Thursday, July 27, 2006

The Contest in America, by John Stuart Mill

This essay is the source of the often-seen quote:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.


The original has two entire sentences in the middle, which are normally edited out. Why?

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Friday, July 21, 2006

HTTP Made Really Easy

Written in 1997, which you might think about make it outdated, except when you remember that all this time later we're still using HTTP 1.1.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

MSN - News - 'Sixth Sense' Star in Hospital After Crash

Osment ... was driving a 1995 Saturn about 1 a.m. when the car collided with a brick pillar and flipped


A 1995 Saturn. That is one movie star who knows how to live below his means. (As a two-time Saturn owner, I'm allowed to diss them with impunity)

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Jakarta Tomcat Connector - AJPv13

This does not bode well..
This describes the Apache JServ Protocol version 1.3 (hereafter ajp13). There is, apparently, no current documentation of how the protocol works.

Monday, July 17, 2006

hatom - Microformats

hAtom is basically that carries (some of) the information of an Atom feed right in the attributes of XHTML... How did I miss this? This is like so my kinda thing.

Leaving W3C QA Dev. from Bjoern Hoehrmann

Via Zeldman.

Friday, July 14, 2006

The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs


James Bach’s Blog ? Blog Archive ? Should Developers Test the Product First?

(via TSS)
Many testers would advise the programmer to test the product himself, first. I have a different answer. My answer is: send me the product the moment it exists.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

SPACEWAR - Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.

Alan Kotok just died.

TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

It's written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive

Weblogs Forum - When Reuse Goes Bad

The contractor was no longer just trying to solve the customer's problem, they were trying to solve all problems that looked like it. So for that reason alone the project would have required 10x the original time and money.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Free Routing Number Search

Enter a bank routing number, find out what bank it is. For those of you who that are co-workers, yes this is what we call ABA numbers.

Saturday, July 01, 2006

to human misery!

Simpsons DVDs, beer, and a big bag of chips. The last refuge of the old married geek.