Just found a blog: Clubbeaux. Here's a sample:

NATO was never a bunch of friends who got together because they all liked each other, it was a town's citizens manning the ramparts in a time of crisis. You may not like your neighbor, but when an outside threat comes you stand shoulder to shoulder with him. When the crisis ends, the citizens go home to their respective interests.

I couldn't agree more.

Let's get out of these old alliances before they get us into real trouble. Remember WWI? Serbia had an alliance with Russia (1912). Germany had an alliance with Austria (1879). Britain had an alliance with France (1904).

The Soviet threat is gone. NATO doesn't have a mission anymore, and the invocation of article V and subsequent inaction of our "allies" has shown it to be a dead letter.

Let's move for the dissolution of the North Atlantic council. We can write bilateral treaties with any non-weasel states worth our time, but the responsibility for securing civil order in Europe should be left to the Europeans.

The Financial Times is reporting that France's deficit is expected to exceed 3 per cent of GDP (link via Drezner). This would constitute a breach of the growth and stability pact unless France cuts public spending, which PM Raffarin refuses to promise to do. He doesn't want to break his campaign promise (tax cuts).

The European Commission is threatening give him a stern talking-to, and if he persists in not cutting the deficit, to slap him firmly on both wrists.

But really, what can the EU do to France? The governing agreement is article 104c of the Maastrict EC treaty (pdf) as expanded in the protocol on excessive deficits (pdf). (Read them yourself, but expect a headache.) Once a member state has been determined to have an excessive deficit by the European Commission, the Commission sends a report to the European Council. The Council must decide within three months if there is an excessive deficit. If so, they give the transgressing state up to four months to take steps to clean up its act. All of this happens privately.

If the member state fails to take action, the Council can make this information public. Incidentally, "taking action" means promising to take action, e.g., announcing austerity measures. The rule is:

The Council, when considering whether effective action has been taken in response to its recommendations made in accordance with Article 104(7), shall base its decision on publicly announced decisions by the Government of the Member State concerned.

Anyway, after ten months of this, the Commission can impose sanctions of between 0.2 and 0.5 percent of GDP per annum; the amount depends on the size of the deficit. The money must be deposited with the European Central bank and becomes forfeit if the bad behavior continues for two years, otherwise it's returned.

So, two years and ten months after the end of the fiscal year in which it ran an excessive deficit, a member state can be obliged to pay a fine of up to one-two hundredth of its GDP. Or, stated another way, a fine of up to 8.3% of its deficit. There are some teeth to this treaty, but they're blunt and far-off.

I sympathize with France's position. They're falling short of their predicted growth figures. (Though I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they'd picked the most optimistic growth number just to get another year of breathing room.) They had hoped to balance the budget by 2004, but it's always hard to balance the budget into a down economy. And now, with deflation looking much more serious than inflation, balancing the budget would be economic suicide.

(Why? With the economy in decline, tax revenues fall. Balancing the budget means reducing government spending to match tax revenues, which reduces government demand for private-sector services. If the economy is down because of lack of demand -- as is characteristic of a deflationary recession -- cutting government spending just accelerates the contraction. Remember, Herbert Hoover balanced the U.S. budget into a down and deflating economy. He also was keeping a campaign promise.)

So I do sympathize with France. They're in a tight spot and they want to spend their way out of it. It's too bad that the Monetary Union enabling treaties make that illegal.

Of course France wants a special exemption, and will probably get it over the objections of smaller EU member states. (Portugal didn't get one, after all.) But France is too large and powerful and important to offend. So the rules will probably be relaxed. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, and the EU members with strong economies (*cough* Finland) or who imposed fiscal discipline (*cough* Germany) will wind up paying the price.

I hope the U.S. government is willing to take the necessary steps to avoid serious deflation. Bring on the budget deficits! Lower taxes! Print more money! If things start to get bad, and sending Bush, Cheney and the ranking members of congress out to do lap dances would help, I say we do it. And since the U.S. hasn't ceded sovereignty over its federal budget to a multinational council, the measures we adopt will be free of foreign review.

Ah, sovereignty. I wonder if the Finns are getting nostalgia for it yet.

My wife: "Hey! The Vagina Monologues is coming to town before we go!"

Me: "That's nice."

"We could go together! Do you want to go?"

"No."

"Do you mind if I go by myself?"

"No."

"I think it would be really interesting. Are you sure you don't want to go?"

"Yes."

"I would go to The Penis Monologues."

"I wouldn't."

In an article about postwar Iraq, the Washington Post notes in passing that

Bush, speaking in a business suit before an audience of 1,400 at a black-tie dinner

Best case is that alfjr.com is blowing smoke: it's just a lie, attempting to get attention or increase its audience among islamists. I think that's the most probable possibility.

Alternatively, the claim could be true. There could be a terrorist attack planned within the next few days.

If attempted, the attack could succeed or fail. No matter which it does, the effect of the attack would be to galvanize American sentiment against the terrorists, (unfairly?) against Iraq, and probably (unfairly) against Arabs.

So we would probably immediately invade Iraq. Which might be what the terrorists want. I can't see that it would be productive in the long run to the terrorists.

I don't really see that it's possible that the attack (if it exists) would be called off. This announcement has certainly already come to the attention of the FBI, who are surely taking it seriously. Making a public announcement days before alleged attacks is like spitting in the FBI's eye. The ten-day limit is indicative: given enough time, the FBI can be expected to turn something up. So the terrorists have to act soon.

Not much more to say. We'll know by March 7th if they're blowing smoke or not.

Wesley Smith, a medical ethicist, writes in National Review Online:

What's the point of passing laws if they're not going to be enforced?

Link via Charles Murtaugh

Apparently the Swedes don't think much of Canada -- check out the scare quotes on the MySQL download page:

Can't say I blame 'em, though. Recently, my wife renewed her passport, and in order to get a Canadian passport you need to give three references who have known you for at least two years, one of whom must be a professional. Here's the 3-page application form. Four pages of instructions are included.

If I were living in the States, I could renew my passport by mail by filling out a one-page form and signing a declaration under penalty of perjury. (The form.)

It was easier to get married here than to get a passport. It was easier for me (an alien with a non-resident visa) to get a driver's license than it was for my wife, a Canadian citizen, to get a passport in the city she was born in.

Ric Pashley, an Australian chemist, has demonstrated that oil and water can mix.

If confirmed, the finding could provide clues to one of chemistry's most puzzling phenomena. This is the so-called long-range hydrophobic force, which causes oil surfaces to attract one another over what to chemists are remarkably long distances.

Effectively, Pashley's claim is that dissolved gas is necessary for the action of the so-called long-range hydrophobic force. In the absence of dissovled gas, water and oil spontaneously mixed. (Unfortunately, the summary article doesn't say how hard they were pumping.)

Although this is exciting for physical chemists, and in a distant way interesting to biologists (after all, there are very few biology samples that you can repeatedly freeze and evacuate), it's earth-shattering for theoretical chemists.

Any simulation that purported to show spontaneous separation of oil and water is now known to be garbage. The paper-and-pencil crowd will have to figure out how to work dissolved gas into their models. If Pashley is right (his results haven't yet been reproduced), it means that we have to throw away most of our liquid theories.

It almost makes me wish I were back in grad school, doing liquid theory, for the chance to work on these problems in a relatively clear field. Unfortunately, the other structural problems of theoretical chemistry remain: low relevance and intractable computing problems.

And although accounting for dissolved gas is now known to be necessary, there's nothing to say that it's the last factor that needs to be accounted for in theory. Very likely it's not. Water is messy stuff, full of dissolved ions, gases, small organic molecules, and we're not really very good at modeling it.

Hey, Colby's not the only guy with a vice...

Our first apartment was a free-standing, three-room, 300 sq. foot cottage in back of a two-story house in Oakland, CA. The sort of thing that was built in the postwar boom to rent to veterans going to Berkeley on the GI bill.

It went through a crackhouse phase during the 80s. We got the lowdown from the neighbor who'd been there since the 60s. Apparently another outbuilding, an ancient garage, had actually been condemned and demolished by the city... because of the rats.

Imagine if the US government kept a database where they stored the address of all foreign nationals. Not just resident aliens and people on long non-resident visas (work, student), but also tourists.

Imagine if, as a tourist arriving in the US, you were admonished to appear at the local INS office within two days of arrival and register your address.

Imagine there were a special exemption for those staying in hotels, hostels and inns, because the proprietors of those are required to register you. Imagine if this were billed as a service.

You don't have to imagine it. Not because it's policy in the US, though the Total Information Awareness proposal includes provisions similar to these.

No, you don't have to imagine it, because you can see it in action in the Czech Republic.

Police for Foreigners. Just says it all right there, doesn't it. This was in place when I visited in '88 -- you know, under Communism.

In other news, Robert Fisk is an idiot.

No, really.

It's horrible. I've been trying to avoid this -- not reading Fisk articles, switching to a different website when the term comes up, etc. But now I am sorely tempted to actually fisk an article. A Robert Fisk article, no less.

It starts out like this:

Could anything be more pathetic than the Arab demonstration against war?

Well yes, Robert, something could. How about .. you. Or .. this article. Those are way more pathetic.

A million Britons marched in London, more than half a million Spaniards in Madrid; 200,000 in Paris and New York. And Cairo? Well, just 600 Egyptians turned up in their capital to protest at America's forthcoming invasion of brotherly Iraq – surrounded by 3,000 security police. By way of contrast – brave contrast – 2,000 Israelis protested in Tel Aviv against the war.

Yeah, it takes a lot of bravery for people to march for peace in Israel where freedom of expression is a constitutionally protected right. G'uh!

What on earth is it with the Arabs?

What on earth is it with Robert Fisk tearing through the thin veil that masked his racism? This isn't even "soft racism of low expectations" anymore. It's resurgent colonialism!

Of all people, they – and they alone – are likely to suffer in this American invasion of their homeland. They – and they alone – have the will and the ability to understand that this US military adventure is intended – as Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, frankly declared last week – to change the map of the Middle East.

They - and they alone - are likely to benefit from the destabilization of the regimes which oppress them. Remember the plan - once Iraq is being reconstructed, we can stop supporting the murderous Saudi regime.

Yet, faced with catastrophe, the Arabs are like mice.

There you go again. What is it with the racism?

Their leaders may agree with their people – but they will not let their people say so.

Bobby says their leaders oppose war, but prevent their people from attending anti-war demonstrations. Is it because they fear the U.S. response? Yeah, right: as if we'd torture anti-war protesters in Cairo before the much-more-conveniently-located ones in New York. And if we were going to punish an ally for allowing anti-war protests, we would definitely punish unimportant ally Egypt for a 600-person protest before important ally Britain for a protest of 3/4 of a million in London alone.

More likely the real reason Arab leaders prevented the demonstrations is that they fear that organized demonstrations against the war will lead to organized demonstrations against their own rule.

President Mubarak of Egypt has made it all too clear there is little he can do to rein in President Bush. King Abdullah of Jordan has said there is almost "nothing" the Arabs can do to avert war. Which means Arabs ask, more and more, what their leaders are for.

Didn't I just say that?

The presidents and kings of the Arab world agree with their people, it seems, but do not wish them to express the views they themselves hold.

Actually, I think the leaders of those countries just aren't really big on expression in general. Or any other basic human rights.

True, 200,000 Syrians protested against the war in Damascus. But no one protests in Syria unless they are in accord with their government, which means that this particular "popular" protest was arranged by the Arab Socialist Baath Party of Syria. But at least the Syrians did not carry, as their neighbours in Beirut did, portraits of Saddam Hussein. For in Arab capital cities, there is a special problem. Repeatedly, Arab opposition to war is trammelled up with Arab support for the Iraqi dictator.

How embarrassing for them. [Snip some irrelevant stuff.]

Sayed Nasrallah [the head of the Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla army] also deplored the fact that "the greatest Muslim demonstration in history" – the gathering of two million Muslim pilgrims at Mecca for the Haj – had not used the slogan "Death to America"

I'm confused -- what happened to "Islam means peace"?

or "No to War".

Hey, Islam does mean peace. I guess if Hizbollah is saying "No to War", then that's not really a gold AK-47 in the fist on their main page...

Nasrallah also accused "certain" Arab regimes of "supporting the war or approving of it in secret". And, of course, we all know who they are.

Who? Who are they? Who and Who and WHO who who Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

And if you missed it the first time around, don't miss this MiSTing of Amiri Baraka's poem.

Not content to march in major cities, they also march in fictional cities.

The international community had little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

The United States has patiently worked to preserve UNSCOM as Iraq has sought to avoid its obligation to cooperate with the inspectors. On occasion, we've had to threaten military force, and Saddam has backed down.

Faced with Saddam's latest act of defiance in late October, we built intensive diplomatic pressure on Iraq backed by overwhelming military force in the region. The UN Security Council voted 15 to zero to condemn Saddam's actions and to demand that he immediately come into compliance.

...

So Iraq has abused its final chance.

As the UNSCOM reports concludes, and again I quote, "Iraq's conduct ensured that no progress was able to be made in the fields of disarmament.

How many final chances can the Security Council give?

By the way, this is from a 1998 speech by Clinton. Link via Tim Blair.

There's an amusing but very polite argument in the comments to this Reason blog post. I've never really read the writing of libertarians at play before.

For what it's worth, I'd have to agree with James. Both a) and c).

Still, it's a sad story. Smoking pot is stupid, but it's not the kind of stupid that you expect to die of.

I did a bit more research on the powers of the Finnish President. It turns out that they used to be quite large -- selection of the Prime Minister, selection of candidates at several levels of the civil service, command of the military. This I read as a legacy of the charismatic leaders of the White forces in the Finnish civil war of 1917-19.

This all changed with the Constitutional reform of 2000. The President is no longer in charge of the military. She (Finland's current president is a woman) no longer appoints the PM, and cannot ask for the PM's resignation. The effect is a regression to the European norm. Westminster style, as Colby calls it.

I think it's a pity.

I've just finished reading a long New York Times article about a disabled-rights lawyer and her conversations with Peter Singer, the controversial Princeton ethicist. Link via Mark Shea, with the excellent summary:

Reminds me of Lewis' account of a pastor he knew who once saw Hitler in the flesh. Someone asked, "What did he look like?" The pastor replied, "He looked as all men do: like Jesus." What marks the woman in the story off from Singer is that she can see humanity in a monster while he cannot see humanity in a human being.

Suppose you have a compilation process that consists of three sequential phases. The first phase is totally under your control and is linearly parallelizable. The second phase is partly under your control and is partly parallelizable. The third phase is not under your control and is not parallelizable.

Question: should you upgrade your build system (1GB RAM, Pentium IV 1.6GHz) to a parallel machine?

Sadly, in our case, the answer is no. Although we occasionally run a large (5 hour) build, the best-case parallelization would reduce that to only 2:40 on two processors and 1:40 on four. And we're unlikely to get best-case parallelization. A more reasonable estimate is 3:00 on 2 and 2:00 on 4.

The initial, fully parallelizable task takes 80 minutes. The final non-parallelizable task takes 1 hour. The rest of the task -- the main compilation -- is 2 1/2 hours plus. It would take significant work to make this phase safe for parallel execution.

Steven Den Beste has a typically long and insightful post on France and Germany's behavior towards the US. Towards the end he quotes Mark Tran in The Guardian:

In the worst case scenario, France would present the US with the awful predicament of having to override the nearest thing there is to a world cabinet.

Honestly, I never thought of the UN Security Council as a "cabinet". A cabinet is a council of political advisors. Advisors are subordinates. Implicitly, then Mr. Tran must be saying that the United States is the de facto leader of the UN and the rest of the Security Council are only its advisors.

I'm American, and I'm in favor of the war, and even I find that claim hard to swallow.

Perhaps the idea of a cabinet is different on the far side of the Atlantic. This feeds into den Beste's argument that the underlying problem is misunderstanding.

I know of no other country in which there is a separation of powers as there is in the U.S. The democracies of Europe are parliamentary democracies on what I would call the British model. "The government" means the majority party in parliament, or the set of parties which form the governing coalition. The Prime Minister is the head of the majority party or of the main party in the coalition.

Some European countries (for example, Finland and the Czech Republic) have a separately-elected executive. In both of these, the position is called the Presidency. But typically this person has only ceremonial duties, similar to those required of the monarch of England or Norway.

On paper, the Prime Minister in a parliamentary system wields an enormous amount of power. In practice, though, these systems do not rapidly degenerate into dictatorships. There is a check on the PM's power -- it's his cabinet, and ultimately the rank-and-file MPs who make up the government.

Usually, to become Prime Minister, a party leader has to do significant horse-trading with other members of his party. This usually involves the assignment of "plum" ministerial portfolios (cabinet positions) to political enemies or at least rivals. Thus we find Joschka Fischer, a Green, in the cabinet of Germany's Social Democrat PM Gerhard Schroeder. And we see that Jean Chretien's most likely successor as PM of Canada is Chretien's longtime political rival Paul Martin, formerly minister of Finance.

You know when trouble is brewing in a parliamentary government when members of the cabinet are publicly disagreeing with the PM. Cabinet members have influence in their party; if a cabinet member leaves the government, his followers will be annoyed. Prime Ministers can face a party revolt, where the members can call a leadership vote and replace the PM -- or even call a vote of no confidence, causing the government to fall and requiring new elections to be held.

The US system is different. To summarize the US system for foreign readers: the executive branch of government, which includes the military, the federal police agencies and most regulatory agencies, is under the control of the President. The legislative branch of the government -- the Congress, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate -- makes laws, and that's it.

In the US system, once the President is elected, his position is secure for four years. (Barring impeachment, of course; but that's hard to do.) There's still some horse-trading in the selection of cabinet members, and payoffs to loyal factions in the party. But a cabinet member's political relevance in the US is insignificant, really. A cabinet member who disagrees with administration policies too publicly and too often will be asked to resign; the government will continue without him. There's no embarrassment in the President overriding a cabinet member: the President is in charge, and the cabinet member is the advisor.

Which brings me back to the initial quote. Let's have it again:

In the worst case scenario, France would present the US with the awful predicament of having to override the nearest thing there is to a world cabinet.

Suppose it were true that the UN Security council functions as the cabinet to a world government. What would this mean?

From the US perspective, that's a non-predicament. (What's France's portfolio, anyway? Don't say primates capitulards.) France, UN cabinet minister for whatever, says no on invading Iraq; and the US (leading) overrides.

Of course, from the European perspective, it is indeed embarrassing. There is open disagreement in the world cabinet. France, a senior minister, may not oppose a "government" initiative -- perhaps the leader (the U.S.) will fall from power. Certainly, in this view, the U.S. would lose face.

In fact, the UN Security Council is nothing like a cabinet in either the European sense nor the American sense. The UN will never be a government because it doesn't have a leader, or a legislature, or an executive arm capable of fulfilling the main duties of a government (hint: does the UN have a credible monopoly on force?) So comparing the UNSC to a world cabinet is nonsensical.

But it does highlight a difference in the American and European perspectives on this situation. And it helps to explain why France thinks France is more important that we think France is.

We're very good at disinfecting. Which is to say, we're not very good at preventing the development of mold, so we get a lot of practice disinfecting.

What I'm trying to say is, we're out of bleach.

Partly it's the brewing: I need to sterilize the buckets and all the glassware (actually it's plastic, but the term sticks), and all of the bottles. I generally make a bleachy, soapy, TSP-y sinkful of water every time I brew or bottle.

Partly it's the composting. We got a composter late this fall -- right before the ground froze, in fact. So outside our back door is a large plastic container filled with kitchen garbage, decomposing very slowly.

And with the cold and the snow, nobody wants to step outside with the bowl of compost and add it to the composter until the bowl is full. That can take over a week. Once the bowl is emptied, we discover the mold that's started to grow at the bottom of the container.

And on the subject of our housemate, I will say only this: she treats reusable containers as if they were write-only media.

As I said, we're out of bleach. I mentioned this to my wife, and she asked, "Can we get name-brand bleach this time?"

Name brand sodium hypochlorite? What, does it come with extra neutrons?

This is my first test post with XEmacs blogger mode. With luck, I'll be able to achieve two things I wasn't able to do before:

First, I'll be able to check my spelling before I post.

Second, I'll be able to blog without my wife seeing the tell-tale Movable Type interface screens.

Oops! Gave the game away.

Let's see how this works.

Today I fixed and maintained some internal web pages and wrote a few scripts that I've been wanting to write for a while. This is deeply satisfying to me.

First, I wrote a server that sits on my desktop machine (Windows XP) and listens for URL's. When it gets a URL, it opens that URL in a browser. Then I wrote a client that sends URL's to the server from our firewall/mail host.

The upshot is that when I read mail in my preferred environment (vm under XEmacs), I can move point onto a URL in an e-mail message, hit RET, and the URL opens in an Internet Explorer window on my desktop.

Almost as though I was reading my mail in Outlook, sneer the Outlook zombies.

Almost. Except without the security risks.

Second, I wrote a server that sits on a windows machine and listens for requests. It understands two commands. GET makes it dump the contents of the clipboard. SET makes it set the contents of the clipboard to whatever you pass in after the "SET".

Then I wrote a cgi script that sits on our internal web server. I can GET the clipboard from any of our windows desktop machines and then copy that to the clipboard of any other machine.

This is something akin to the Holy Grail for us. What it means is, I can say to my wife, "Hey, check out this site." And she can grab it from my clipboard. Or while we're coding, suppose I'm driving; she can find a code snippet and send it to my clipboard and then I can paste it into whatever I'm doing.

Also I fixed the 'cvs annotate' feature of cvsweb, and made the revision numbers in the left margin be links, because that was cool and I could do it easily.

Excuse me, though. I have to go read 'OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today' e-mails. I'm still enjoying not having to select, reconstitute, and paste the damned URL's.

So now I've given up on pricing Windows XP Server -- apparently, it's ceased to exist, or never existed in the first place.

So I'm trying to price Windows 2000 Server. And this is so difficult that Microsoft has a web page titled How To Buy Windows 2000. I have reduced the process to three easy steps, presented IRS tax-form style:

1. Calculate your net worth. Enter it on line 1.

2. If the amount on line 1 is less than zero, STOP. You may not buy Windows 2000.

3. If the amount on line 1 is more than zero, write a check in that amount and send it to Microsoft. We will send you one Windows 2000 server license.

Seriously, though, WTF is up with the CAL's? Do I need one to connect to an IIS process running on the server, or just to connect to file sharing/print sharing/RAS/terminal services?

Jeez, I understand why people get excited about free software. You just waste less time figuring how to license things.

Colby's heat, phone, and -- most importantly -- DSL are out, prompting him to dizzy heights of irony:

9:33 am We have heat! And I'm broke. But we have heat! Not only will I never take heat for granted again, I'll never even take the concept of taking things for granted for granted. What other pleasures of civilization am I failing to appreciate sufficiently? Hot water from a tap! Nicotine! Deodorant! Corn shavers! Telephones! ...oh, right.

Unfortunately, I have to pretend this isn't a joke so I can ride one of my favorite hobbyhorses. Everyone with a sense of humor, please duck out now.

...

Right.

I had this conversation a couple of times with Peace Corps volunteers who said things like "I'll never take running water/flush toilets/24-hour convenience stores for granted again."

Modern conveniences exist so you can take them for granted. In fact, you only receive their full benefit when you take them for granted.

If you don't take these things for granted, if you fall down on your knees and thank Edison every time you flick on a lightswitch, what kind of pathetic moron will you be? Our advanced society is about taking these things for granted: that our utilities will work, that the water will flow, that the bread will be delivered to the stores, that the waste will disappear from the cans in back of my house.

These things don't happen by magic, to be sure. It is some poor schlub's job to keep the sewers running. But that schlub is getting paid adequately for the unpleasant aspects of the job, so he does it, so I don't have to worry about it.

The time I don't spend worrying about sanitation, I can spend doing productive work and causing the Canadian economy to grow. (Go Team!) Or posting here. But I can only have that security by taking civlization for granted.

It makes me want to tear my hair out.

All I want is to price a Windows XP server, OK?

Because the client's bug database, FogBugz, runs on Windows. And uses Microsoft's crap web server, IIS. But it's okay security-wise, cause it's behind a (Linux) firewall.

I should never have recommended this thing in the first place. I knew when I recommended it that you can't run more than one server program per Windows machine. Windows can't handle it.

I even knew that Microsoft still doesn't let you have more than 10 inbound connections on their allegedly professional OS line (NT, 2000 Pro, XP Pro). After all, it's tradition.

But now they want to know how much it would cost to "upgrade to" (read "get a") server OS without the 10-connection limit.

And farging Microsoft won't tell me!

I go to their website and look for servers and I find this page, which is useless, so I click through to this page mostly about server programs. No thanks, I want server OS's. Oh wait, there it is down at the bottom: Windows Server 2003. Click.

ARGH! "Microsoft Windows Server 2003 is now available for customer preview."

YOU BASTARDS!!!

I KNOW YOU SHIPPED SOMETHING CALLED WINDOWS XP SERVER, DAMMIT! NOW TELL ME HOW MUCH IT COSTS!

This is Linus's revenge on me for recommending FogBugz over Bugzilla.

Derek Lowe doesn't do quantum:

Yep, it's true. I've got a lot more quantum in my head than someone picked randomly out of the phone book, but by no definition am I a quantum mechanics guy.... the best way to make an organic chemist immediately turn the page of a journal article is to use the phrase "consider the Hamiltonian." No, thank you.

Which is fine, since big organic molecules give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. I was okay as long as the correct answer to every question was "use a Grignard reagent" -- that was the end of first semester organic. But in second semester organic they started introducing cycloadditions and rearrangements and all sorts of bizarre named reactions.

I turned away into the pure clean world of quantum chemistry. Four atoms is the right size for a molecule. Ten or so -- that's pretty big. Molecular weight over 100? Sorry, not my department.

The funny thing is that in quantum chemistry I had no difficulty reconciling my belief with my work. I found quantum mechanics so weird that it didn't seem a stretch to believe in Creation. I mean, if God created electrons -- and they behave like that -- then why shouldn't He create the earth with built-in fossils?

The Beck's Dark is utter crap. Not even a frozen glass can extinguish the lager-y aftertaste. The best thing about it is the fact that the bottle is not screw-top, which means I can bottle my home-brew into some twelve-ouncers next time I brew.

On the other hand, the Big Rock Alberta Stout is holding up its end. I'll definitely get that one again. What is it with these Canadians? Do they only like yellow beer? (If so, that's something in common with Jonah Goldberg.)

After last month's last-minute workfest, we've decided to keep better track of our hours, so I wrote a script to keep track of time worked in this month, hours left, number of workdays, etc. It turns out that my wife and I have differing interpretations of suffcient progress towards the goal (40 hour work weeks), so the script spits separate lines for each of us: "Sam thinks we are ON GOAL."

And I'm ripping the rest of our CD's. It finally became more convenient for me to use ripped tracks than to change CD's for the all-important background music for our code-a-thon. Once that crossover happens, it doesn't make sense to wait any longer.

Unfortunately this means I have to come to terms with the eclecticity of my music tastes. I'm a right-winger, and my favorite band is Midnight Oil. Uh-oh.

A great article on rent control in New York, in the New York Post. Obviously (the Post is a right-wing paper) the article is against, but it contains some interesting history. Rent control was instituted in New York as a wartime measure, but subsequently socialists lobbied for permanence.

The law actually stipulates the "wartime emergency" can be lifted if vacancy rates ever reach 5 percent, but rent control prevents them from ever reaching that level.

Indeed.

Rent control was one of the reasons we decided not to rent in Berkeley when we were attending grad school at UCB; rent control had made the rents too high. Luckily, California abolished rent control so eventually the apartment market in Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Monica will return to normal.

Dave Kopel brings up a feature of the new tax plan that I hadn't heard of in his Media Analysis Column

"Tax plan aids small firms buying SUVs" announced the Post, while the News proclaimed "A boon for SUV-buying firms."

Of course the tax plan says nothing about SUV's. It just increases the Section 179 limit. Section 179 can be used to expense any depreciable asset -- a car, computer, desk, photocopier, whatever.

Here's how it works: if you have a small business (less than $200,000 annual profit), you may write off up to $24,000 in depreciable assets immediately, provided they are used at least 50% for business purposes. As your profit exceeds the $200,000 cap, your section 179 amount is reduced dollar-for-dollar.

Never heard of it? It doesn't exist in Canada. If there's one thing I wish Canadian tax law had, it's Section 179-type expensing.

In 2002, the limit was $24,000. In 2003 it was supposed to rise to $25,000. Bush's plan triples that.

And it's a very clever thing, too, because it will stimulate small business to consume more. I would certainly consider buying a company car if I could fully expense the purchase price.

Joel on Software discusses binary search as a debugging technique:

The next thing I tried was a method I learned from Gabi at Juno: the old binary search method. Before we started work on this release, publishing took 1'04". Today it takes 1'57". So I started checking out old versions of the source from CVS by date, rebuilding, and timing how long publishing took with each day's build.

Funny, because the other day we were evangelizing this to our cow-orkers. Our client's product has several major programs in it; we own one (the compiler) and co-own one (the viewer). In practice this means that nobody owns the viewer, and nasty little bugs are always creeping in. Pretty often we use binary search to isolate them.

Also interesting is Joel's backup hell story. Our client RAID's their CVS server now, but they didn't used to. One time the CVS repository got lost (actually, I blew it away by accident), and we restored from the offsite backup (rsync to my server) and I had forgotten the argument to rsync which deletes the files... anyway, Joel's story resonates with my experience.

And his conclusion seems valid too, which is a pisser. I don't want to upgrade all our (read both our) Windows workstations to XP Pro just so I can get RAID.

Britain surrenders; commercial business jockeys for position in the "cannabis user" market, The Guardian reports:

The Government has announced that cannabis will be 'downgraded' to a class C drug next summer making arrest and prosecution for possession less likely. The move follows a controversial experiment in Lambeth, south London, where police attention focused on hard drug users and suppliers rather than cannabis smokers.

My first irrelevant thought was: Does any user really call it cannabis? Reporters and bureaucrats, sure, but real users? All the pot-smokers I know called it weed, but that was in Southern California.

And my second irrelevant thought was: will Colby Cosh object? If justifying Christmastime spending sprees as being "good for the economy" is anathema to him, how about the Guardian's line "Could cannabis smokers be the unlikely saviours of the British economy?"

Don't buy government bonds -- smoke a bowl for our GI's!

I'm not sure these are the freedoms they died to protect.

Went to a new liquor store today -- around 78th and Calgary Trail North, I guess it's called Strathcona Liquor Store. They had a better beer selection than any I've seen in Edmonton. Still no Hophead. I asked; he said he could bring it in for me in cases if I wanted it.

I got two kinds of dark beer: Beck's dark and Big Rock Black Amber Ale.

I won't get the Beck's again. Too beery -- in a Miller Lite kind of way, you understand. A lager masquerading as an ale.

I will get the Black Amber again. It's a real stout (the label says, "Dark Alberta Stout"). The last allegedly dark Canadian beer I had was a serious disappointment. In the mug it's nicely black, but when you hold it up to the light it's a dark bloody red. A good solid taste with a creamy finish. Not overpoweringly hoppy, but bitter enough.

It will do.

The wires are reporting that space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry over Texas. The entire crew of seven is believed dead.

I built a model of Columbia when I was a kid. Then it seemed cool; now it just seems sad.

I heard early reports on the radio this morning. It filtered into my consciousness in the same way I learned about the Sept. 11th attacks.

The bad taste award goes to an unnamed CBC Newsworld reporter. Link via Den Beste.