Firefox 3 is showing some very significant progress on the JavaScript/ECMAScript front. The nightly builds of Firefox 3, pre-Beta 4 have kicked both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 squarely in the pants, then doubled them over, and kicked them in the face like they were a football at the Superbowl. The optimized nightly build of Firefox 3 was almost ten times faster at completing the JavaScript benchmarks than IE 7! Even Opera was beaten by Firefox 3. The benchmarks are coy about whether or not Tamarin was included in the optimized build, but either way, those are some very serious improvements in Firefox.
I have not read the book yet (it's in the mail, but tied up with a backorder of The Irrational Atheist, so it'll come in a while from now), but one critique I have seen of Liberal Fascism that made me chuckle, then sigh in pain was one where the writer tried to argue that modern Left-Liberalism and Fascism cannot be tied together because they don't clearly have the same historic roots. As a code monkey, I can think of an obvious reason why this sort of thinking is bullshit. You have two systems that arrive at the same protocol through different means, one by studying the other. No one can empirically prove, with God's eye on the facts, how much American progressivism studied and borrowed from Fascism and National Socialism, but history has shown that it is reasonable to say "a lot." It doesn't matter whether or not these different political factions had somewhat different outcomes because in practice, their ideas, goals and cultures are similar enough to be compatible. Libertarianism and traditional conservatism are not at home with Italian Fascism, but "liberalism" most certainly is, and that becomes obvious when you compare notes between the two factions' platforms.
FreeBSD 7.0 is now available. For those of you itching to work on Unix, it's a good way to get into the swing of things. It's not as popular as Linux, but BSD and its derivatives are very good operating systems in their own right. One of the advantages of FreeBSD is that there is only one FreeBSD. It doesn't have distributions the way that Linux does. There are derivatives of FreeBSD, such as PC-BSD, but FreeBSD is FreeBSD. It's another good platform for doing server-related work ranging from file and print services, to web hosting.
Zero tolerance policies and the War on Drugs collide to bring us to a UK-level of stupidity when it comes to how students can now be treated. A weight-lifter was punished for bringing vitamins, yes, vitamins, to school.
One of the things that I have learned from being in a church small group is that the saying "you can't choose your family" applies to the spiritual side of things. Sometimes you get into a case where you want to fall back on the old habit of just treating them like they're a regular stranger, but they are, for better and for (often) worse, our brothers and sisters in a spiritual sense as well. Doesn't mean you have to cast your pearls before swine, but it does mean that you can't just write them off as though they're just another stranger and jerk.
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