We should be able to predict, within a month or two, when we can draw down troops

The Lieberman-Lamont Primary result is starting to be felt in other Connecticut races. Shays, the 4th District Republican Congressman, has previously opposed a timeline for withdraw. Facing a tough re-election race against Diane Farrell, it seems that he’s trying to hedge his bets.

Oddly enough, I’m not in favor of a timeline. A software release date is usually a balance between a schedule target and a feature target. I’ve never known anyone to actually hit both. If you are lucky, then you sacrifice some features to hit your date. If you’re unlucky, then you slip your date to include the critical feature subset in the release.

I think that a timetable for withdrawal doesn’t make sense without a set of goals to be satisfied prior to each stage of the withdrawal. In software, we always have the option of a follow-up release. But we don’t have that luxury in Iraq.

Hey, Jill Sobule has a blog. I purchased her eponomyous 1995 CD on a recommendation from the Folk Music Listserv years ago and I still have multiple tracks on my iPod.

Contrary to its name, folkmusic was much more about the singer/songwriter genre than about folk music. Case in point, Jill Sobule, who isn’t your prototypical folk singer.

I had the good fortune to see Jill live at the Makor on W 67th Street several years back. Her show was funny and poignant and not to be missed.

Thanks to Gene for pointing out Jill’s weblog.

A professional should develop for his audience - after all, they’re paying for it. But an amateur should develop for himself. It can be a long journey from a good idea to a demo that works. And that’s a journey that you need to make by yourself.

The peanut gallery will pull your good intentions in a multitude of directions. They will offer needs disguised as advice, but be unable to offer attaboys until you have something concrete to show them.

There will be times when life leaves no time for hobbies. There will be times when you want to explore alternate technology. There will be times when the entire endeavor seems pointless. And there may be times when you throw it all in and start anew.

So my advice to Steve Kirks is to write your mac app for yourself. Plenty of time to go public once you have something to go public with.

The Wikipedia foes are concerned about the upward creep of Wikipedia entries in search engine listings. And while James Robertson is on the right track when he asks What’s the Alternative?, I think he glosses over the evolution of how we archive and access information.

I knew nothing of the Opium Wars as a young boy. Growing up in Colorado, I had an excuse:

The winners write the history books.

Thirty years ago, books were our primary souce of information. It was rare to find a book that contradicted conventional wisdom. And I certainly wasn’t going to read of Boston merchants who made their fortunes selling opium.

Now, we have a different problem. We have a vast number of web pages rather than a limited number of books. And we have search engines as our gatekeepers rather than publishers.

Our new gatekeepers may be no more accurate than the old. But their errors are algorithmic rather than personal. And I’m confident that an algorithmic correction to Wikipedia will be available when necessary.

He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That puts it not unto the touch To win or lose it all

I’m a Connecticut centrist. You should have been my candidate. But you lost my vote when you proclaimed your willingness to run as an independent if you lost the primary.

Now you have lost the primary. It’s time to go back on your ill-conceived plan to run as an independent. No one likes to leave the big stage. But it’s time for you to go.

I’m in the middle of an EDI segue at work. When people talk about EDI, it usually carries a connotation of bisynchronous modems and arcane data formats. The modems are mostly gone, but the arcane data formats have a lot of life left in them.

If you’re going to be working with the arcane data formats, then you’re going to need a good editor. I’m an Emacs devotee at heart, but I recommend Softshare’s free EDI Notepad for anyone who needs to work with EDI formats. EDI Notepad understands the EDI data structure, keeping your data file legal. And when you’re all done, EDI Notepad can display your data in a people friendly HTML view.

You may not need it if you know your EDI data format inside and out. But if you’re a EDI neophyte like myself, then you need to download EDI Notepad.

A CSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce.

I tried this concept before, when I lived in Northern California. It didn’t take - there was too much produce for just me and then the Danville Farmer’s Market set the bar way too high.

Now, I’m finding that a half share is just about right for the two of us - especially when one of us is a vegetarian. Our produce is coming from a certified organic farm and the quality is tremendous. In addition, we have a tendency to stick with a limited palette of vegetables, and eating what is in season is forcing some welcome variety.

We found out about our CSA farm via a bulletin board flyer at the local drugstore. The more scientific approach is to check the nationwide directory of small farms at LocalHarvest. Check it out.

It seems that my .htaccess frenzy was pretty successful. 404 returns are way down. And most of those seem to come from search bots that glommed onto transient Textpattern url modes during the migration.

Here is how I support my old Radio Userland urls:

1. First, configure Textpattern for the year-month-day-title url mode on the admin page. This minimizes the difference between Radio urls and Textpattern urls.
2. Redirect the daily pages to Textpattern. Textpattern year-month-day-title mode will mostly handle the monthly archive pages (it misses when explicitly called as index.html).

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RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2}).html$ \
    http://ideoplex.com/$1/$2/$3 \
    [R=permanent,L]

1. Redirect Radio Userland category pages (both monthly archive and daily) to the corresponding Textpattern url.

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RewriteRule ^(sports|software)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})(|/|/index.html)$ \
    http://ideoplex.com/$2/$3/ \
    [R=permanent,L]
RewriteRule ^(sports|software)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2}).html \
    http://ideoplex.com/$2/$3/$4 \
    [R=permanent,L]

1. Finally, I redirect the old rss feed to my new atom feed. This probably causes some breakage to newsreaders that don’t support atom, but Textpattern’s rss support is stuck back at version 0.92.

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RewriteRule ^rss.xml$ \
    http://ideoplex.com/atom \
    [R=permanent,L]

Note: I’ve split each RewriteRule across 3 lines for greater readability.

There were some nice lessons to be learned from Tiger’s British Open victory:

1. The power of a plan: We’ve all heard the aphorism Drive for show, putt for dough. Tiger Woods lived it on the big stage, putting his driver back in the bag and switching to a controlled game off the tee. The result was a British Open victory for his 11th major.
2. Don’t scrap the plan when the execution is to blame: Tiger kept to the plan after a 3rd round that opened the door for his competitors. He understood that it was the trio of 3 putts on the inward nine that was to blame, not the plan.
3. The advantage of being the leader: Tiger is 11 of 11 in the majors when leading after the third round. Playing in the last group, Tiger can play within himself. His competition knows that they have to go out and beat him, that he isn’t going to beat himself. More often than not, they’re not up to the challenge.
4. Cover your challenger’s move: When Chris DiMarco made a charge with a final round of 68, Tiger responded with 3 straight birdies to relegate DiMarco to a gallant runner up.

I’ve spent the past few hours in an .htaccess frenzy. Most of my old Radio Userland urls are now redirecting to their equivalents in my Textpattern installation. There are still some vestiges of Radio Userland to root out, but it is downhill from here.

BTW, I should mention that I intend to keep at least one vestige of Radio Userland. I’ve managed to accumulate around 700,000 page reads since I started Take the First Step, and I’d like to hit a million. I’ll be keeping the Radio Userland webbug around until I do.