Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Jon Gruden: "You might say this is the best 1-5 team in the league."

Sports · 2004/10/20 · Comment · Link

There's Something About Mary Cheney

After last night's presidential debate, some Bush partisans are characterizing Sen. Kerry's mention of Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney, as an attempt to smear her.

Mary Cheney has been open about her sexuality for years. She was employed as the lesbian and gay community liaison for Coors Brewing, a board member of the pro-gay Republican Unity Coalition, and works today as a senior member of her father's campaign, drawing a $100,000 salary. Some activist groups have publicly lobbied her to speak up on gay-rights issues, as the Dear Mary Web site demonstrates.

Though as a general rule politicians should avoid making rhetorical points using each other's children as examples, Mary Cheney's a 34-year-old woman who has been in the public sphere since the 2000 campaign. Her relationship to her father informs his policy on gay marriage rights, which he described in the vice-presidential debate with Sen. Lieberman:

... we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. We shouldn't be able to choose and say you get to live free and you don't. That means people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into.

Describing her as a lesbian should be no more controversial than discussing the AIDS and gay-marriage activism of Vanessa Kerry, the senator's 27-year-old daughter.

Besides, calling someone a lesbian is only a smear under the false premise that homosexuality is something to be ashamed about, as Andrew Sullivan writes this morning:

When Kerry cites Bush's wife or daughters, no one says it's a "low blow." The double standards are entirely a function of people's lingering prejudice against gay people.

Politics · 2004/10/14 · 18 COMMENTS · Link

IBM has donated Cloudscape, an embedded relational Java database that has been in active development since 1996, to the Apache project, where it will be called Apache Derby.

There's a Cloudscape tutorial site on IBM DeveloperWorks and an Apache Incubator site where it can be downloaded.

Java · 2004/10/13 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Karl Rove Advertises Liberally

As a Florida resident, I can't go a half hour without seeing an ad in which "John Kerry and the liberals in Congress" are plotting some form of progressive deviltry, such as raising taxes on assault rifles to protect the abortion rights of gay whales.

The ads are especially pervasive during major sports events:

Last night while Niki and I were trying to watch the baseball playoffs, every other commercial was a political attack ad. ... One ad they played over and over again all night on every channel starts every sentence for the first half of the ad with "John Kerry and the liberals in Congress ... John Kerry and the liberals in Congress ..." Shut the hell up and let me watch baseball in peace before it goes away again until next Spring! Don't Clockwork-Orange me into an aversion to baseball!

I'm outside the target audience of these ads, but that phrase doesn't seem like one of Karl Rove's better pieces of gopaganda. It positions John Kerry and the liberals in Congress as two distinct groups, an impression that doesn't help the effort to paint him as the second coming of Eugene Debs.

Politics · 2004/10/13 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Using Your Header in UltraEdit

Since I began using UltraEdit as a programming text editor recently, I lost the ability to call the header() function in PHP. Every time I tried it in a script, the following error happened: "Cannot modify header information - headers already sent."

This error happens whenever a script produces output before header() is called. When obvious causes for this problem have been ruled out, you must look for anything that might output a blank line or other characters.

In my case, UltraEdit put three characters at the beginning of a UTF-8 file without displaying them in the editor, so I didn't spot them until I opened one of the errant scripts in vi.

These characters are a byte-order marker, as described in the UltraEdit support forum, and here's how to turn this feature off:

1. Choose Advanced, Configuration. The General tab should be in the front.
2. Scroll down to the Load/Save/Conversions section.
3. Deselect the two Write UTF-8 checkboxes.

There's a possibility I've incurred the wrath of the Unicode gods by making this change, but at least my PHP scripts work.

Php · 2004/10/12 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Enjoy Some Steamed Rice

Anne Rice recently flipped out on Amazon.Com, writing an egomaniacal rant in response to customer reviews of Blood Canticle:

First off, let me say that this is addressed only to some of you, who have posted outrageously negative comments here, and not to all. You are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective. Indeed, you aren't even reading it. You are projecting your own limitations on it. And you are giving a whole new meaning to the words "wide readership." And you have strained my Dickensean principles to the max. I'm justifiably proud of being read by intellectual giants and waitresses in trailer parks, in fact, I love it, but who in the world are you?

Her personal assessment of the book: Five stars.

Publishing · 2004/10/11 · Comment · Link

Get Your Browser War On

Writing for eWeek, columnist Jim Rapoza believes that Microsoft's XP-only security upgrade to Internet Explorer will send millions of users to other browsers, making the browser market competitive again:

For the first time in years, IE's market share has dropped slightly. But I predict that this trickle will soon become a full-fledged torrent.

In fact, I fully expect that, a year from now, IE's market share will be below 75 percent.

I've been using Firefox for a while, finding it vastly superior to Internet Explorer. The browser opens pages in new tabs rather than new windows, can bookmark all open pages with a single bookmark, and offers keyword shortcuts that can initiate searches on any site from the browser's address bar.

For example, I can type find Microsoft Bob to load a Google search results page for the text Microsoft Bob and info Sinclair Lewis to view pages related to the author on the InfoPlease reference site. A shortcut can be set up for any Web site where search terms appear in a page URL.

Windows Xp · 2004/10/11 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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