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. ...

The

Cloudtravel (via Ernie the Attorney) is exactly the sort of site I dig. It’s a one man show, written by Chris Cloud (and what a great name for a traveller), that serves as a travel guide to places he’s been. A real personal style, good information, and plenty of opinions. He says he needs more substance; I say he’s already given us quite a bit. I wish I’d been able to read this before my first trip to New Orleans. ...

So how come Dave Winer thinks that we should [maintain directories for free](http://web.archive.org/web/20111116223955/http://web.archive.org/web/20111116223955/http://www.xmlrpc.com/stories/storyReader$1583 (original) “How the directory on XML-RPC.Com works”) (original) but that it’s unfair to expect free programming?

I’ve written earlier about the new mission for US Special Ops forces, so since Rumsfeld held a briefing yesterday regarding the U.S. Special Operations Command (original), I figure hey, may as well talk about it some more. Let’s see. They’re increasing the budget, which strikes me as a rational step, particularly given these criticisms. He’s giving Special Operations Command a supported command role, which means “the Special Operations Command will have the tools it will need to plan and execute missions in support of the global war on terror.” The Washington Times claims (original) that this implies authority to plan their own assassinations, but that’s kind of unclear to me; if it’s true, then any command in a supported command role had that authority previously. Mind you, I’m still of the opinion that even Bush shouldn’t be authorizing assassinations as an instrument of US policy, but that’s me. ...