On Twitter I asked a question out of frustration about Afghanistan.

2 hours ago: "Does anyone have even a theory why we're still in Afghanistan? Even a paranoid one?"

Apparently people in my circle have been thinking about this!

silencematters: "The oil and gas pipelineand mineral deposits."

joemoreno: "In theory, you don't want a failed state that's a safe haven for unlawful activity. But, who signs the peace treaty?"

scootinater: "it's all about the poppy's!"

mrDarcyMurphy: "Too lazy to get out?"

anildash: "Maybe everyone is ready to leave, but the security line is just really slow?"

redeye: "Lithium."

tolles: "politicians are seldomly rewarded for losing a war."

arjunram: "cuz u continue to fund pakistan and by it the ISI."

mattburrows: "oil."

BF191: "Obama decided to buy his own Buick (Afghanistan) and rejected Bush's Caddy as no good (Iraq) gotta show cars are good."

AdamBagwell: "didn't some geological survey find that Afghanistan is sitting on insane amounts of precious metals?"

dkato: "keep unemployment numbers as low as possible? Skyrocket when vets and stop-lossed come home."

SimonZerafa: "There after that huge Lithium deposit they discovered recently; easier and quicker to extract and will make money "

Soulati: "If we leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is poised right now to zoom in and undo everything. It's a can't win, don't you think?"

Alt_010: "Something to do with Anchor Baby's I think."

mcarvin: "if there were no bad guys in Afg., the Military-Industrial Complex 2.0 loses a large part of it's raison d'etre."

Jason: "my guess is we are secretly deep into Pakistan (with their permission) and we need Afg. as cover for those operations."

kidmercury: "profit for war biz; profit for CIA drug running (check afghan heroin production); part of NWO agenda (world govt)"

justinlfowler: "Minerals."

null_ptr: "The bad guys (Taliban) are there. Left Iraq and went there/Pakistan."

matthovey: "re-read the Plan for a New American Century, Dave."

flowchainsensei: "Nuclear weapons."

carlacasilli: "They have things we want. Things like natural resources."

lakesunrise: "B/C there are no jobs for vets. Our economy can't handle the extra war-hardened soldiers. They'll be forced into idleness- scary."

briantroy: "I'm gonna go with winning elections and ego."

AndyBold: "Oil, again. Afghanistan is a major gateway to the sea in that area which is why Russia went in. Think oil pipes & Asian continent."

adamkmiec: "we used MapQuest for directions on how to get out?"

rbonini: "We have yet to find Bin laden?"

jeremyfelt: "Manifest Destiny (squared)"

 8/12/2010; 3:16:02 PM.   .

Here's the trip report on EveryTrail. 10.0 miles. 1.25 hours.

I rode up 8th Ave, cross town on 20th, joined the East River bike trail at Stuyvesant Point, went under the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, South Street Seaport, round the Battery, up the Hudson and across the Village.

There were signs of heavy rain most of the route, but I never got more than a few drops.

The heat wave is over, it's in the mid-70s. Perfect riding weather.

The pedestrians are the worst in Battery Park City, sometimes blocking the whole super-wide path with dogs and baby carriages, not moving. The best bike trail is just north of there, betw the top of Battery Park and 46th St. It's a straight shoot the whole way.

Today the leg pain and tiredness are gone, endorphins flowing make me happy!

 8/12/2010; 10:37:19 AM.   .

A few followups to recent programming pieces.

1. As a warmup project I added three new verbs to the OPML Editor glue script table for Flickr. Together they make it possible to easily download all the pictures in a Flickr group to a local disk.

2. There's a new realtime-over-the-Internet manager in the OPML Editor based on long polling and XML-RPC. I believe it's the foundation for instant RSS-like apps, and a chance to revisit all that's klunky or ineffective about RSS (notably how awkward subscribing is). There's very little code in this package, a good omen! You work hard for a very long time to find these nuggets. It's designed to be easily cloned, and I hope to start an open source project in the fall, to clone, document and evangelize it.

3. The realtime manager was developed for yet-another instance of the Instant Outliner. This one really is instantaneous, and should scale well. You'll find the code for it at builtins.io. (The code for the realtime manager is at builtins.realtime.)

4. Chuck Shotton took the tin-can-and-string idea and ran with it, not only implementing but also specifying a federatable social messaging app. I've worked with Chuck on and off for 15 years (gulp) and respect the hell out of him. I'd look carefully.

5. Had a fun, spirited phone talk yesterday with Blaine Cook, who works on realtime stuff for British Telecom and was one of the original guys at Twitter. I still think DNS is the right technology to manage identity, and can't support "activity streams" as long as it is Atom-only. Even so, there may be possibilities for connecting our work.

6. Not really a programming thing, but on Saturday, New York City is opening Park Avenue to bikers, runners and walkers (as it was last Saturday, and will be next Saturday). There are lots of related special events. If you're in the city it's a great idea to get out and get some blood flowing. It'll make you smarter! And it looks like the heat wave has broken just in time.

 8/12/2010; 6:02:37 AM.   .