Better hosting at home

Longtime readers will note the new template for TKL. Got tired of trying to massage HTML and CSS all by myself. In case you didn't already know, I buck the trend for web developers, take perverse pride in not being a particularly creative front-end designer. I leave such stuff for the script kiddies, heh!

Made some other structural changes as well. The blog is now hosted at home, over a fat wireless Internet connection, one of only one in our neighborhood. DSL and cable not techie enough for my gadget-loving wife. And it's a fake ASP as well, didn't want to break a hundred permalinks. I know precious few bloggers who care to update permalinks that they may not visit every day. So the blog is now just a set of lightweight html-only pages, served up by a crazy combination of Linux and Apache clones, off a naked server that used to be someone's old laptop.

And it renders faster than it ever has.. go figure!

BRB

Not gone, just preoccupied with non-blogging and non-bloggable stuff.. BRB soon

As a sidenote, NO, I have no strong opinion on the surprise election results in India. Except to say, people get the government they deserve, not necessarily always what they had in mind. This is probably the most unstable coalition government in Indian history. I give them less than a year before the internal alliances corrupt key players and collapse under the weight of political angst. The old-guard communists are playing a very dangerous game, driven by their fear of the BJP-Hinduvta alliance more than love of their own ideology. Sooner, rather than later, those pipes will burst.

Till then, if you have money invested in India, I suggest for your own sake you pull out for now. The new government does not have the first clue how to play hard and nice in the world economy..

Nothing to fear but fear itself..?

I have often wondered, with a certain smidge of embarrassment, at my slow, steady, inexorable drift from the fashionable politics of the Left. Why, I was perfectly happy, smug in my readings of those, who reviewed the critiques that summarized the thrice-translated works of Marx and Engels. Lenins head as graffiti on the park fence was art to my nascent eyes. Red sickle and workers rights on billboards along the mile between home and school where I grew up. Calcutta. City of smog and joy. City of politics and hotheads. Of beautiful women and the despair of hungry nights. Of spiced monsoon winds and mile-long queues for food rations. Of dazzling humanity living with daily rolling blackouts.. This, the home of the Indian political Left. With all your smug, all-knowing, hot-headed Bengalis, happy to be the chosen proletariat, the last scions of Marx.

One speculates on this journey at times. Like an introspective housecleaning, if I may be so bold, from communitarian elitist, to somewhat rugged individualist. From loving the abstract people to loving the freedom that is ones' gift to oneself. From wide-eyed idealist, to a different sort of idealist. A tempered one, perhaps. There is still time, much learning and loving still left. Yearning for new knowledge, new skills, new vistas are still fresh.

So what is it about today's political Left of which I so despair. Rooting out "a" cause, leads me to fear. Something so elemental to the human condition, something so simple, that it is so easily overlooked. What runs in the vein of todays Leftist is fear. It is fear of hurting others, of being hurt. It is fear of doing wrong, and causing others to do wrong. It is the fear of self, the fear of the vast, diverse, chorus of humanity, none of whom can be counted upon to order society in the exact image of their most fervent desires..

Are you fearful of men? Then young boys in schools must, for the sake of their fellows, take Ritalin to warp their personalities. Afraid of the penis are you, of young men holding it as they take their piss. Then teach young boys to do so sitting down. Fearful of freedom for those unsuited to your intellectual class..? Why then, the solution is simple. Take it away, as being good for them. The proles have no need to be free, because they would not know what to do with it. Are you afraid of humanity, crowding the planet? Then wish for more of them to die. Under the heels of well-spoken dictators, and ranting priests. Or under the equally vicious heels of environmental grandstanders.

I have little time for fear these days. Not when I have but one life to live, and die for. Not when there is spring each year, rustling through the cherry blossoms of my yard. Not when there is love, and family, and friends to cherish. Not when there is always hope, always a silver lining to cut the dull pain of despair that hammers and pounds at our lives.

I did not have to abandon the Left. It drifted away from me, on to the jagged shoals of self-loathing, condescending victimhood masquerading as the moral high ground. What a turpid waste of human capital.. what a shame..!

Easter Bunny visits

For a pair of non-Catholics like us, Easter Sunday is just a day some shops close early... (if you really need that Clorox 409 refill today, then better hurry..!). Imagine our surprise at the following irony. Kids who go to bed wishing for a visit from the Easter bunny should have stayed over at our place. We awoke this morning to a visit from an itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny Easter bunny. Well, er, he actually sort of fell into our window well. But on Easter Sunday..? Coincidence..? I think not..!

No idea how he fell in. There is a window well cover, wedged in with gardening junk, since the wells are on the hidden, utility side of the house. Regardless, here are some pictures of the rescue. The gloved hand is that of the gentle wife.





Cute, ain't it..? Now everyone say Awwwww...

Smoke and Mirrors

When information fails to inform, it becomes meaningless chatter. Just bits and bytes, and leaves of paper. Piling dust in cobwebbed corridoors. Such is this news, which is no news to me..

The administration on Saturday released the memo that warned of possible hijackings and terrorist activity in the U.S. In his first comments since the memo's release, Bush said the document contained "nothing about an attack on America." Bush said if he'd known specifics he "would have moved mountains" to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Reaction to the White House release of the memo on Osama bin Laden fell largely along party lines. Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the 9/11 Commission, said the memo held recent information "perhaps should have alerted" officials to boost efforts. But Gov. Jim Thompson, a Republican member of the Sept. 11 commission, said the document "didn't call for anything to be done by" Bush. The document -- called a presidential daily briefing -- or PDB -- states that al-Qaida had reached America's shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot. Thompson said it did not include a "smoking gun." "Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US," the memo to Bush stated. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

It is notoriously difficult to convince Americans that they must fight, for something other than the last Pokemon toy on the shelf come Christmas eve. It took two years, numerous ships lost, sailors dismembered and drowned in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic, before we bore arms against the Nazis.. two years, while the rest of the world continued its slow, mad collapse around us.

What exactly, in the history of this country, convinces some in this rank partisan squabble, that Americans would have tolerated preemptive strikes against Al-Qaida prior to 9/11...? Even today, much of the political Left wants to play the proverbial ostrich. There is no war, they claim. 9/11 was because we never signed Kyoto. We must not inflame the passions of the gentle Islamist, they say. This is a war we began for oil, and will end with us burning in its flames..! Such is the opposition to reality that does not provide comfort to us. Conditioned as the Left is, to view the ills of the world as byproducts of the burps and hiccups of uncouth, overweight Americans, such behavior is not entirely unexpected. But it provides scant comfort to the rest of us.

The fact that Clinton was barely able to get away, with a measly, mouthful of missile strikes on empty tents, is indicative of how much of a political risk he took with his own base. The argument that we could have done more, is meaningless. It is a distraction from the war effort. It is a distraction from the security debate we must continue, if we are to reach political consensus over erosions of privacy, explosion of the federal beauracracy, citizen databases, and other insidious little pinpricks on our lives and liberties. I fear we will lose them, blinded as we are by this irresponsible media circus.

War, what war..

As the pandering to the religous right continues unabated, one wonders what insane political calculation tipped Ashcrofts hand so far. We are in a war, so they say. I believe that, I know in my bones that we have been, and continue to be, in the midst of a spiralling conflict between modernity and the last bastion of fascism.

Now here comes the Attorney General, riding on a high horse of self-defined morality, urging us to pay attention to a more important war.. the war for our immortal soul, wherein the demolition of smut is of singular importance. Perhaps, for the wolf-packs of evangelism, such is true. Perhaps it is even true that only puritanic Christains have souls to be saved.

What is unclear to me, however, is why the legal apparatus of the state must be pressed into such a spiritual quest..? Perhaps because the moral quest has failed..? Because people would laugh with the sinners than at them..? Because morality that denies human sexuality is doomed to practical failure..?

There are many reasons to wish for gridlock after this november. Many, many reasons. This is one of them. We are at war. Not with consenting adults purchasing the sexual exploits of other consenting adults. We are at war with the final, clarion call of fascism. Disguised as disciples of the Koran, who claim, upon pain of death, to be the one true voice of the Prophet. This is not an easy war for us to fight, or to win. We do not need the distractions posed by frustrated religous demagogues of our own. Time, perhaps to send a message to this White house. Start packing your linens..

You may call me Will..

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
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Pandoras Box

The battle for Fallujah has already passed into the annals of military history, as an event that marks the passage of warfare from rolling countryside to the crumbling concrete of the city. What will emerge from this will shape the fighting doctrine of the Marines and the army for the next few generations.

The fighting is grim, the fighters grimmer. They fight on a sea of information, of a networked battlefield that is unparalleled in history. Of our men and women locked in battle, their numbers are far fewer. Gone are the days of massed brigades, cannon fodder by the millions, remembered only by the tears in a mothers eye, a lump in a childs throat. They are warriors who chose war, it did not chance upon them like the Blitzkreig on hapless, sleeping farmers..

War was always a way of life for some. We are now witnessing the maturing of a fighting force of young Americans, for whom this way of life is now fact. The warrior caste has come of age. How will they now view their fellow citizens? Will they shun the rest of society, selecting only the company of their own? Will they be the children of Heinlein, and suffer no one but those who choose to lay their lives down in the armed service of their countries?

A self-selected minority

I guess ad-jumping PVR owners aren't going to make much of a dent in election year analysis after all, if one is to deduce some correlation between the new Bush TV ads in some key states. (Link via Polipundit.)

A week of hearings on Capitol Hill and criticism from a former counterterrorism aide have eroded President Bush's poll standing on fighting terrorism. But that's nothing compared to the damage that Bush's campaign ads may have done to Democratic candidate John Kerry.

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows a remarkable turnaround in 17 battleground states where polls and historic trends indicate the race will be close, and where the Bush campaign has aired TV ads. Those ads say Bush has provided "steady leadership in times of change" while portraying Kerry as a tax-hiking, flip-flopping liberal.

One's worldview tends to be contrained by the oddities of ones own existence. My inveterate ad-jumping, live-tv replaying habit using the Personal Video Recorder led me to underrate the impact of TV advertising in this years political campaign. Being blinded by leaves is a good way to get lost in the forest, eh..?

Worth the wait..

Having to sit through a Barbara Walters interview with Karen Hughes to get to John Stossels takedown of Animal Rights extremists.. heh! Pity it was basically a clip show of old takedowns..

The man is annoying, but effective. Seems like he should keep it up.

Weak links in the chain

Now that Musharraf has tipped his hand, his weak wrists are showing..

Eight Pakistani soldiers who were taken hostage by militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas were found shot dead in a ditch near Serwakai on Friday. The eight soldiers had been taken hostage after an ambush on an Army convoy last Monday which left 12 other soldiers dead and 20 others injured. The soldiers were in their uniforms with their hands tied behind their backs. An official who saw the bodies said that the soldiers had been shot at point-blank range.

The executions were the latest sign that the effort by Pakistan’s government to flush foreign militants from the region has gone awry. Describing the killings as ‘‘inhuman, cold-blooded murders’’, the Army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said the eight soldiers appeared to have been killed a few days ago.

Also absent, is the understanding that Musharraf has, in effect, launched a war against a segment of his own people. He is gambling on some very high odds that he will prevail, with the US as the anvil to his hammer in the West. This is not a police operation, with the hardened tribes of Waziristan meekly surrendering to a benevolent magistrate. This is, once again, an unelected leader of a tired nation, taking her to the edge of civil war. He will lose men, while the other side will shed their own blood. This will continue until there is a clear loser. It is far too early to predict a Musharraf defeat, though efforts by his political opponents to paint his failures bright red will no doubt be par for the course..

Armed tribesmen are on the move in the borderless region of Pakistan's NorthWest. He faces the near certainity of a near term coup, most certainly political opposition from within the ranks of his own supporters. He is taking enormous risks. Why..?

Musharraf calculates that he can actually win. If he does, and the stakes are high, he comes out swinging. His long game is not to target the Taliban nesting in Waziristan, or Al-Qaida training camps he knows "nothing" about. Those are mere annoyances. This is a man with a lifetime of obsession over his nations rival and neighbor. With the Americans digging their heels to his West, and training with SpecOps in India, the spotlight on dismantling the infrastructure of state-sponsored terrorism; the thousand year war over Kashmir is all but lost. The status quo is the status quo, and will remain so for much of future history. So what is left? The future, to which he must certainly look to. What does he see? A Pakistan forever locked in battle, a reminder of failed promises and heartbreak? A nation torn between fundamentalist medievalism and modernism?

As his nations leader, he has to look to maximize her future. For now, his calculations lie in the hope, that with the help of the US, and a neighbor increasingly disinterested in waging past wars, he can be the strongman of Pakistan. His nations very own Pinochet, with a legacy that may ultimately be equal parts of heroism, riddled with desperate tyranny.

He is the weak link in the chain that he swings himself.


UPDATE: Ritesh Bansal provides some valuable background into Musharraf's personality, his favorite role models, and why all of it explains his seeming determination to marginalize the Islamists creeping around in the folds of his cloak

Ahh, I can breathe

Interminable client project almost over, I get to go back to home base.. where I have a real cube, with 100% more sunshine, 25% more window, elbow room fit for a Titan. Most importantly.. I get "quiet" around me. No more having to deal with a mass of humanity traipsing down unplanned hallways, conducting loud, impromptu meetings "RIGHT-OUSIDE-MY-FRELLING-DOOR"...! No more hand-holding, gritting teeth at inefficiencies that boggle the imagination. Now, finally, a quiet place where I can think, plan, and help continue the design of our exciting new commercial software product. All the while watching planes land at O'Hare. Very Zen, the whole watching planes bit. Where do they go..? Where do they come from..? Who are the ants milling around their cavernous bellies? Hope one never misses the runway and lands uncomfortably close to my window. What does it all mean..? Is the answer to the Universe really 42, or the square root of PI..? (Ahem)

This product I mentioned, is something a few of us have been working on for the last two years to bring to market. An integrated document and change management system for regulated environments that doesn't cost an arm and three legs. Lets you map unlimited document and event management processes without having to hire expensive script-kiddies or a dedicated programming staff. Our first client piloted with just one process mapped to the application, and now have over 25.. (heheheheee.. quite the Monty Burns moment right there). Said client is now no longer under the gun from a certain unnamed Federal Regulatory body since they have a validated, 21CFR Part11 compliant, change control and event management system in place.. I feel a cracking of knuckles is in order.. ( craaack.. click.. ouch, ouch.. craaaack.. ahhh, much better)

As the Technical Architect for this product, there are some distinct advantages. I get to dictate, well, architecture, for one thing..! I get the satisfaction of seeing the big picture knit itself together over time, as well as the triumphant gotchas that come from everyday code-writing miracles. I get to build something that grows over time, gets used by people I will never meet. Change their 8-hour workdays in ways I cannot imagine. I wonder if development teams at Microsoft get that way? Feel like a little god at the end of the day? A feeling that no amount of custom Intranet-building for 10-people departments can ever give.

We are now too, in the "risky" area of growth, where significant resources have been expended on this product to back out, and the client base is still below the tipping point. Very exciting, I assure you. A little nerve-wracking, every sales opportunity is a call to arms, to let out the dogs.. Hungry, we all are, while the lessons of DOT.COM busts have been examined and learned from. Real business plan, real product, no frelling vaporware here, no siree..!

I just love being one of the wolves of capitalism, what can I say..?

Grand designs

India and China to become the new backbone of the Internet..?

India is likely to be the Internet's new centre of gravity along with China, according to the top official of the body that oversees the Internet.

Of course, language is the key barrier. I have always wondered, though, where these people get their projections from. Some undiscovered and unwashed orifice from the nether regions of their bodies..? Pfeh..!

I'm not familiar with the demographics of Internet usage in China, but in India it is confined to an increasingly walled-off, technological elite. The kind who answer your service calls, transcribe prescriptions, run 24-hour software development projects, steal VC money from Silicon Valley, take yearly vacations in the US, shop in Singapore over the weekend, and live in corporate cities distant from the rest of the country by culture, knowledge-worker snobbishness, and by reinforcement of latent class and caste hierarchies.

The Internet is simply too distant for most of India's population, who are still rural, un-educated in the traditional sense, and uninterested in something that does not help them predict next years cotton crop yields. For them, the world of biotechnology is ostensibly of greater importance. If anything, India is poised to be one of the Biotech "centers of gravity" over the few next decades. The Internet will probably just tag along as a lagging technology.

This is not how a country becomes the center of gravity of the Internet. A growing and influential section of it no doubt, but not quite ready to take over the world yet.

The PVR and the political ad washout

Polipundit remarks that Bush ads are all over TV in Washington State, and that you "can't miss them.."

As a matter of fact, here in Illinois, I'm sure the TV and radio ads have kicked off with just as much vigor, yet I cannot tell if my statement is mere supposition or not. Yes, there are signs on street medians, often of indeterminate political ownership. Some hastily plugged into the hard spring ground, now bending haplessly in the wind, "..elect Rep. XYZ, or the world will end.." , a kind of signage clutter that is a harbinger of the tussles that lie ahead. Yet, I have no idea what Bush ads are playing, and whether the Kerry counter-ads have taken off or not. I have seen few, if any political ads on TV.

All because of my satellite dish and PVR..

One of the great features of a digital PVR (personal video recorder to all you primitives..) or its sibling TiVo, is the ability to skip forward one to three minutes into recorded programs. We pre-record all the shows we want to watch each season, and rarely watch live TV anymore. We skip over every advertising segment, the only ads that ever flit across my conscious mind are the ones right after, or right before a show segment.. fleeting, broken-up, out-of-context pleas for attention. I suffer to sit through some of them on miscalculating the number of skips I need to get to the scene when that glowy-eyed alien gets his personal force-field ripped out of his wringing hands, by some intrepid, busty, blonde bombshell astrophysicist/test pilot/killer commando.(ahem). Even shows we do not pre-record, we usually pause the "live-TV", go about our business, and start watching 15 minutes or so into the show. For the express purpose of getting through advertisements..

Either way, I view fewer ads, which translates to even fewer political ads. (I also watch less overall TV as a result, but that is the subject of another post).

What does this have to do with the election.. well, for a political junkie like myself, relatively little, since I deliberately immerse myself in a variety of news aggregators, as well as blogs both left, right and center-ish. But for the vast majority of non-political, TV-watching, thankful-for-the-PVR American families, it means that political advertising is simply going to be less effective at reaching out to them. They aren't watching as much advertising as they used to have to.. as a Tivo turncoat admits

So what's a money-conscious campaign to do..? I would target shows that people still watch in real-time. Like news, or sports. Maybe even the weather channel. Right before that "local on the 8's" segment. Pay the premiums for ads that start right before a show, or right before the cliffhanger five minutes before the end. Either way, the pickings are slim, and getting slimmer by the day than an anorexic, vegan teen on Atkins..

For the lifespan of this years electoral battles, the PVR phenomenon is unlikely to have a significant effect on political advertising and campaign strategy, as less than 1% of Americans currently own one. Yet, PVR ownership is predicted to rise to 20% by 2007. Swing voters, who by virtue of unscientific speculation, are most likely to be the kind of relatively affluent, middle-class voters who own PVRs, will be harder to reach using traditional media. Perhaps targeted BlogAds would fill that niche better.. If so, blogs with a large eyeball audience (like Instapundit), would be a perfect target for a future Karl Rove, looking to sway votes, one page view at a time...

Conversely, if seeking the independant vote becomes harder, both parties might simply abandon the effort, and seek instead to increase their partisan base, spend more millions on get-out-the-vote drives, and rely more on their local affiliates to push people to the polls. A sign of a permanent and growing divisiveness in politics, with the center increasingly isolated from much of the political process..? Hard to tell..


UPDATE: Perhaps people with PVRs will just start tuning out of much of the election process. Perhaps its a good thing. Less partisan rhetoric could lead to people voting on issues without getting sidetracked by personality clashes, and vendetta-based political mud-slinging.

So how pure am I..?

Well, according to the Libertarian Purity Quiz, I score a 55/160, which makes me a medium core libertarian.. not quite the anarcho capitalist, but not the dour statist either..

I haven't much to comment on that. Libertarianism as pure ideology always irked me, yet many libertarian principles are well worth living by. I am pragmatic about the role of the state, agnostic about some of it's non-libertarian functions, decidedly against killing off the state as an institution.. I don't know how mainstream my brand of "libertarianism" is, but I suspect fellow "classical liberals" (a dying breed perhaps?) would find my view on the world and its people more in line with theirs..