Since I’ve been boosting the Sidekick excitedly for the last few days, I ought to let people know about a caveat. If you use Keyguard mode, sometimes incoming calls won’t ring, which means you’ll miss the call unless you happen to be looking at the screen when the call comes in. (Keyguard mode automatically locks the screen after a given period of inactivity, to prevent accidental calls.) If you turn Keyguard mode off, no problems. ...

Addendum to the below: the direct trigger point was in fact a US diplomat pushing the issue; we called North Korea on their nuclear program. OK, that’s fair. I think that the essential conclusion is the same, though. I’m honestly not sure why Bush isn’t standing up and saying “This happened because we pushed them, and it’s a perfectly acceptable price.” At this point I think that’s a reasonable stance. ...

[Leafnet](http://web.archive.org/web/20230127105333/http://web.archive.org/web/20230127105333/http://www.leafnet.org/ (original) “Leafnet: get the message out”) (original) (by way of Boing Boing) is a new approach to distributed politics. I really like it. The basic idea: check the site, print out a leaflet, post it in a bunch of places. It distributes the work of pamphletting across everyone who’s interested in the subject. Very nice concept. Now he needs to tie it to an alert system. It’d also be more effective if it was oriented towards a specific set of political issues. If you expect people to pay attention to alerts asking ‘em to leaflet, they need to know what to expect, and that’s even more important if people have to go to the site to see what new campaigns there are. ...

I did some research this morning on the context of the North Korean issue. (Or, if you like, crisis.) First off, here’s the Agreed Framework from 1994. This is the basic agreement, brokered by Jimmy Carter and signed by Bill Clinton. It’s got three elements: North Korea agrees to stop producing plutonium, the US agrees to help them build a light-water reactor by 2003, and the US agrees to make sure North Korea has alternative energy in the form of fuel oil until the LWR gets built. ...

We have some interesting stuff from a DoD news briefing (original) delivered yesterday by Major General John F. Sattler, USMC. He’s the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa. This task force is carrying out operations in support of the war on terrorism in, obviously, the Horn of Africa region — that’s Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Yemen. It’s about 1,500 people large, including command staff. ...

You know, I’m getting a little weary of hearing people tell me what the war on Iraq is about. It’s not about the oil. If this were all a big plot to ensure Bush’s friends get their hands on oil, there are better places to go. There’s a crisis in Venezuela at the moment (link subject to change with time), and that’s in our hemisphere. Venezuela produces as much oil as Iraq. If it were about oil, we’d be heading down to South America to clean up that issue. ...

I’m sort of fooling around with a side project, with the intent of using Movable Type as a general content management system, and I came up with something that I thought was kind of clever. I wanted a list of offsite links on the front page, and I thought it might be nice to allow other blog authors to add links, but I didn’t want to give full template modification access. Thought about it a while; came up with a solution. ...

Cory Doctorow’s new book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is now available. Both in a dead tree version and as pixels; the latter is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Check it out, buy the dead tree version, read it online, glory in the freedom of information. I’ll no doubt be reviewing this later.

So: why doesn’t my web browser detect unlinked URLs in a page and turn them into links for me? Sure, sure, it should be an option I can turn off. However, I want to stop cutting and pasting stuff like http://www.meyerweb.com. For that matter, I wouldn’t mind if it picked up any hostname beginning with www — let it catch www.meyerweb.com too. Catching anything that registers as a domain name might be a bit much. On the other hand, perhaps it might be worth doing a DNS lookup and converting anything that returns. In a very optimistic world with sufficient computing power, you could do the DNS lookup, check port 80, and if there’s something responding then do the conversion. ...