the Toby Hoovers of the world to understand? Criminals, by definition, don't obey laws. Therefore, laws designed to restrict access to firearms will remove them only from the hands of the law-abiding. It's not exactly neurosurgery. In contrast, the number of privately owned guns in the United States rises by about 5 million a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The number of guns owned by Americans is at an all-time high, fast approaching 300 million. That's only one for every man, woman and child in the country. We must do better... and we can do better! Meanwhile the FBI reports that in 2003 the nation's violent crime rate declined for the 12th straight year to a 27-year low. The FBI's figures are based on crimes reported to police. By comparison, the U.S. Department of Justice reported in September that, according to its annual national crime victim survey, violent crime reached a 30-year low in 2003. Let's see if I've got this straight: crime keeps dropping in the relaxed environs of the United States while in restrictive countries like the U.K. and Australia, violent crime (especially  gun crime) is exploding. I wonder if any lessons can be gleaned from these statistics? Let me ruminate on that for a while. Talk amongst yourselves: topic - did the fall of Rome really end the 'Age of Enlightenment'? Right-to-Carry states fared better than the rest of the country in 2003. On the whole, their total violent crime, murder and robbery rates were 6 percent, 2 percent and 23 percent lower respectively than the states and the District of Columbia where carrying a firearm for protection against criminals is prohibited or severely restricted. You mean the brilliant Eric Fingerhut was wrong when he said, "the presence of a gun is actually likely to escalate violence"? And the omniscient Toby Hoover completely flubbed her prediction that, "we will have more shootings, more accidents"? My whole world is crumbling! How could those <spoonerism> two shining wits </spoonerism> possibly be wrong? On average in Right-to-Carry states the total violent crime, murder, robbery and aggravated assault rates were lower by 27 percent, 32 percent, 45 percent and 20 percent respectively. Maybe it's just a coincidence!! As usual, most of the states with the lowest violent crime rates are those with the least gun control, including those in the Rocky Mountain region, and Maine, New Hampshire and Ver-mont in the Northeast. The District of Columbia and Maryland, which have gun bans and other severe restrictions on gun purchase and ownership, retained their regrettable distinctions as having the highest murder and robbery rates. Makes you want to just go out and buy yet another handgun, doesn't it?

Lake County Record: 'Gun ban' utopia sees an increase in violent crime
 

Grimes Sets Off a Firestorm

The eloquent Richard Grimes, of Dr. Dobbs Journal fame, recently set off a firestorm in the software development corner of the blogosphere. Having written a .NET column for three years, he'd come to the end of the line. His reasoning? Read the whole thing, but here's his summary.

...Microsoft's current operating systems, XP and Windows 2003, do not depend on .NET; and with XP, .NET is an optional component. The next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, was released as a technical preview at the 2003 PDC, and it looked as if the operating system would have .NET's tendrils throughout. However, a lot has changed since then. ...I have a very cynical opinion of .NET. The framework has a lot of promise, but I think Microsoft was far too ambitious releasing far too many assemblies much too quickly. As a result design suffered [and]... we are stuck with the library we have... [.NET is] intended for users to develop applications, but not for Microsoft to create operating systems or the revenue generating products that they base their profits on...

In other words, Grimes posits that .NET is a sort of "development-lite" environment that carries a heavy run-time penalty (which, surprisingly, doesn't even come with the operating environment).

Dan Fernandez, Microsoft's Visual C# Product Manager, responded to Grimes' criticisms in his own blog entry. But I found the most compelling remarks in the comments on Fernandez' blog, not the blog post itself. Here's one that resonated with me, as a commercial software developer:

# .NET Distribution should not be a developer burden 3/7/2005 6:29 AM Mark Munz The fact that Microsoft has NOT pushed .NET frameworks onto Windows machines lends to the lack of credibility in Microsoft's claim that .NET is the future... client side deployment of the .NET framework is crucial. Not every app is going to be server-based... Putting the burden of redistributing the .NET framework on the application developers is unprofessional for an OS company. And fear of taking some flack for including the .NET framework in a SP has got to be the lamest excuse I have ever heard... So smaller developers are left telling their customers -- yes, our application is 1MB, but you have to download a 25MB framework first. That's right, you have to download and install a component that is 25 times the size of our application in order to use our application. The result, we -- the smaller developers -- are the ones who look unprofessional... The truth is that it is mainly Microsoft's own fault that .NET is not more widely used today.

Another heavy-duty software blogger, Mark Lucovsky, weighed in with some meaty remarks on the nature of shipping software.

Consider the .NET framework for a second. Suppose you wrote something innocent like a screen saver, written in C# based on the .NET framework. How would you as an ISV "ship your software"? You can't. Not unless you sign up to ship Microsoft's software as well. You see, the .NET Framework isn't widely deployed. It is present on a small fraction of machines in the world. Microsoft built the software, tested it, released it to manufacturing. They "shipped it", but it will take years for it to be deployed widely enough for you, the ISV to be able to take advantage of it. If you want to use .NET, you need to ship Microsoft's software for them. Isn't this an odd state of affairs? Microsoft is supposed to be the one that "knows how to ship software", but you are the one doing all the heavy lifting. You are the one that has to ship their software the last mile, install it on end user machines, ensure their machines still work after you perform this platform level surgery.

Exactly. Well put.

One of my current popular downloads (over 1.2 million copies downloaded) weighs in at under 700K and doesn't come burdened with a ginormous runtime.

.NET done right would utilize a lean, on-demand framework that could be loaded as needed, right off the network if available. In the meantime, I can't use .NET for client-side apps for the reasons specified above.
 

Monday, March 07, 2005

Fisking the Big Ten on the Hartzell Affair

Updated, scroll down to the bottom for Big Ten contact info.

Last Friday, the 4th, the Big Ten released an official statement on the Hartzell affair. Just to refresh your memory, University of Northern Iowa Athletic Director Rick Hartzell and Southern Illinois Trustee Ed Hightower officiated the crucial Indiana/Wisconsin game.

With an NCAA bid hanging in the balance for the bubble team (IU), Hartzell and Hightower laid the proverbial officiating egg. In other words, many of the calls appeared (to me at least) very, very odd. ESPN's announcers present at the game noted the poor calls and Doug Gottlieb, an analyst back at the studio, also made mention of the low quality of the officiating. He called into question the reasoning of the Big Ten in having two officials affiliated with or employed by bubble teams refereeing another bubble team's game. After all, a slot in the NCAA tournament is worth, quite literally, a fortune.

Let's put it in even simpler terms: when Kentucky fans complain that IU got hosed, you know something's going on.

So anyhow, a day after we unleashed a mini-blogswarm on the NCAA, the Big Ten Conference released its Offical Statement" on the matter.

Personally, I think the Big Ten exhibited all the sound judgment of Anna Nicole Smith at a Tijuana pharmacy. But let's just Fisk their statement properly, shall we? My comments are in bold.

The Big Ten has communicated its extreme disappointment and concern to ESPN's management relative to statements made by Mr. Doug Gottlieb at the halftime of Thursday's Purdue at Illinois basketball game on ESPN2. Specifically Mr. Gottlieb called into question the integrity of Mr. Rick Hartzell, an official in Tuesday's Indiana at Wisconsin basketball game, telecast by ESPN. Read the transcript (below): Mr. Gottlieb simply stated that there was the appearance of a conflict of interest. He neither impugned Hartzell's integrity nor called Hartzell names. He simply stated the obvious - an Athletic Director with a bubble team should in no way, shape or form be officiating another bubble team's game. It just looks bad. Period. In addition Mr. Gottlieb questioned the professionalism of Big Ten Associate Commissioner Rich Falk relative to the administration of the Big Ten's men's basketball officiating program. Again, read the transcript. Gottlieb questioned Falk's judgment. It is as accurate to say Gottlieb impugned Falk's professionalism than it is to say Gottlieb also closed Sportscenter that night by singing an aria from Puccini . Or is Falk, unbeknownst to us, some sort of higher being -- an officating deity, as it were -- who is beyond being questioned? Last time I checked, Falk was a human being, just as fallible as you and I. And therefore his judgment, especially in a matter such as this, can be questioned. Neither statement should have been made, and in our view these statements represent an example of irresponsible sports `reporting'. Both statements could and should have been made. Or does the Big Ten advocate stifling free speech, burning the U.S. Constitution and, with it, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights? I, for one, will not sit here while you bad-mouth the United States of America! (...everyone hum now .... hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm...) It is unfortunate that Mr. Gottlieb, whose own reputation for honest dealings has been called into question in the past, has been placed in the position by ESPN to pass judgment on a well-regarded, veteran official working a Big Ten basketball game, and a Big Ten associate commissioner who has rendered valuable service to the Conference and college basketball for decades. Ewww, nice cheap shot on Gottlieb. And a beautiful changeup that disregards the fact that both announcers at the game criticized some of the calls and that Gottlieb was not the only reporter questioning this odd situation. This sort of practice is bogus, plain and simple. Anyone with half a brain could recognize that putting a combo-A.D.-and-referee in such a position is as sound an idea as having MC Hammer manage your investments. The Big Ten Conference considers this matter concluded and will have no further comment. It's over when we say it's over. Next time try answering the questions raised: will the Big Ten (and for that matter, the NCAA) address this practice? Why would Rich Falk make such an officiating assigment? Surely there was an officiating team available whose members weren't employed by a University in contention for a bubble spot? Or did the other officiating squads call in sick? You know, I think I see another blogswarm on the horizon. TRANSCRIPT OF DOUG GOTTLIEB'S COMMENTS DURING HALFTIME OF ESPN2'S COVERAGE OF THE PURDUE-ILLINOIS GAME MARCH 3, 2005: "As we take you back to Tuesday night Indiana-Wisconsin it's obvious that there may not be a real clear cut, a clear cut bad call made on this particular play. But if you watch it there is the appearance that maybe there is a conflict of interest. You know, Indiana trailed by one and it looked like Wilkinson fouls on the play...Mike Wilkinson fouls on the play. Mike Davis obviously went nuts but Rick Hartzell was the official who was in position. And that conflict of interest or at least the appearance of the conflict of interest is apparent because Rick Hartzell is the athletic director at Northern Iowa. Now if he's the AD for a bubble team, why is he officiating a game involving another bubble team in a game that could cost Mike Davis his job, and could definitely cost Indiana a chance to play in the NCAA Tournament? I'm not saying there is a clear cut conflict of interest, but there is at least that appearance. And it lends the question, why is Rich Falk assigning him to a game in the Big Ten? He's the conference officials commissioner, and why is he assigning him to this game, and why wasn't a switch made at the last second so that there's never that appearance? When it was obviously at least to Steve Lavin, who was calling the game as the color man for ESPN. He said it was a bad call. I agree. It was a totally blown missed call. But now there the appearance of the conflict of interest because there's no call made and because he's the AD at Northern Iowa."

Big Ten Conference Statement

Update: Here's some contact information, which I believe is up-to-date. Please contact, politely, any of the parties below to ask them the salient questions. The non-statement they released is, in my opinion, completely insufficient in dealing with this issue.

Commissioner, James E. Delany (Email) Associate Commissioner, Rich Falk (Email) Director of Communications, Scott Chipman (Email) Associate Director of Communications, Robin Jentes (Email) Assistant Director of Communications, Jeff Smith (Email) Big Ten Conference 1500 West Higgins Road Park Ridge, IL 60068-6300 (847) 696-1010 Fax numbers: Comm. (847) 696-1110

For those of you bloggers out there, email me a link to your blog entry on this topic and I'll be glad to link to it. Anyone else, if you can get an answer out of the Big Ten, please email it to me and I'll be happy to post a summary.

Another Story Buried

The invaluable Arthur Chrenkoff notes the following story that's been buried by the mainstream media.

In the first substantial shift of public opinion in the Muslim world since the beginning of the United States' global war on terrorism, more people in the world's largest Muslim country now favor American efforts against terrorism than oppose them. This is just one of many dramatic findings of a new nationwide poll in Indonesia conducted February 1-6, 2005, and just translated and released... Key Findings of the Poll: - For the first time ever in a major Muslim nation, more people favor US-led efforts to fight terrorism than oppose them (40% to 36%). Importantly, those who oppose US efforts against terrorism have declined by half, from 72% in 2003 to just 36% today. - For the first time ever in a Muslim nation since 9/11, support for Osama Bin Laden has dropped significantly (58% favorable to just 23%). - 65% of Indonesians now are more favorable to the United States because of the American response to the tsunami, with the highest percentage among people under 30. - Indeed, 71% of the people who express confidence in Bin Laden are now more favorable to the United States because of American aid to tsunami victims.

Arthur Chrenkoff - World Media Buries Another Story
 

Sunday, March 06, 2005

10 Things I've Done You Probably Haven't

in recognition of Cowboy Bob's post, here are ten things I've done that most others probably haven't. Check out Cowboy Bob's post if you really want to feel inadequate. And feel free to add your own...

1. Proposed to my wife at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, a decision I've never regretted for a split-second
2. Watched the birth of my two daughters (first natural, second with epidural... both were very stressful for me... ;-)
3. Was fortunate enough to architect a best-selling software product, with plenty of brainpower supplied by Pete, Gerry, Cian Chambliss, Dave Delay, Terry Smith, and a host of others (product management provided by the inimitable Peter Mesnik)
4. Spent an unforgettable vacation with my wife and kids, watching a stunning sunset in Tortola and diving off a reef at Trunk Bay, St. John's
5. Got my nose broken and broke someone else's nose in the exact same instant going for a rebound in basketball (ouch!)
6. Ended a bizarre bar fight with one lucky punch
7. Got married, moved to a new city, and started a new job with an unfunded startup company... all within the period of thirty days
8. Jumped off a forty foot cliff at the quarries in Bloomington, Indiana featured in the movie Breaking Away (although it take many minutes to screw up enough courage to do so)
9. Took my two-year old daughter to the movie Beauty and the Beast without telling her what to expect... and watched her face light up with eyes as big as quarters when the movie started
10. Once emptied a 33-round magazine in less than 12 seconds using a baby Glock (G26)!
 

Saturday, March 05, 2005

Padilla, Civil Liberties, and the Left

Jose Padilla, a convicted felon and former Chicago gangbanger, was arrested in May of 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Padilla had been under surveillance for months, since he'd arrived at the U.S. Consulate in Pakistan asking for a replacement passport.

The State Department obliged but, intrigued, asked other agencies to investigate why a man named Padilla was hanging around in Karachi. Padilla (who also called himself 'Abdullah Al Muhajir') was then tracked by U.S. intelligence flying between Pakistan, Egypt and Switzerland. They also found that Padilla had met with senior al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There, he'd trained with the enemy studying such advanced topics as wiring of explosive devices and researching dispersion of radiological material.

U.S. officials added that Padilla's planned acts of sabotage were independently described by Abu Zubaydah, the most senior al Qaeda figure captured by U.S. authorities.

Padilla could be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant without being charged until the U.S.-declared war against terrorism ends, according to John McGinnis, professor of constitutional law at Northwestern Law School in Chicago. As the Bush Administration has argued, enemy combatants, even if U.S. citizens, are no more subject to criminal law than were Wehrmacht troops on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.

The history of 'enemy combatant' status lies in the tale of seven Nazi agents who came ashore in 1942. Their mission was simple: sabotage armament factories and railroads to the detriment of the American war effort. One soldier, a man named Haupt, was also a U.S. citizen.

The Nazis were quickly captured. President Roosevelt ordered them tried by military commission, but the detainees filed a petition of habeus corpus   to challenge their military detention using the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. Could the President arrest, detain, try and even execute such persons in the U.S. without involving the judiciary?

Unanimously, the Supreme Court ruled that indeed he could*:

...an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals...

In other words, saboteurs without uniforms were "enemy combatants" and therefore subject to military jurisdiction. Even Haupt, the U.S. citizen, could be so held. The Supreme Court noted:

...Citizens who... enter this country bent on hostile acts are enemy belligerents within the meaning of the Hague Convention and the law of war...

Despite the positions you've heard from pundits and TV's "judicial experts", the status of enemy combatant is not new. The U.S. Supreme Court has clearly delineated where combatant status begins and civilian law ends.

"If someone is a soldier, he is under the rules of war and needs to be treated as such," McGinnis adds. But "He [Padilla] is not necessarily a prisoner of war. He's an undeclared combatant, a saboteur ... aiming at civilian targets, and outside the protection of the Geneva Convention."

U.S. officials supplied evidence showing Padilla planned to harm U.S. interests and thereby transfered Padilla's case from the civilian to the military justice system. After receiving information from intelligence sources and recommendations from the Attorney General and Secretary of Defense, President Bush signed off on the decision to treat Padilla as an enemy combatant.

Hardly a system rife for abuse, the Padilla case has both legal and historical precedent leading all the way to the Supreme Court.

New Sisyphus: The U.K. and the U.S.: Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror

* Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 63 S.Ct. 51, 87 L.Ed. 7 (1942)
 

Friday, March 04, 2005

The China Syndrome

The story you are about to hear is true. The names of those involved have not been changed, due to the fact that I... didn't need to.

My good friend Gerry, who is the Managing Partner of Mindstorm Technologies in Boston, relayed the following delightful eBay buying experience.

He's owned a Sony Vaio for years, a slick and light laptop that exudes "cool". It sat, for months at a time, plugged into the AC outlet in the living room of his fourth-floor condo in Boston. It faithfully served as his Internet surfing device and, from time to time, a backup Windows development system.

Leaving a laptop plugged in continuously, for long periods of time, is problematic because pretty soon the battery is destined to die. And sure enough, when he went to use the Vaio unwired a few weeks ago, the battery was deader than Francisco Franco's grandma.

Using eBay, he found an inexpensive replacement battery, which thankfully arrived within a few days. That's odd, he thought as he opened the box: there were no Sony logos. Only a series of inscrutable Chinese characters along with a slapdash mailing label.

Placing the battery into the Vaio should have been easy. But, for some reason, it didn't seem to want to fit into its pre-ordained space. In fact, it proved downright difficult. Exerting way too much force, Gerry finally shoe-horned it into place using the strength and experience gained from opening over one thousand Miller Lites. Finally, he snapped it into place. Lo and behold, it worked! Everything was back to normal... or... so he thought.

It was then off to dinner for Gerry. A couple of hours later, after a satisfying hiatus at the neighborhood sushi bar, he unlocked his door. And heard a loud POP. Thinking someone was in his apartment, his pulse rate quickened. He looked around for something with which to arm himself. A 9-iron perhaps?

Suddenly he smelled burning! He snuck a glance into the living room only to spot his laptop spouting a large flame, directly from the keyboard. He ran over to the computer, simultaneously searching his field of vision for something with which to douse the fire. Another loud CRRAACK rang out - and flaming dollops of plastic sprayed in an eight-foot radius, thankfully not directly in his face.

Now, a dozen tiny fires were burning -- along with the kindling, I mean laptop. Flames were erupting on his walls, polished hardwood floors, even on the granite countertop.

He quickly stamped the small fires out. But the laptop still burned... IT STILL BURNED! He quickly tamped it out with a hand-towel and surveyed the damage. Floors... not good. Walls... not good either. The smell was overwhelming. He opened the bay windows in the living room to get some fresh, albeit quite cold, air circulating. As he turned back to the laptop, holy sh*t, the flames had erupted again!

He swatted it over and over until it ceased burning. And then he realized it was still plugged in! Pulling the cord out of the wall, he breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the fire was out. Other than the smell of burning plastic and various pockmarked surfaces, his condo had survived. He walked into the bathroom to use the facilities.

Moments later, after washing his hands, he exited the bathroom. For the love of... the laptop was on fire again! It was like the Exorcist, or maybe Nick Lachey on TV! It just kept coming back for more!

This time, the fire had engulfed the entire keyboard. The flames grew higher and higher. Gerry grabbed the laptop, extending his arms to keep the flames away, and ran to the window. He hurled the burning Vaio as far as he could. It arced from the condo, directly into a snow bank twenty feet away and four floors down. At last. The fire was out.

All he could think was, "thank goodness I wasn't actually using the laptop... on my lap... when it exploded."

Sony Vaio Laptop, fully loaded: $2730.
Cheap battery from eBay: $50.
Adrenaline-rush while battling flames in your condo: Priceless.
 

It's Hillary's World, We're Just Livin' in It

Here are latest updates on the '08 Hillary/Obama ticket, which I'm certain you've been awaiting with all the nail-biting anticipation of Tara Reid at the Oscars.

The IT Professionals Association of America is ticked at Hill:

Scott Kirwin, founder of the organization, states, “We are tired of Democrats pretending they care about the problems facing average Americans. Senator Clinton’s actions prove they clearly do not.” The ITPAA based its award on Indian press reports of Sen. Clinton supporting outsourcing and assuring political and business leaders in India that the US would not attempt to save the jobs lost. “Outsourcing will continue,” Clinton said in Delhi on Feb 28, according to a report by the Asia Times... “Her statements got little press here but were splashed all over the Indian media,” Kirwin says. “Does she think we aren’t going to find out about it?” Kirwin says that the India media is the best source of information about outsourcing and what he terms “labor dumping” – using immigration policies to dampen wages. Kirwin says the Senator’s position supporting outsourcing is nothing new. He noted that in March 2004 Clinton appeared on CNN’s Lou Dobbs show and criticized offshoring and the Bush administration support of the practice. Host of the program Lou Dobbs then pointed out that Clinton was closely allied with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an Indian offshoring giant which set up its US headquarters in upstate New York – an area Clinton represents...

John McCain doesn't believe Hill will ever be president:

...Sen. John McCain said Tuesday that he doubts Hillary Clinton can win enough votes nationwide to reclaim the White House in the next presidential race. "I don't believe that Senator Clinton will be president of the United States," McCain told the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes." The Arizona Republican offered the prediction after clarifying his remarks last week on "Meet the Press," where he said Sen. Clinton would make "a good president..."

Joe Biden thinks Hill will be the Democratic nominee in '08, as reported by Newsday's Joseph Dolman:

Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who may seek the nomination himself, sizing up Clinton last Sunday on "Meet the Press", "I think she is likely to be the nominee. She'd be the toughest person. And I think Hillary Clinton is able to be elected president of the United States." ...I mean, the Democrats know a thing or two about wretched judgment - from Al Gore's 2000 decision to run a populist campaign to John Kerry's 2004 decision to ignore the claptrap of the Swift-Boat veterans. And yet, at a time when the party must broaden its clout among tradition-minded voters or languish in the shadows indefinitely, some Democrats are looking to perhaps the most polarizing woman in the nation as their savior? ...But for all her hard work and mainstream values, she will face the challenge of a lifetime trying to live down her activist background. Every excess of the 1960s will be her burden to carry once the GOP strategists finish with her...

And Bill Clinton thinks his wife would make an excellent president.

...Bill Clinton declared during a visit to Japan that his wife "would make an excellent president". While saying he did not know if she would run, he added: "If she did run and she was able to win, she'd make a very, very good president. I think now she's at least as good as I was."

I take that to mean that Hillary would sell even more critical defense technology to enemies of the US, accept even more cash donations from suspect sources, allow innocents to be massacred while mingling at the President's Cup golf tournament, and perhaps even commit adultery in the White House.

And those hoping for a repeat of Clinton's boom by electing Hillary are grasping at straws.

Here's a news flash: the Y2K and Internet booms were products of (a) an anomalous, time-based event; and (b) the genius of web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, respectively. Clinton just happened to be in office when these two tidal forces washed over the US economy. Take away those two events and Bill Clinton's economic legacy would be far, far different.

Electing Hillary president would be akin to giving a drunken teenage boy keys to the Porsche. Way more things can go wrong than can possibly go right.
 

Thursday, March 03, 2005

NCAA Blogswarm

Having now seen the tape of the infamous IU/Wisconsin game, I'm really steamed. Despite an apparent conflict of interest, University of Northern Iowa Athletic Director Rick Hartzell and Southern Illinois Trustee Ed Hightower officiated the game. Many of the calls in the game, to put it mildly, stunk. Don't take my word for it, read what the Kentucky fans think (and they certainly have no love lost for IU).

Indiana, a bubble team, ended up losing the game on a series of (what seemed to me, at least) preposterous calls. Even ESPN's announcers mentioned the strange calls against IU. Just a coincidence? Perhaps, but here are the standings for Hartzell's and Hightower's two teams in the MVC, which also appear to be the very definitions of bubble teams:

Southern Illinois 15 3 - .833 25 6 .806 Wichita State 12 6 3 .667 19 8 .704 Northern Iowa 11 7 4 .611 21 9 .700

You may ask why two men -- whose schools have so much to gain by making the NCAA tournament -- are officiating a game involving another bubble team, the Indiana Hoosiers?

Good question. I have the same question. And I think it's one worth asking the NCAA about. Here's some contact information. Be polite and ask them about their policy of referees affiliated with or employed by Division I schools refereeing the games of other schools in direct competition for lucrative NCAA Tournament slots.

I've also included a couple of PR contacts at the NCAA: they can be asked whether the NCAA has reviewed this incident and whether this practice will be prohibited in the future.

Mailbox: Send a message to Division I Basketball Officiating Mailbox The National Collegiate Athletic Association 700 W. Washington Street P.O. Box 6222 Indianapolis, Indiana 46206-6222 Phone: 317/917-6222   Fax: 317/917-6888 Email: Div. I Mens Basketball Officiating Email: Erik Christianson, Director of Public and Media Relations Email: Gail Dent, Associate Director of Public and Media Relations

If you have a blog, please post an article about this practice. As of this writing, there is no mainstream media coverage of this incident or the apparent conflict of interest of this type of practice. And that's just not right, given the huge dollars attached to making the NCAA Tournament.
 

The Future of Blogging

The future of blog-related technologies is not a topic on which I've seen much speculation. As a heavy blogger over, lo, these many (16) months, I present some nebulous thoughts as to blogging directions over the coming months and years.

Blogpresence - first, I'd like to introduce the concept of Blogpresence. That is, a public face for a blogger's identity. Even when you're asleep, you're blogpresence "speaks" for you - even if it's just to say you're unavailable. Blogpresence is roughly equivalent to the instant messaging concept of buddy status. Buddies can put up away messages, or indicate that they're around but busy, or active. Blogpresence will provide a much richer version of buddy status. Implicit with status will come a concept of user identity. Anonymous users will not see as much information as trusted friends. Trusted friends, of course, will get to see additional information about the blogger (contact info, email address, etc.). In other words, blogpresence will morph to fit the user's identity.

Blogmessaging - building upon the concept of blog comments, blogmessaging will incorporate IM and text message into a blog. A trusted friend who wants to get a hold of you will visit your blog and punch a message directly into a text-box on the blog. A routing system will determine how best to deliver the message: via text-messaging, IM, voice-call, email, etc. Anonymous users will get the same message delivered, but only via a low-priority mechanism (say, email).

Blogalog - Amazon and other aggressive Internet retailers will soon embrace the concept of blogalogs, catalogs published by bloggers. If I read a book or listen to a CD, a toolbar add-in in Firefox will let me instantly create a blog entry or sidebar panel for it: link, image, affilliate tie-in (so I get credit for the sale), etc. A blogalog toolbar will make it much easier to pitch merchandise from my blog.

VoxBlogoli - is a term coined, I believe, by Hugh Hewitt that means "voice of the bloggers". Hugh organizes blogswarms on specific topics: say, filibustering of Supreme Court appointments. But VoxBlogoli could be organized by any influential blogger around virtually any topic: a potential conflict-of-interest by NCAA referees, what bloggers thought of the Superbowl commercials, etc. Of special interest to marketers, VoxBlogoli takes the pulse of the blogosphere quickly and efficiently.

Blogflow - based upon a concept I described in August of '04, blogflow is a workflow concept in which the blogger's inbox and outbox are partially made public (at least to trusted users). More useful in intranet situations, blogflow provides ad hoc workflow capabilities and, more importantly, visibility into work-processes that today are completely invisible.

Any other thoughts on future directions? Comments appreciated.
 

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Conflict of Interest

I'm an Indiana basketball fan having grown up in the era of Bob Knight. I happened to watch the IU - Wisconsin game last night and was shocked at the horrid officiating. Sure, it's easy to claim you get jobbed by the officials when the calls go against you. But what happens if the announcers notice it, too? And not just once or twice, but multiple times throughout the game. Is something more insidious at work?

Before I get to the conspiracy theory, I'll give you an example. AJ Ratliff is an Indiana freshman who took a runner in the lane during the second half and was literally pulverized. The ball went over the backboard... limbs slapping other limbs... and there was no call. On the other hand, Wisconsin's talented forward Dan Wilkinson, drove against Robert Vaden, lost control, and stumbled into him. The announcers thought it was a travel or an offensive foul. Nope. Foul on Vaden.

What's my point? Just some bad officiating? Check out this bizarre conflict of interest as noted on, of all places, a University of Kentucky message board.

Now I'm not a big conspiracy guy, but take a look at this quote from the Philadelphia Daily News: N is for Northern Iowa, which might be the first tournament school whose athletic director is an active referee (Rick Hartzell). So he won't be working any NIU games in the tournament, just as another elite official, Ed Hightower, won't be working any Southern Illinois games, seeing as how he is on the school's Board of Trustees. Both of the officials mentioned in this paragraph, Rick Hartzell and Ed Hightower, officiated last night's "must-win" Indiana-Wisconsin game. Both of their schools, Northern Iowa and So. Illinois, are bubble teams for at-large bids. Indiana is the definition of a bubble team. Can we say "conflict of interest"? Below is a link to the Hartzell's bio. UNI Athletic Director and Referee

This is an obvious, and completely unacceptable, conflict-of-interest. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars are riding on an NCAA bid... and the AD of a bubble team gets to officiate another bubble team's game.

And even ESPN's announcers noted the off-kilter officiating decisions.

CatsPause: Conflict of Interest

Hearts and Minds

Taranto notes the following contrast. The odds that any position Ted Kennedy takes will be proven wrong are about the same as those that William Hung will continue his "singing career". It's hard to argue with a series of miscalculations when you can still garner free PR.

"Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing--the hearts and minds of the people--and that is a battle we are not winning."--Ted Kennedy, Jan. 27 "Thousands of mostly black-clad Iraqis protested Tuesday outside a medical clinic where a suicide car bomber killed 125 people a day earlier, braving the threat of another attack as they waved clenched fists, condemned foreign fighters and chanted 'No to terrorism!' "--Associated Press, March 1 Interestingly, the text of Kennedy's infamous speech seems to have disappeared from his Web site; the above link is to the Yahoo cache. We guess it's a good sign that he no longer stands by the speech, but we'd think more highly of him if he actually owned up to his mistake. Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

WSJ: Taranto's Best of the Web
 

Bitter and Inane is No Way to Go Through Life, Son

The inane and bitter Richard Cohen spewed forth a few days ago and -- shockingly -- he wrote of the Democratic movement rustling through the Mideast:

...something momentous is stirring: democracy, freedom, independence. Something. Or, as an Arab acquaintance just e-mailed me from the region, "I can smell the winds of change in the air wherever I go." ...

A gracious and glowing concession to the Reaganesque moves of the administration? Of course not.

Given what's happening, it's understandable that many eyes have shifted to Washington with a new sense of appreciation. Could it be that the neocons were right and that the invasion of Iraq, the toppling of Hussein and the holding of elections will trigger a political chain reaction throughout the Arab world? It would be the Middle East equivalent of what happened in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union finally sank to its knees, took one last breath and crumbled. Maybe... some of us may be prematurely celebrating the changes in the Arab world, possibly mistaking them for what has happened in quite different places. No doubt... "something's coming" -- but, believe me, it may not be what we expect.

Ah, there's the Richard Cohen I know! He's back! Willing to spin any good news for the administration -- and, therefore, the United States -- into foreboding visions of disaster.

And not a mention of George W. Bush.

Yes, Richard Cohen's unblemished record of constipated analysis and failed prediction remains intact. Here's a gem from September, 2003, courtesy of American Thinker:

In diplomacy, in foreign affairs, in the waging of war and maybe in protecting America, he [Bush] has made mistake after mistake. Like Henry Ford II, he may never complain and he may never explain. But when you look back, there's still a wreck in the road.

Richard Cohen's predictions contain all the accuracy of Mizz Suzanne's Psychic Hotline, only without the snappy patter nor the Jamaican accent. I think it's high time someone graded Cohen on his litany of failures, although I'm pretty sure the pathetic number of online visits to his column would plainly indicate just how useless he is.

WaPo: The Inane and Bitter Richard Cohen
 

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

The Left's New Meme: Democracy in the Mideast? Just a coincidence!

Hugh Hewitt, once again, lays down a startling riff that should be required reading by everyone who votes. Including the felons and dead guys who apparently cast gubernatorial ballots recently in Washington state.

What gets Hugh started? The Left's new meme, starting with Ed Kilgore at TalkingPointsMemo, that the democracy movement in the Middle East has, well, absolutely nothing to do with President Bush! It's all a coincidence! Here's Kilgore:

...[it] never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment... Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders) that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

Hugh's retort eviscerates Kilgore, who has sufficient chutzpah to attempt to discredit Reagan's remarkable handling of the Cold War...

Here's Lech Walesa on Reagan: "When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989." As with the Poles, so with the Lebanese --they are putting their lives on the line to face down their oppressors. But American policy stands with them and encourages them, and pressures the dictators not to strike back, and threatens the tyrants if they do. The refusal to recognize that American policy does indeed have consequences is yet another exhibit in the huge array of arguments as to why Democrats cannot be trusted to run the nation's foreign policy --- they don't think it matters. Kilgore's dissmissiveness of presidential rhetoric --"as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment"-- isn't just a misguided slam at W, it is an admission of awesome ignorance of the power of the American president to shape a world through words, a failure of imagination and an admission of an inexperience with foreign affairs that makes you question his commentary on literally everything... If you don't understand the power of the presidency, then you and your candidates ought not to be trusted with it, for it will end up a replay of the Carter experiment with presidential "small ball," where resignation to events is the dominant theme, and America's enemies to set the tempo and most of the rules. Democrats have spent more than 15 years trying to deny Reagan his role in bringing down the Soviets. I suppose they will be trying to minimize Bush's role in introducing democracy to the Arab world for an even longer period of time. Both efforts ask the public to set aside the facts they have witnessed and watch the Michael Moore movie over here, with post viewing commentary provided by Howard Dean. It didn't work with Reagan and it won't work with Bush...

Hugh Hewitt: Reconnecting the Dots
 

Appeasement Redux

It's like a really bad horror movie where the mummy keeps getting back up, even though it's been shot, set afire, run over with a car, and pulverized with a wrecking ball. The Europeans, insistent on continuing down their path of self-destruction are willing to give the Mullahs yet another pass. Let's trade some airplanes for a promise not to build nukes!

Yes, the Mullahs are just the guys that you want to play patty-cake with, given their unceasing support for terrorists of all stripes (including Al Qaeda) and their prior promises to nuke Israel into molten rubble.

I certainly can't say I understand the administration's apparent willingness to embrace, even temporarily, a soft line on Iran. But it's always worth remembering that the US recently sold Israel $320 million worth of bombs, including 500 BLU-109 warheads, one-ton "bunker busters"that can penetrate five meters of reinforced concrete.

Trusting the Mullahs, the world's foremost sponsors of terror, is a phenomenally bad idea. It's kind of like inviting Dennis Rodman to house-sit over Spring Break. The only surprises you're going to get won't be good ones.

The governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency is in session this week in Vienna, and today it will review the latest batch of evidence concerning Iran's violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. These violations include: • Refusal to allow the IAEA to inspect all areas of the Parchin military site near Tehran, which the U.S. suspects is involved in illicit nuclear research. • Failure to disclose construction of a tunnel under the nuclear site of Isfahan. • The unresolved question of how weapons-grade uranium was detected on Iranian centrifuges. • A document describing technical assistance offers received from nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan dating back to 1987. Sounds bad. So what does the Administration intend to do?

WSJ: Carrots for the Mullahs - A surefire path to a nuclear Iran.