8 entries filed this month:
Quote of the day:
“Keeping crude oil below $70 is all very well, but in political terms it is a useless achievement if you cannot also keep gasoline below $100,” said Barclays Capital. “There is an energy crisis, and it is likely to get worse before it gets better.”
Yuri has updated python-markdown once more, now sporting extensible construction and adds attribute functionality along side the footnote capability (yes!), all of which I probably would have remained ignorant of unless I’d seen this note on ogbuji.net and backtracked.
This isn’t really a dig at Dave Winer, really:
Last week I found myself in a new apartment, a permanent address at last, and a laptop that’s so riddled with spyware as to be unusable. While watching Katrina on CNN and MSNBC, I ran all the spyware removal tools I had, they’re known to work, but then I couldn’t bring myself to launch MSIE, because that’s how the spyware comes back. Then I had an epiphany. I didn’t use Firefox on this computer in the past because it was so strange, so different from MSIE as to be jarring Dave Winer, Easing into Firefox
What? Jarring???
IE has an address bar, Firefox has an address bar – check. IE stores book marks, has history, and so does Firefox – check. Both allow you to browse web sites.
But IE has hidden, extra special features one might miss. For example, IE allows malicious websites to continually infect your computer – while you use the tool normally, and does so even for someone like Dave who has his wits about him – check.
You’ll miss out of most of this pain with Firefox, and that could be jarring for some. Firefox one does a terrific job at isolating users, even smart users, from the worst nasties of the web – check.
For that simple reason alone (forget all the other great features of Firefox including tabbed browsing, the search bar, shortcuts, Grease Monkey, etc) folks like Dave who know what they are doing, or like my Mom (switched!) who doesn’t, should have switched eons ago.
Dave, you didn’t have an epiphany, you just decided to get with the program. We can guess, perhaps incorrectly, that you’d have done it earlier but a form of not invented here kept you from following the crowd. In this case, the crowd had the epiphany, well over a year ago. Welcome to the party.
Here’s the real point of this note: if smart, influential, people like Dave Winer are willing to put up with a piece of crap bit of software (Microsoft Internet Explorer), what hope do software consumers have of seeing better, safer, applications?
Its simply too bad that Dave didn’t use his position of influence to perhaps swing the folks at Microsoft over, earlier. They are well along the way, no thanks to Dave on that one, through the efforts of the web standards community (another group which Dave rather actively fought early on) and from designers who just got fed up with dealing with Microsoft.
At any rate, progress is good, even if late.
The strangest things show up in my news aggregator. Today, in Tehran Times:
TEHRAN (IRNA)—Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi on Saturday condemned Canadian justice system for acquitting a policeman who killed Iranian national Keyvan Tabesh in Vancouver in 2003.
Tabesh, 18, Iranian national residing in Canada, was shot and killed instantly on July 23, 2003 by the Vancouver policeman.
Asefi described the court decision clearing the policeman as “travesty of justice”.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed Canadian court decision to clear policeman as unfair motivated by political considerations.
“The Iranian government would take legal action against Canada to ensure fair trial of the policeman who killed the Iranian national in cold blood,” Asefi said. More >
Iranians reading that news item with no context do not get the full or truthful picture.
The family of Keyvan Tabesh, a young Iranian shot and killed by a Port Moody police officer on 14 July, expressed shock at the attitude of the Iranian government trying to use the incident as a mean to cover up the death of Ms. Zahra Kazemi, the 54 years-old Iranian-Canadian photojournalist. Iran Press Service – More>
Ken Taylor, of US Iranian hostage fame oh so long ago:
Ken Taylor, a former Canadian ambassador to Tehran between 1979 and 1980, said the Iranian government’s call for transparency is “outrageous”. “It’s total mischief and absolute nonsense to try and link the two cases together”, said Taylor, adding “It weakens their own case by taking this step”.
Local Iranians speak out:
Pari Saâidi, a spokeswoman with the Iranian-Canadian Community of Western Canada, said the Iranian government’s comments are in direct retaliation for the Canadian government’s demand for answers in Zahra Kazemi’s death. “This is bullying and the Canadian government should not buy it. They’re covering their crime. Whatever happened here will be thoroughly investigated”, she said Thursday.
The death of Tabesh was tragic, yes. He apparently suffered from depression, and threatened a police officer with a machete and was killed
Tuesday, we learned that the young Port Moody man gunned down by a police officer two years ago had spent time in a mental institution just three months before he was killed. Keyvan Tabesh was shot to death by a plainclothes officer on July 14th, two years ago. The officer said Tabesh was running at him, weilding this machete. [The incident began as] earlier that night Tabesh had used his machete to attack two women in a car. More >
Iran continues to play games and hide its culpability in the death of a Canadian national at the hands of government sponsored torturers.
Supposedly Conservatives are all destined to hate the Mother Corp. I don’t.
I miss it, but knew I would, as I’m not an angry frustrated conservative who believes the CBC, and all other so-called “mainstream media” (the infamous MSM), are out to get my party or politics.
I was pleasantly surprised to find conservative-leaning Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente – Who needs the CBC anyway? Um, I guess I do misses intelligent broadcasting.
Good friends, good conservative friends, with which I share many ideas on policy often claim they’d love to dismantle the CBC, but privately I think some of them would agree with Wente, and me, that ’life without the CBC is a big wasteland’.
The CBC is pitched to people with a flicker of interest in the world and an IQ above room temperature, which automatically excludes a good half the population. It’s supposed to be specialty programming. It specializes in Canada. No private broadcaster will ever do that. As for ratings—well, if you want to find out where the hustle for ratings leads, just check out CNN. In between natural disasters, CNN is runaway brides from end to end.
Its true. There’s precious little to turn to for television news – we can have CTV pick up on ridiculous Friday File stories when there are items of bigger import that go begging for coverage. Forget trying to find any serious documentary or investigative journalism on the tube when the CBC is off air. Radio? A mixed bag; very regional. Occasional flashes of light here and there depending on the show anchors but trending to the US style – angry men, and the occasional women, harping on a subject over and over – propaganda style – for an hour.
Those that argue the CBC has political biases should be arguing for more funding, not less, for the institution. Make sure they are fully funded and can follow all the stories of importance to Canadians, both at home and around the world. Fully funded, and appropriately directed (but not dictated to), the CBC can ensure a broad range of voices get our ear and eyeball time.
I’d rather have a supposedly biased news organization that offers material of substance than the commercial alternatives alone without a public broadcast competition. Give us intelligent content – the people will figure out for themselves what makes sense and what does not.
Until management and employees come to their senses, you can get at print and audio content from locked out employees at www.cbcunlocked.com and www.cbcunplugged.com.
Dave Winer has issued a call to action to bring IT to disaster relief, and there are already some folks applying their minds to the problem and are creating XML solutions.
Suggestion: Don’t write one line of code, not one XML spec, until you’ve worked a week in a Red Cross call center on family reunification tasks.
You’ll come away with a much better appreciation for the requirements and the scope of the task. What’s more you’ll understand that the user groups involved – victims; separated family; anxious friends; employers; disaster relief volunteers and professionals – all have different needs and abilities to contribute to the task of reunification.
You’ll also understand that a wholly electronic system can’t be envisioned, at least not for all of the various stages of a disaster.
Any solution crafted without direct experience in the thick of things will fall short; that’s not to say such a solution might not be useful and fill holes or create opportunity where today there is none – not at all.
Volunteering with the Red Cross in a call center will open eyes and stimulate thinking. What’s more – and forget all the technology stuff – just volunteering with the Red Cross will leave you with a warm feeling inside.
Thanks Yuri, for python-markdown v 0.8 which as of Sept 1 now handles headers with links.
Cool: python-markdown, which I last looked at quite a few versions ago, works a charm and now includes footnote support, the one major item I missed in Textile.
Although it still does not support links in header elements; perl-markdown does, i.e.:
# [Markdown][5]
[5]: http://foo.com/
… should both render h1 elements containing links. Yet footnote support is really what I needed in order to switch for a project I’m about to move to release on; now if only the @attribute= idea noted on ogbuji.net, or some such unobtrusive method of getting class, id or style data shoved into an element, life would be truly grand.
This is a test paragraph with a footnote. 1
Multiple paragraphs can be included in the note text by indenting
them, just as with multi-paragraph list item. However, unlike list
items, even single-paragraph footnotes will be wrapped in <p> tags. Blah blah blah.
Lichtblau said problems could linger through the end of the year. "Hopefully, three months from now situation will be resolved. I don't think anyone knows how much damage there is to refineries."
You can say that again!
(view source to see the footnote handling.