Saturday, January 17, 2004

Tease: I'm working on a really interesting RSS project to roll out in time for the Iowa caucus results on Monday night.  

BBC: "Democratic presidential candidates have been intensifying efforts to win over Iowa voters as they approach the first hurdle in the race for the White House." 

CandidateMap.com is "an impartial resource where voters can judge political candidates by the statements they make, as opposed to the image they craft." 

The Nation: "Sheen is an enthusiastic supporter of the former Vermont governor." 

BBC: "NASA is halting all space shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope -- a move that will put it out of action within four years." 

What do users want from RSS? 

What do users want from MSIE? 

A new look for the aggregators on the Harvard server. I swapped in the code I adapted from Radio, an improvement over the very simple one we had for Manila. More features, it looks neater, and is a better basis for evolution. However, since it's new, there may be problems, if so please report them here, and I'll look into it as soon as I can. 

Ooooh oooh Matt Mower has a great idea for making Radio's upstreaming work better. I never got around to this when I was working on it. It should work well. I'm not ready to be a guinea pig for it yet, but will be soon. Thanks for diggin in there Matt. 

I don't know why I didn't think to do this earlier, but I went looking for a reference on Domino's and abortion, and found this article that carefully explains that the story is false. The owner of Domino's gives to anti-abortion groups, not Domino's itself. This is an important distinction. Abortion is one of those moral conundrums where most of us think there's a clear answer, but we don't agree on what it is. That Tom Monaghan has a strong opinion and backs up his belief with contributions is not a problem for the pizza. The problem would be if, by buying a pizza from Domino's, I was making a contribution to a cause which I oppose. The power of the Internet. In the 70s all we had to go by was word of mouth, and if you tended to associate with people like yourself, you never heard a reasoned opposing viewpoint. It's fair to say that most people in Madison in the 70s, if not all, were in favor of abortion rights. Just asking a question about whether it was the company or the owner would likely get you yelled at. Really, I'm not kidding.  

Ross Karchner: How to Install Python. 

Later I'm going to want to refer to this disclaimer. I am neutral on the Democratic presidential candidates. I may have opinions, but in my technical work, they're simply not relevant. I believe in politically agnostic tools. For example, the Pentagon was a big customer of my outliners. I grew to really like them as people. However as an anti-war person in the 60s and 70s, who'd-a-thought I'd be creating tools for them in the 80s. Another example. I used to love Domino's pizza (in Madison it was the best you can get). Then I found out that a percentage of their profits were going to fight against abortion rights. I stopped eating Domino's pizza immediately. Why should pizza take a political stand like that? So, if a campaign wants to push the envelope, I'm there. It doesn't mean I support the candidate, or that I will vote for the candidate, or that next week I won't show up at their competitor to help them deploy the latest technology. I'll be there if they'll let me try out new ideas, to raise the bar, to help more people be involved in the election.