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Month: January 2004

Answering to fans

January 16, 2004
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Speaking of the Red Sox, Curt Schilling’s answering questions over on the Sons of Sam Horn. You gotta be a member to post, and you aren’t gonna get to be a member, but the answers are still fascinating.

Speaking of Curt Schilling, the Boston Dirt Dogs are running a quote about pitching under pressure from the afore-mentioned thread on the current front page. To illustrate the point, they have a scan of the cover of Grace Under Pressure, a Call of Cthulhu adventure from Pagan Publishing. Strange world.

Rolling updates

January 16, 2004
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Hey, new stuff on the blogroll! Well, semi-new stuff, but I felt like noting it.

  • DonkeyRising is demographer’s Ruy Teixeira’s blog about Democratic strategy. It’s a little rah-rah but insightful and informative.

  • The Decembrist is Mark Schmitt’s blog; he was formerly one of Bill Bradley’s senior aides. Solid stuff from a political insider.

  • The American Street is a new group blog with David Neiwert as a contributor. They need to fix their layout but I’ll read Neiwert’s stuff anywhere.

  • Tofu Hut is funny and worth a peek, although he better get back to movie reviews soon, cause I want to read more of that. Please.

Further food

January 15, 2004
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Note on the below —

“NetNewsWire”: already produces OPML that tags feeds as type “rss”. Reverse compatibility nearly requires others to follow suit; I’m sure NetNewsWire is not the only application that does this.

However, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea to distinguish between multiple feed types. I would like to know if a feed is Atom or RSS before I grab it. Saves time, saves CPU on both ends of the transaction, saves network, and so forth.

So yes: type should accurately identify the type of feed, whether that be RSS, Atom, or something else entirely. NNTP, say.

NASA

January 15, 2004
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Inquisitive minds may want to know what NASA’s budget looks like now, since Bush proposes redirecting 11 billion dollars of the budget to a moon mission. I’m way into the moon mission; I just wanna know where the money is coming from. I found 2004 budget information here.

This is not an exhaustive examination of the budget, it’s just a summary based on their request. That said, onward. Hm, this is long — follow the link for the bulk of the discussion and information.

Continue ReadingNASA

What'd Clinton want

January 15, 2004
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According to the usual anonymous sources…

Bush administration officials say regime change in Iraq had been U.S. policy since 1998, when President Clinton was in office, and insist removing Saddam by force was a last resort.

This will come as a surprise to John Bolton, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — some of whom, I believe, have a role in the Bush administration. They may even be Bush administration officials. If they are to be trusted, Clinton “failed to provide sound leadership” and was “unwilling either to adopt policies that would remove Saddam or sustain the credibility of its own policy of containment.” In fact, he “placed us on a path that will inevitably free Saddam Hussein from all effective constraints.”

Obscure feed

January 14, 2004
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Obscure technical quibble of the day follows. Warning: technogeeking ahead.

Dave Winer’s OPML sharing guidelines are a little wonky. Point 1 says:

If an element is pointing to a feed, set its type to “rss”. Do this even if it’s not an RSS feed.

Nope. Set the type to “rss” if it’s an RSS feed. Set it to “atom” if it’s an Atom feed. If you want a generic type name for a feed, I’d suggest “feed”.