Blue Sky On Mars

Take that, PowerPoint S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. (Nevermind the fact that Tufte says, rightly, that low content density presentations are not very useful)

The Nation presents 100 Facts about Bush’s administration, plus 1 opinion. I’ll echo the opinion here: Four more years of the Bush administration will be a disaster for America. John Kerry for President.

Is it just me, or is it a bit lame that Sys-Con’s XML Journal quoted most of Tim Bray’s article rather than just linking to it? Apparently, they couldn’t get Tim to actually write for them. Ick. By the way, NeoOffice/J is cool. It is quite nice to be able to run OpenOffice without running X. XML Journal is free to quote the following from my blog:

Sys-Con’s XML Journal is apparently out of ideas and in need of ad revenue, said Kevin Dangoor. Perhaps next time, they’ll consider creating their own content instead or at least using a “hyperlink”, which I hear will be popular any day now. Perhaps the article will even be something that’s actually about XML, rather than a Mac GUI on top an office suite.

It’s pretty well-known that the Oracle JDBC drivers pre-10g don’t support CLOBs that are larger than 4K. The 10g drivers do support large CLOBs (up to 4GB, I think) and even work with 9i, which is what we’re using. But there appear to be some creepy, made-for-Halloween bugs in there…
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Neotonic ClearSilver is an open source template system that is written in C, but with bindings for Java, Perl and Python. That’s right, a language-neutral template system, designed to be easier to grok and user for most things than XSLT. Though it’s new in my little universe, it’s not a new package. It is in use at Bloglines, Google Groups 2, and in other conspicuous places. Seems pretty high on the spiff-o-meter.

Want to make your Mac apps do cool stuff, but don’t like AppleScript? Pick up appscript and you can be writing your scripts in Python! Woohoo!

As much of a nailbiter as the 2000 election was, I don’t think there was anywhere near the passion that you see in this election. People are coming out of the woodwork and Leaning Into It and making their voices heard.

I’ve written anti-Bush sentiments here before. I don’t know that I’ve written any pro-Kerry sentiments. Here’s one: Kerry is the right man for the job. He’s come across well in the debates, he knows the ropes in Washington and his policies are sensible.

Either Kerry or Bush will be the president come January. Sure, you can protest the Washington establishment and vote for Nader or Badnarik. The real establishment to protest is the current administration that has done nearly all it could to make a mess these past four years. Vote Kerry to make a change.

Kerry has a lot stacked against him. I don’t think the stock market is going anywhere for a while (see Bull’s Eye Investing), and the Iraq situation is not going to be easy to disentangle. But, I am sure that Bush will do a far worse job. The next president will most likely choose at least one Supreme Court justice, and that’s another thing I don’t want to leave to Bush.

Vote Kerry on November 2nd.

On Saturday, we watched the second debate on the Replay. The third one is recording as I write this. At one point, Crysania (who is now 14 months old) looked over at the TV and saw Kerry talking. That was when she spoke her first political commentary. She said “eye” and “how” (how = hair in Crysania-speak). And she was absolutely correct! Kerry has eyes and hair!

When Bush came on, she didn’t really have anything to say.

Crysania has really picked up a remarkable vocabulary. I’ve lost count of how many words she knows. The number of distinct syllables she can pronounce is smaller than the number of words she knows, but you can usually tell what she means from the context.

The other day, she even said a phrase, “toe wet”, when her feet were dangling in the sink.

Sun has released hat: Java(tm) Heap Analysis Tool 1.1 (HAT), which lets you view a heap dump object graph in your web browser.