Blue Sky On Mars

The Associated Press gathered up White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s statements about the CIA leak. “On the record” can be a beautiful thing sometimes. As I understand it, government press conferences are public domain, so I’m including the quotes here:

Sept. 29, 2003

Q: You said this morning, quote, “The president knows that Karl Rove wasn’t involved.” How does he know that?

A: Well, I’ve made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place. … I’ve said that it’s not true. … And I have spoken with Karl Rove.

Q: It doesn’t take much for the president to ask a senior official working for him, to just lay the question out for a few people and end this controversy today.

A: Do you have specific information to bring to our attention? … Are we supposed to chase down every anonymous report in the newspaper? We’d spend all our time doing that.”

Q: When you talked to Mr. Rove, did you discuss, “Did you ever have this information?”

A: I’ve made it very clear, he was not involved, that there’s no truth to the suggestion that he was.

Oct. 7, 2003

Q: You have said that you personally went to Scooter Libby (Vice President
Dick Cheney’s chief of staff), Karl Rove and Elliott Abrams (National Security Council official) to ask them if they were the leakers. Is that what happened? Why did you do that? And can you describe the conversations you had with them? What was the question you asked?

A: Unfortunately, in Washington, D.C., at a time like this there are a lot of rumors and innuendo. There are unsubstantiated accusations that are made. And that’s exactly what happened in the case of these three individuals. They are good individuals. They are important members of our White House team. And that’s why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved. I had no doubt with that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it’s accurate before I report back to you, and that’s exactly what I did.

Oct. 10, 2003

Q: Earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

A: I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that’s where it stands.

Q: So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

A: They assured me that they were not involved in this.

Q: They were not involved in what?

A: The leaking of classified information.

July 11, 2005

Q: Do you want to retract your statement that Rove, Karl Rove, was not involved in the Valerie Plame expose?

A: I appreciate the question. This is an ongoing investigation at this point. The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, that means we’re not going to be commenting on it while it is ongoing.

Q: But Rove has apparently commented, through his lawyer, that he was definitely involved.

A: You’re asking me to comment on an ongoing investigation.

Q: I’m saying, why did you stand there and say he was not involved?

A: Again, while there is an ongoing investigation, I’m not going to be commenting on it nor is … .

Q: Any remorse?

A: Nor is the White House, because the president wanted us to cooperate fully with the investigation, and that’s what we’re doing.

Politics

There are plenty of CMS choices today (a great many of which are free). For many types of projects, a Wiki acts as a great CMS, because anyone can edit. Wikis are nice, too, because many of them keep a revision history. Lots of open source projects use Wikis with the idea that users of the project can contribute documentation.

The trouble with a wiki, though, is that even though a revision history is maintained there’s no way to sync up the wiki with the versions of the software people are using. Or, at least, there’s no way built in to the wiki to do so.

I was thinking that a CMS or wiki that stores its content in subversion may offer the benefit of subversion’s branching and tagging. Lo and behold, I find that there’s a CMS called Sitellite that can store content in subversion (or CVS, but why use CVS these days?)

It would be interesting to see if Sitellite actually lets you tag your content and present older versions in an organized manner…

Technology

Dave Winer points to Rebecca McKinnon’s roundup of reactions from Muslim bloggers to Thursday’s bombings in London. The reactions are what you’d expect (and hope for): sadness for those lost and anger at the terrorists. I’m curious about the reaction from “normal” Muslims around the world. Given the state of infrastructure, the standard of living, and government censorship in the Middle East and elsewhere, looking at reactions from bloggers will only give you the view of the well-educated and well-off. To really get a sense for how people feel about the situation (and how much popular support these terrorists have), we’d need to hear from the proverbial “man in the street” from Muslim nations.

Politics

If you’ve ever been curious what people think about paying for a “subscription” to a desktop application, look no further than Nick Bradbury’s announcement that FeedDemon will move to a subscription model.

I’ve thought about this a bit myself, and one of the early commenters summarized my feelings on the subject well: something like internet-based synchronization (which NewsGator offers) is a *service* and charging that by subscription makes sense. Something like FeedDemon is a software *product* and you expect to be able to use that version of the product forever.

Expectations can certainly change. I know that Microsoft, which has saturated its main markets, is dying to hook everyone up on a subscription model. But, after 20 years of software-as-a-product purchasing, people need someone to come up with a good incentive to change.

I can certainly understand what NewsGator is driving at: they are setting themselves up as a services company and FeedDemon is one of their client tools. Makes good sense. They just need to figure out how to take care of the FeedDemon customers who weren’t angling for NewsGator’s services when they bought it.

Software Business

With the ascent of AJAX, many people are writing or considering writing more code to run in browser than they had in years. JavaScript, once left for dead as being too incompatible and impossible to debug, is now being viewed as something usable.

Firefox/Mozilla has certainly helped the renaissance. With an honest-to-goodness debugger, plus a super-handy web developer toolbar, you can really get a view into once going on. Selenium provides a mechanism to run tests in-browser, so that you can get all of the benefits of an automated test suite making sure your code works in different browsers.

All of this recent goodness is causing people to start approaching JavaScript as a real programming language. However, JavaScript is still implemented a bit differently between browsers, and its object model is definitely different from what most people are used to. Ian Bicking wrote about his troubles working with Prototype.js’s extended object model. Bob Ippolito has been writing all month about JavaScript warts when it comes to real programming.

If you take a look at the kinds of things that Bob is implementing, you’ll get the idea that Bob is trying to do real development in-browser, turning it into a real layer in an application. Given that people have made sophisticated email programs and spreadsheets in JavaScript, people have certainly done this before. But, most of the scripts I’ve seen have been focused on whizzy special effects.

So, to the question then: how much should you do with JavaScript? For just about any application, I would say that the answer is “as much as you can”. Assuming you don’t have some weird requirement to support Netscape 4.x or IE on the Mac, and I feel sorry for you if you do, you can reasonably do quite a bit in JavaScript. The limiting factor will likely be JavaScript performance.

JavaScript is slow. Don’t believe me? Check out something computationally intensive like encryption or trying doing an XSL transform without native browser support (you’ll have to use Safari for that, to see what I mean).

The benefit to using JavaScript can be huge, though. Even though it is slower than the language being used on the server side, that work is being done off of your server. If you’re careful about how much data you feed to the browser to process, quite a bit of the formatting work can be offloaded there. And, if you take advantage of native code as much as possible, you can even handle fairly sizable chunks of data.

Given the value in doing JavaScript today, a framework like Bob Ippolito’s MochiKit that extends JavaScript’s object model can seriously ease the burden of putting together robust code that runs in-browser. JavaScript is definitely entering a new era.

Software Development

Not that I have time to do so these days, but when the time arises, Billy Reisinger’s The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza will be there to help me make a dandy pizza. I’m looking forward to his deep dish installment.

Random

I’ve been very quiet about Zesty News the past few weeks. The reason for this is simple: I don’t like pitching vaporware. When I announced Zesty News at the end of April, I had a specific distinct bug list that I was going to tackle before release of the alpha, so I felt fine in announcing it. I don’t regret having done so, because I also wanted to put the name out there.

I’ve worked with some people who liked to emphasize that “plan is a verb”. You don’t make a plan and then stick to it rigidly, even as the world around you changes. In May, I made a couple of choices that have delayed the Zesty News software a bit. I’ll write more about that later.

I’m going to remain generally quiet about Zesty News at this point, until I ship the alpha.

Blazing Things

For anyone out there that doesn’t read Slashdot: Netcraft: PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits. This includes WordPress and Drupal, both of which I am using at present. Time to go update!

Technology

I’ve been running the Google ads for three weeks now. Each week, my revenue from the ads has doubled over the previous week.

Given that, in just a few weeks, my Google ad revenue will be larger than Google’s current revenue. Early next year, I’ll be able to buy the whole U.S. Ahh, the joys of exponents.

Last week, 50% of my traffic came from one article that got some wide circulation in the Python community. I think that has something to do with last week’s doubling, and I have a feeling this week will be a bit smaller.

Funny

The folks behind the swell Kai’s Power Tools graphics filters have a Windows and Mac painting program called ArtRage. And it’s free!

ArtRage is a painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools.

Sounds reminiscent of Fractal Design Painter, which is probably beefier, but is definitely not free.

Technology