April 2008 Archives

Just wait until this falls into the hands of a bunch of skript kiddies: 

Thank God we don't live in a society inspired by the Bible, otherwise we might have people being put away on mere accusations: 

I started my new job today. Obviously, I cannot name the company that I am now working for because of obvious reasons (like bloggers getting fired for doing that), but it does seem to be a good fit for me so far. They have a lot of work to do, something that was the exact opposite of where I came from, so that will be a welcome change of pace. I know, I know... famous last words, right? Well, when you have a hyperactive mind and are forced to sit in a cubicle for eight hours a day doing nothing but what you decide to do within the limits of company policy for nine months, it gets old, very... very fast.

Posted in Rachel's honor.

Just in case you had forgotten about it, the FBI and some members of Congress have brought back the issue of data retention policies. This comes on the heels of the FBI asking for a massive, unprecedented expansion of authority to conduct surveillance online. From the sounds of their proposal, it is something akin to the way that the NSA has been caught doing filtering at some of AT&T's offices in the past. It also comes at a time when it has been discovered that the FBI has routinely lied and broken the law in its use of National Security Letters. Yet somehow we are supposed to feel safe about how the FBI would use data retention legislation and an "omnibus surveillance mandate" when it comes to them obeying the law and constitution.

How problematic the data retention legislation will end up being depends entirely on the scope of it, obviously. Initially, I think it will cover a combination of DHCP transactions (how you get your IP address), all of the HTTP information describing what websites you are going to (though not the content of the sites themselves), and the plain text of email and IM conversations. Inevitably, it will get worse if the legislation goes through because some judge and/or politician will wake up to the realization that there are many protocols which are not being covered, and that a file name or URL is not often sufficient to prove anything other than intent.

If we get a data retention mandate, one of the expansions that I predict within ten years of enactment is broad regulation of how network protocols are designed. It'll probably bridge CALEA and whatever the mandate is called, requiring anyone who makes a new network protocol to make it thoroughly accessible to law enforcement. It's only a matter of time before that is needed because aside from some of the mainstays, protocols are a dime-a-dozen. If someone at the FBI figures out how to monitor one new network protocol where people don't want to be monitored, for whatever their reason, good or bad, someone will just modify it or create a new one. It is almost a given that, in order to make it enforceable, unless the government is uncharacteristically restrained, that it would evolve into a broader mandate that regulates software development and deployment extensively.

State laws apparently don't matter anymore when it comes to regulating the police. The SCOTUS just ruled that it is entirely acceptable for the government to introduce evidence that the police obtained while conducting a search that is illegal under state law, but otherwise constitutional. See, in Virginia, there are restrictions on the books about how far you can go in a traffic stop. The officer thought he had probable cause based on the person's behavior, even though state law said he couldn't search the man, and the SCOTUS upheld a state court saying that the 4th amendment and his probable cause argument overrode the state law.

A congressman wants to end the sale of Playboy on military bases. I'm sure our servicemen are going to just love his logic about why he feels justified in arguing that tax dollars are involved, when in fact the magazines are bought with private money at both ends of the transaction:

But Broun's spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved - "used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials," he said.

Super-sized waves that can sink ships! Once again, something that was snidely dismissed as rubbish by "the experts," without evidence, turns out to be true.

North Koreans found working at a Syrian reactor? Why am I not surprised?

Anyone use Twitter? I don't, but I found these two things to be pretty funny:

Got this screenshot blurb from this blog.

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), the first release of Ubuntu 8, just came out.

And what would a morning linkfest be without a good Youtube video? This series brought to you by my wife, who has an incredible knack for finding good content on Youtube.

30

H/T: Billiam.

Next week, I start my new job. The one thing that I am not really looking forward to is a return to Java Enterprise Edition development. While I've been on overhead for my current--and soon to be former!--employer, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of experimentation with Perl and JavaScript. My development environment for the stuff that I have built on my own in the last nine months has largely consisted of Apache web server, MySQL, Perl and a web browser. The memory footprint for that is around 100MB-200MB, and that's probably being liberal on the specs. Back at my previous group at my employer, where I did Java EE development, my developer laptop frequently had 1.5GB-1.6GB of memory allocated for all of the "enterprise software" that it had to run to simulate a development environment. If it isn't the size of the Enterprise, it doesn't belong in your enterprise, you might say...

Rachel and I have an Apple TV in the mail. It's one of the new 160GB models, and we got it for over 50% off. How? We used up most of our rewards points with MyPoints. I can't wait for it to get here. I ripped about a hundred DVDs and converted them to fit on my iPod Touch, and will be able to transfer them to the Apple TV.

One feature that Apple hasn't put into their iPod/Apple TV/iTunes software is the ability to tell devices to swap content. It'd be less of an issue if these devices had expandable storage, but in the mean time, it'd be cool to be able to sync your iPod and Apple TV to your PC or Mac, and tell iTunes to swap a few dozen movies from your Apple TV to your machine in exchange for new ones, and then to swap out some of the ones on your iPod in a similar manner.

One last thing. I tried out the new template module caching feature in Beta 3 of Movable Type 4.15, and it is rock solid for performance improvements. When turned on for the header, footer and sidebar modules, it took about four and a half minutes to rebuild about 1,200 posts.

I will never understand how the buffoons that run Red State got the audience that they do because whenever they talk about anything related to the Internet they sound like raving lunatics:

Google and Lessig believe that intellectual property rights should be curtailed and internet providers should be forced to allow anyone and everyone to use their networks.
While Google is pushing net neutrality and blaspheming Christ, Google is also censoring Christians online. As I document here, Google has censored a pro-life group online. Google has also been sued for anti-Christian discrimination in the United Kingdom.
Of course, while Google is happy to censor Christians while denigrating Christ, Google has gone out of its way to censor content that might offend muslims.
Google should have no right to demand open access to your internet while censoring and denigrating Christians on its network. And the Senate should not give Larry Lessig a platform to advocate Google's position while Google behaves in that manner.
Call the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee and tell them you find it disgraceful that Google could advocate an open internet while censoring Christians and laughing while Larry Lessig denigrates Christ. The number is 202-224-5115.

Erick Erickson apparently doesn't know the first thing about what the network neutrality debate is even over in the first place. It is about the ability of ISPs and telecoms to throttle the bandwidth that their customers pay for for certain protocols and service providers, such as Google. Network neutrality advocates don't believe that your ISP should be allowed to sell their services as real broadband Internet access while telling companies like Google and Apple that they won't get to access the customers at the speeds that are advertised for the Internet access. How would you like to subscribe to DSL, FiOS or cable, only to find out that your provider was extorting the companies you want to buy from: "pay us for the privilege of accessing our users (who happen to be your customers) or you won't get to send them data at the speeds that they are expecting based on what we claim to be selling them."

That, is what Erickson is conflating with Google's censorship. Now, in all fairness, Google's censorship habits are troubling, but they are not particularly relevant to the issue of network neutrality. In fact, if network neutrality is entirely abandoned, it would be even harder for new popular websites and service providers to get access to broadband Internet users because of the stunts that ISPs and telecoms would be allowed to pull on their users.

And... it gets worse:

Tomorrow, Lawrence Lessig will testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on the future of the internet. Lessig will do Google's bidding and suggest that the net neutrality doctrine should be legislated to force companies that provide the connection to your home to give everyone access for free. It sounds great until you start thinking about all the freeloaders. I too supported net neutrality in principle until realizing just how far left groups like Google want to push it -- eradicating privacy along the way. But, while Google wants open access to your broadband connection, they themselves want to censor pro-lifers and Christians from Google's own network.

Those freeloaders are the customers of broadband ISPs. Why should we get all-we-can-use bandwidth? Do we get that with cell phone minutes? Electricity? Water? Gas? I have a great idea. I am going to start a business where I let you buy a monthly "unlimited gasoline account" and then bill every car company in America because some people consume way more gasoline than I expected to be reasonable under this business model. Damn corporate freeloaders, Ford, GM, Toyota and Honda. Who do they think they are expecting to not have to pay a royalty to me for access to my customers?!

You may also remember Erick from his diseased rantings about how there was a pinko commie conspiracy to deny RedState the support that it wanted for the software it didn't have to pay for.

Not knowing much about evolution is the least of the average American student's worries:

[Expelled] is simply an anti-science propaganda film aimed at creating controversy where none exists, while promoting poor science education that can and will severely handicap American students.

I was not aware that there were any serious jobs outside of academic biology that required a thorough understanding of evolution in order for Americans to perform them. Clearly, piss poor science education on topics of such daily, professional importance as the big bang and evolution are the culprits behind the dearth of Americans in engineering fields and the hard sciences. Silly me, I would have put the blame on the way that public schools largely waste students' time, and tend to be run by educational and intellectual half-wits whose claim to being a professional teacher is at best usually based on a degree in education and a minor in their subject area.

Clearly the solution to making up for all of the damage that has been done to the educational process is to make American students learn evolution dogma like a secular catechism. Given the lack of critical thinking skills so present among them today, that's about the best that can be expected of the average student who is to freed from their "handicap."

A Morton Middle School eighth-grader faces felony charges after putting crumbled peanut butter cookies in the lunch box of another student with a severe allergy to peanuts.

The allergic student, another eighth-grader, did not eat the cookies and did not suffer a reaction.

However, even trace amounts of peanut oil can cause severe reactions and even death. Symptoms can include hives, welts and swelling that can restrict airways. Earlier this month, it was reported that a 13-year-old boy died in Australia at a school camp due to an allergic reaction to peanuts.

It's amazing that I have gotten anything done this week with what has happened at work, the highlight of which was being told by my manager to commit time card fraud by changing time I worked from our overhead charge code to holiday hours. Human Resources, naturally, takes exception to this which worked out for me because when I was done talking to them about what to do here, I was basically given carte blanche to just sit at my desk for eight hours a day, doing my own thing if no one needed me to work for them. That's one advantage to working in this line of work. Time card fraud is so serious of an ethical lapse in this line of work that a company will immediately go into damage control the moment a junior employee says that he or she was instructed to commit time card fraud. While my manager has enough tenture to be possibly shielded from this particular incident, Human Resources will henceforth be very prejudiced toward him in the future should a similar situation arise ;)

I know that some of you have gotten into messing around a bit with HTML and such, which is why I recommend checking out JQuery. I know I've posted on it in the past, but lately I've gotten more and more impressed with how powerful it is for manipulating web pages. And it is very natural in how it does that too! Let's say that you have a list that looks like this:

• Link
• Link
• Link
• Link
• Link

Try the fader.

If you wanted to go through that and a fade-in animation and add a number next to "Link" it'd look like this:

function doFade()
{
    $("li.feedlink").each(function(index) {
        $(this).hide();
        $($(this).children()[0]).html( $($(this).children()[0]).html() + " " + index);
        $(this).fadeIn(2000, undefined);
    });
}

What this means in, English, is:

-For each list item (li) of class "feedlink,"
-Hide it
-Get the child nodes (the link inside), and set the inner html of the link (what's between the open and enclosing <a> tags) to be the existing content plus the variable index which is the current position in the loop.
-Fade in the current list item over the course of 2,000 miliseconds, and undefined is used instead of a reference to a JavaScript function call that would be called when the fade-in is completed.

$() is a wrapper that JQuery provides for just about everything you could want with JavaScript and HTML. You put in HTML or DOM nodes, and it will allow you to work JQuery's voodoo on that. Heck, if you wanted to add a new list item after every iteration through that aforementioned sequence, you would juse use $("<li class='feedlink'><a href='#'>Another Link</a></li>").insertAfter(this); JQuery In Action is a great reference source for JQuery, and I highly recommend anyone who likes to do web-related stuff to pick up a copy of it.

This story about half of the cops in one small town in Utah are polygamists made me laugh because once again, it shows the internal contradictions of modern liberal America. The worst that these cops can be charged with is illegally having two or more marriage licenses and having sex with teenage girls (who, ironically enough, are probably old enough to executed as adults should they ever kill someone in cold blood). Really, the polygamy angle is just not that big of a deal unless you look at it from a matter of religious morality, and even there polygamy itself is not particularly morally wrong.

Really, the way to go here if you are going to practice polygyny or polyandry is to find a sympathetic pastor or priest and get them to do an unlicensed marriage ceremony with someone who is at least 18 years of age. Society only seems to get upset when marriages and licenses are at issue, not when a guy decides to shack up with several women at once outside of marriage. Consistency is, after all, not something that modern liberal America is known for in explaining how things ought to be done.

That private citizens can be conscripted to work for the benefit of those they do not want to work for is the natural conclusion of the attacks on freedom of association that have been the pride and joy of the left's "anti-discrimination" politics. I am starting to agree more and more with the sort of attack made here on modern liberal society that liberalism, at least as it currently exists, contains the seeds of its own self-destruction through the contradictions that are inherent to its opposing goals. It's only natural that civil rights become meaningless in this sort of context. You cannot allow a person to be free to be themselves, when you have other goals like fighting racism and discrimination that may need to trump individual desires and self-determination. To the liberal, it is only fair that a photographer be forced against her will to work for a client that she doesn't want to work for, lest some homosexual couple, somewhere, be denied the freedom to choose any photographer they want (ignoring the irony of the total deprivation of freedom to the photographer).

But what really matters here is that some faggot will get the photographer of her choice, even if it means that the photographer's labor has to be all but seized by eminent domain to make it happen. In happy, tolerant, magical liberalland, it's not slavery when someone is forced to work for someone else's benefits for the "right reasons."

I haven't heard of a more Orwellian name for a crime than this one in a long time. I understand and agree with providing a more severe punishment for being a peeping tom toward children, but seriously, this particular law goes over the deep end as Dr. Helen notes.

It sounds incredibly familiar:

Let me give you an example of the professional man who keeps other men down. If you work in - or are involved in - academia, you will know what I mean. There are a number of older guys, in their sixties or so, who worked with the civil rights movement and considered this their heyday. They are now full professors who pride themselves on helping women and minorities get ahead. They come into every faculty meeting harping about the need to give a step-up to the women in the department or they demand that a minority be hired for some position, meanwhile overlooking the qualified men who should also be in the running. You, the young, untenured guy in the department, often wonder why this deadwood won't step down if he cares so much - and give up his much-coveted chair to some minority. But no such luck, the guy is reveling in his position and perks, all the while demanding that men like you give up the right to theirs. You realize that if this traitor was looking to get hired as tenured faculty today, he might not stand a chance. Does this sound all too familiar?

This phenomenon is no different from the tendency of liberals to give less money away to charity than conservatives. the majority of the left-wing edifice is built on taking the personal and abstracting it away into a social issue. Rather than personally take up the charge to feed and clothe the poor, they will insist on creating a government program and paying more in taxes. That is easier than having to change budgets and then find good charities and support their efforts. It's better that they "enable someone else," usually a "professional," to do that work for them.

They may say that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but those are cheap words when the hypocrisy is coming from someone who not only has the ability to make or break your career, but is unashamed of their own hypocrisy.

The local government of Philadelphia is about to not only openly break the law, but charge its police force with breaking the law:

Mayor Nutter likened himself and City Council members yesterday to the band of rebels who formed this country as he signed five new gun-control laws that defy the state legislature and legal precedent.

"Almost 232 years ago, a group of concerned Americans took matters in their own hands and did what they needed to do by declaring that the time had come for a change," Nutter said as he signed the bills in front of a table of confiscated weapons outside the police evidence room in City Hall.

"We are going to make ourselves independent of the violence that's been taking place in this city for far too long," he said.

The five laws - called everything from unconstitutional to criminal by critics - do the following:

Limit handgun purchases to one a month.

Require lost or stolen firearms to be reported to police within 24 hours.

Prohibit individuals under protection-from-abuse orders from possessing guns if ordered by the court.

Allow removal of firearms from "persons posing a risk of imminent personal injury" to themselves or others.

Outlaw the possession and sale of certain assault weapons.

Nutter said he would begin to enforce the laws immediately, with the exception of the one-gun-a-month requirement, which takes effect in six months.

He and Council are in for a fight, however. The city has tried and failed for three decades to buck the 1974 state law that reserves gun regulation to the state legislature. The state's preeminence appeared to be cemented in a 1996 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the legislature to prevent Philadelphia and Pittsburgh from enacting local gun laws.

These laws are on their face illegal in the state of Pennsylvania, as the state of Pennyslvania has declared that no local government will enact laws that regulate the ownership and use of firearms. To put it mildly, it is not logically possible for a police officer to argue that they are acting under the color of authority by enforcing the local ordinance because the state legislature has passed laws which explicitly declare that ordinances of those nature have no legitimacy in the state.

So, if you are a police officer, what do you do? Do you do what your superiors tell you to do, and enforce a law that you know that the state government has said is not legally valid, or do you stand down? I'm going to guess that as is often the case, that if and when these laws go into effect, that the police will largely robotically enforce them despite the lack of legitimacy under state law. After all, the police are there to enforce the dictates of their jurisdiction, right or wrong, these days.

Now, it's easy to say that it's the fault of the politicians that these laws may get enforced before being ripped apart by the state government, but not so fast. If the Police Chief were to openly come out and say that he would order his officers to stand down and not enforce these laws because they are illegal on their face, that sort of lawful and open defiance would do wonders to curb the enthusiasm of these lawless, petty elected, would-be tyrants.

The fact of the matter is that the local government cannot pass laws which go against the state, and cannot expect mercy when the law-abiding public fights back. I would feel no pity for any cop who gets hurt enforcing these laws, anymore than I would feel pity for one who gets hurt enforcing an eminent domain property seizure that is in violation of the state and federal law. When you break the law, you're a law breaker. If you break the law while armed, you are an armed and dangerous law breaker. Doesn't matter which side of the public-government divide you are on.

H/T: Alphecca

There are many, many things I find dubious about the practice of parents homeschooling their children. I wonder how a mother or father who has not been educated as a teacher, who in many cases has not even been to college her/himself, can possibly provide their child with as good an education as students receive in our much-maligned public schools. And I can´t help but think that these homeschool students, of whom there are several million in the United States, are being robbed of a crucial formative experience by not attending school with other people their age and being forced to interact with a diverse group of peers.

There is a certain breed of bureaucratic worker that has an amoral, slavish devotion to policy and their own power as a bureaucrat. These immigration officials happen to be classic examples of that sort of bureaucrat. Just read the whole story about how unnecessary it was for this baby to die.

If white boys had said and done these things, no one would dare defend them or even try to minimize what they had done for reasony:

It was an assignment for history class--to make a protest sign for or against an issue, and Melanie said she chose illegal immigration. Her sign read, "If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration." Somehow, Melanie said the sign got passed around lunch and angered a group of Latino students.

"I didn't know any of these people," she said. One young, she claimed, jumped on her back and he put her in a choke hold. "We have brick walls in the middle school and he slammed my face on the bricks."

Melanie said a group of boys also threatened to rape and kill her. Eventually, the boys let her go and when she went for help, she was ordered back to class, and told she could not call her parents, she said.

Yes, these boys and the many other immigrant hispanics like them, are going to integrate just fine into a culture that holds freedom of speech as a cultural value. I suppose we could just expand the concept of freedom of speech a little more by adding violent gang beatings of girls for expressing an opinion in class they didn't like as a form of artistic expression, but the natural result of that is that every serial killer would pose as an artiste protected by the first amendment.

I've had women of all races complain to me about how they've been treated by immigrant hispanic men here in Northern Virginia. White, asian, black, hispanics (light-skinned puerto ricans), all the same. If this isn't a cultural issue, why is it that these women of such diverse backgrounds, including other native-born hispanic women, are wary of going where immigrant hispanic men congregate around here? Nah, it couldn't possibly be because this sort of behavior, and lesser forms of it, are far more common among the immigrant groups than yuppie scum white liberals and libertarians want to admit.

It's bad enough that this bear actually behaved like a predator (I know, what was he thinking, right?), now we face the prospect of bear crap run off tainting Germany's pristine environment!

Germany's celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors.

Critics say Berlin Zoo should not have put live fish inside Knut's enclosure. But German media report that the carp were put there to eat up algae.

There is speculation that hand-reared Knut killed the carp just for fun.

According to the German media, he "senselessly murdered the carp." Huh. A predatory species not showing a high level of respect for its prey like a Hollywood American Indian who just shot a dear? Good heavens, what is this world coming to? Next thing you know, cats will toy with mice for amusement before killing them, and dogs will start going around killing anything small and furry that they can get their teeth and claws on! See America, this is what happens when you play way too many violent video games in front of your pets and wildlife!

Any day now we can probably expect German environmentalists to start worrying about the effects of allowing bears an unfettered right to shit in the woods will have on Germany's water supply...

This article at Popular Mechanics is a good demonstration of the way that modern government has really lost its priorities. The sites featured in the article that need to be repaired are just the tip of the iceberg of infrastructure that needs repairs. For too long, government all across the country has wasted lot's of money on fluff like social welfare spending and useless police programs like the war on drugs (not to mention the pork and fraud, waste and abuse). We see the results of this at the federal level readily by the way that Congress just flat out ignores the fact that our payments on the interest of the national debt are roughly equal to about half of the defense budget, and all of that happens while the federal government keeps committing itself to more expenses.

One of the real downsides to modern government is the fact that it is as fickle and attentive to important detail as the public. Most people don't really care about infrastructure unless planes are flying into one another, or their cars are getting swallowed up by potholes. I don't know what the solution to this is or if there even is a solution to it, but I suspect that once again, the American people will get the government that they deserve.

As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that certain social curmudgeon positions such as prohibiting women from serving in the military. I know, I know, saying that women shouldn't be allowed to do something that men can do is sexist (I feel like gagging now that I've said that), but it's for the best for a significant number of women who are serving and who would serve in some capacity. The fact is, when you teach a man to go against everything that society has taught him about murder in order to make him about to go into battle and kill the enemy, you often are just weakening one aspect of his moral compass. In a lot of cases, the entire edifice ends up getting cracked in the process. This is the way it always has been, and the way it always will be, for the men who go into battle for their country.

The sort of thinking that has lead people to want a "kinder, gentler" military is the downside to America having not been invaded by a foreign power since 1812. Our country has had the luxury of avoiding real wartime hardships like having cities razed to the ground, our bread basket turned into a wasteland, our economy looted and all that sort of nastiness that is common to war everywhere else. A real military's purpose is to kill people and break things. You just don't create an institution that has that sort of mission statement and then act surprised when its members from time to time do anti-social things which are less extreme than killing people or breaking things. It's like wondering why your guard dog isn't good with kids.

Y'all know that I don't ever ask for prayers lightly. However, lately Rachel has been having some health problems related to high blood pressure. She could really use prayers right now. She's got a doctor's appointment for this Thursday, and we're hoping it's just work-related, but we'll find out if it is something more than that hopefully that afternoon.

**UPDATE**: I just logged into Rachel's blog and found out that my comments are indeed being marked as spam by Akismet (WordPress' default spam filter). Those of you who use WordPress, please go through your spam filters and mark my comments as "not-spam" in WordPress so that Akismet can hopefully get some reports that those comments are not spam.

In my opinion, part of the problem with the housing crisis stems from how housing is taxed. The property tax is stupid and regressive. Not only is it a slap in the face to freedom (you're paying the government for the "privilege" of owning your house), it's just flat out evil to those who fall on hard times. It's bad enough they get sick, injured, lose their job, etc. Now they risk losing their home due to not being able to pay taxes on it. A better system would be to make people pay sales tax on their house when they buy it. You could either do a 5% tax on anything below a million dollars (many "normal" houses in Northern Virginia cost closing in on $700K-$1M) with a tax of 10% on anything over $1M or just a flat 7.5% tax on all house sales. That tax would encourage more conservative housing decisions, and discourage speculation, all without any additional regulations.

Seems some people are finding out that the blogging rat race is just not worth it. The amount of work that has to be done to keep a top blog is just not worth it for most people. I know it's not worth it for me. I have a full time job, a wife and other interests besides blogging. I think the main reason that the political bloggers haven't been affected by this is because they just don't have to work very hard compared to the tech bloggers. Tech blogging is closer to the traditional rapid-fire pace of professional journalism than the more opinion-centric political blogosphere.

The power and danger of open source software. If you thought that Linux and OpenOffice pose a risk to Microsoft, you haven't seen anything yet with Asterick. It's a powerful program that lets companies replace most of their internal phone back-end infrastructure with a few commodity PCs to handle all of the details behind the scenes. As Forbes puts it, it's poised to bring the $7B market for phone infrastructure hardware crashing down. All I can say is... who needs antitrust these days?

Lastly, most Movable Type users probably know by now that the Privacy plugin was broken with the release of Movable Type 4.1. Since Arvind seems to be busy with school, I'm in the process of taking a stab at fixing the bugs that are preventing it from working on 4.1. I've got a few of them fixed now, but it's going to be a slow and arduous process if it works out because it's a complicated plugin (it gives users A LOT of options for managing authentication and authorization).

This comment to Mike Davidson's post on leaving Movable Type cracked me up because aside from the estimate that WP can use up to 100MB per request service (come on, even PHP deserves more respect than that!), I think it addresses many of my grievances with dynamic publishing of content. The very fact that so many of those sites that are listed that use dynamic publishing have to have extensive caching systems in place is sort of a kick in the pants to the whole argument that dynamic publishing is such a great idea. The system that works out best is a hybrid of dynamic and static. Let's face it, a content cache by nature is not dynamic so don't even go there.

Now that Movable Type will be integrating some serious caching capabilities with version 4.15, it'll be interesting to see how this debate goes forward. The lack of caching so far has been the real bottleneck for Movable Type when it has to rebuild a page.

One thing is for certain, and that's that WordPress is prone to serious performance problems without the caching plugins. Problems that end up being fatal under moderate pressure. One user retorted that his blog handled a 3,000 hit assault from Digg, to which I could only respond: what do you want, a cookie? Any vanilla installation of Movable Type could handle that without breaking a sweat unless half of those users were posting comments in rapid succession.

Lastly, as I have said in the past, one of the breaks that WordPress gets on performance that Movable Type does not, is that its interpreter, PHP (vs Perl for Movable Type) is an Apache module by default on shared hosts. As such, there isn't as much overhead in getting the ball rolling when a PHP page has to be processed as there is when the Perl interpreter has to be loaded from the file system to process Movable Type's code. I suspect that if caching and mod_perl were used in a standalone environment that the WordPress fanboys wouldn't be crowing nearly as much about performance.

The Kangaroo Courts of Canada have gotten in on the act as well:

When Mr. Steacy began posting messages on hate sites as "jadewarr," he was sufficiently Internet savvy not to leave any ISP information that could be traced back to the CHRC. He didn't want Marc Lemire looking at his server logs and noticing any unusual interest from anything ending in "gc.ca." So Mr. Steacy disconnected himself from the office Internet, and looked around for alternative wireless connections. He found one belonging to a young lady whose apartment is a block away from CHRC headquarters in Ottawa. Without obtaining a warrant, he connected to her server, and in effect used her as his cover for his "jadewarr" postings. Last week, a representative from Bell Canada named the lady in open court, since when her name has been reported in the newspapers. Let's say in 10 years' time, this woman applies for a job in, oh, Sarnia or Moose Jaw or Des Moines, and her prospective employer decides to Google her name, and what comes up is all very complicated and hard to follow but she seems to have something to do with some white supremacist investigation back in 2008.

I don't care which country you live in or come from. One of the universal truths about government is that when a part of the government breaks the law or does something unethical for "good reasons," it is almost always going to be let off the hook by the other parts of the government that should be holding it accountable. It only gets worse when you have a system that is for all intents and purposes outside of the normal legal system like the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

All things considered, it is also ironic that a "liberal country" like Canada has a branch of its government whose mission is essentially the same in spirit as the mutaween of Saudi Arabia. Like the mutaween, they are charged with shutting down activities which present no clear and present danger to anyone's safety, and are just little more than moral lapses on the part of the offender. They also have sweeping powers to just screw with people who they accuse of said lapses.

Some much for all of that egalitarian rhetoric from left-wing Democrats. Source.