Skip introduction & navigation

Web Design | Views & Rants | Reviews | Contact | Links | About

I finally bit the bullet and started the weblog. I can’t guarantee it will be updated every day, but I will update it as frequently as possible.

Saturday 27th October

I know the weblog hasn’t been updated as much as usual recently. There are three reasons: software trouble (hopefully fixed), a light touch of ill health, and, well, this is Hallowe’en season — party time, in other words; I’m not geek enough to give that up for a keyboard.

Tom Ridge has confirmed that the anthrax sent to the Capitol was very pure, very concentrated and very deadly.

At this morning’s news conference with Mr. Ridge, Maj. Gen. John Parker, commander of the Army laboratory that is analyzing both the Daschle anthrax and a letter sent to The New York Post, said the Post anthrax was "clumpy and rugged." One of his scientists, he said, described it as "looking like Purina Dog Chow."

But the Daschle anthrax, General Parker said, was "fine and floaty."

It is that fine and floaty quality that makes the Daschle anthrax so dangerous. The germs can hang, invisibly, in the air and get absorbed in the lungs of those exposed to it, causing pulmonary anthrax, the most deadly form of the disease.

The Washington Post reports that the FBI and CIA suspect the anthrax attacks are not the work of bin Laden’s group but are likely to be by one or more home-grown extremists in the United States.

I’m assuming this is a joke. I could be wrong.

The interior minister of the Czech Republic has confirmed that Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, in Prague in April.

The new USA act contains a four-year limit on some of the new powers granted to law enforcement agencies to carry out surveillance — but many of the controversial new powers have no expiration date:

After the president signs the measure on Friday, police will have the permanent ability to conduct Internet surveillance without a court order in some circumstances, secretly search homes and offices without notifying the owner, and share confidential grand jury information with the CIA.

Also exempt from the expiration date are investigations underway by Dec. 2005, and any future investigations of crimes that took place before that date.

MSN has relented, properly this time, and users of other browsers can now get in to MSN — no more being locked out and getting insulting and inaccurate messages. Opera, of course, are pleased. Maybe a bit OTT, but definitely pleased. Now, if only they could make MSN actually worth visiting.…

Talking of the scum of the Earth — no, no, sorry, I meant the Army of Satan — no, no, I mean Microsoft — let’s just call ‘em Glory, m’kay? Anyway, here’s a look at XP shorn of Glory’s spin:

More than anything else, XP reminds me of a tourist trap. You arrive in a foreign city, and a handsome stranger walks up to you and says he will show you around the city. He offers to take you to the very best shops and restaurants. But you soon realize that he is taking you only to places that are owned by his relatives or by someone who gives him a kickback.

You know how mad you get when you realize you’re being taken for a ride? That’s the feeling I got using XP.

Friday 26th October

Last night’s Channel 4 News carried a report that suggested Osama bin Laden has the capacity to make nuclear weapons, but not to deliver them. A Downing Street spokesman said, We have always known that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have the motivation to acquire nuclear weapons but you should be very sceptical about any suggestion that he could develop such a capacity. [Watch the report.] Today’s Times picks up on the story and notes:

However, some are convinced bin Laden already has a nuclear capability. According to a book about the terrorist leader, The Man Who Declared War on America, Chechen rebels facilitated the sale of nuclear suitcase bombs in the late 1990s from a range of former Soviet republics including Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia.

The CIA has stated that a trace of anthrax has been detected in a mail-handling area at its headquarters. The anthrax which targetted the Capitol was a more pure, deadly strain than that sent to media outlets. The spores may also have been coated to help them remain suspended in the air. There’s no evidence of any connection with the bio-weapons programmes in the former Soviet Union, but there does seem to be plenty to worry about there. The USA is, though, building up a case against Iraq.

The US Senate passed anti-terrorism laws today given extensive new powers to law enforcement agencies. The Independent suggests that the request for special forces troops from the UK and Australia is because the first ground operation by US troops came very close to going diasastrously wrong. John McCain, a US senator, expresses what is almost certainly the majority view in the USA today: War is a miserable business. Let’s get on with it.

With an annual budget of more than $300 billion, shouldn’t the Pentagon already know how to combat terrorism… ? Well that’s a good question, and you would hope the answer would be a big yes — but in the weirdest piece of news in weeks, the US Defense Department is asking people to come up with ideas on how to defeat difficult targets, conduct protracted operations in remote areas, etc. Seriously. No idea what the prize is.…

I really wish someone would print a ten volume dictionary containing nothing but definitions of the term "anti-competitive" and throw it at the heads of Bill Gates and the Fozzy Bear soundalike, Fester Addams lookalike Steve Ballmer.

Windows XP has launched. Oh, be still my heart. MSN apparently has decided to give its sites a makeover to look more XP-oid. Trouble is, users of non-Microsoft browsers are kinda stuffed: they get a page which tells them:

If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that you are using will not render MSN.com correctly. Additionally, you’ll see the most advanced functionality of MSN.com only with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or MSN Explorer. If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below.

• Internet Explorer for Windows
• Internet Explorer for Macintosh
• MSN Explorer for Windows

It would be understandable if they were talking about third generation browsers, or that blundering Transylvanian monstrosity that is Netscape 4. But no, you get those messages if you turn up using Mozilla’s most recent build, or Opera (or, yes, Some Versions of Netscape), you get told to "upgrade", which only goes to show they don’t know what the fucking word means.

They claim to be doing this because they support standards and some browsers can’t handle the full standards, particularly with XTHML. Except that Mozilla (and maybe Opera too, but it’s a while since I used it — I just don’t like it) is actually more compliant with the W3C standards than any of Microsoft’s offerings. Oh, and except that MSN’s site doesn’t validate as adhering to the standards anyway.

Welcome to Browser Wars II.

Sunday 21st October

The Shrub Has apparently authorised the CIA to use "lethal force" (which I guess he thinks is an impressive euphemism for "kill") to get rid of bin Laden and other leaders of al Quaeda. This is appalling. I can’t think of anything more likely to ensure bin Laden’s safety.

It’s all very well for the US government to proscribe terrorist organisations with the aim of stigmatising and isolating them, but the effectiveness of that when the organisations have web sites is questionable. Yes, some of them are hosted in the USA.

An American geologist who has spent years in Afghanistan believes he has recognised the location of bin Laden’s hideout from the video released on 7th October:

He said the cave was typical of the Paktia or Paktika provinces of the Katawaz basin, about 210 kilometres (130 miles) south of the Afghan capital.

Dr Shroder added, however, that the quality of the video was too poor to be absolutely certain.

So that’s definitely maybe, then? Or is it maybe definitely?

I remarked almost a week after the WTC attacks on the absence of humour, particularly sick humour, in response to the events. The phalanxes of the determinedly tasteful never understand this, but sick, black humour is a way to cope with awful events. It’s good then to find it resurfacing. For example, in a bookshop in the centre of town I was with a friend when we spotted, amidst the 2002 calendars, a New York calendar. I picked it up and noted there were two pictures of the World Trade Centre in it. The immediate reply came back: "What — before and after?"

Of course, what has been in the news this week is not the spontaneous absence of humour in the aftermath of the attacks, it’s the concern that new legislation may ban humour on religious subjects. The Sunday Herald prints a robust defence of humour by Iain Bell.

War is stupid because the human race, in the main, is stupid. The saving grace of the species is that it is well aware of the fact and happy, most of the time, to say so. But when it denies itself the use of that faculty half the battle has already been lost. When you cannot point out an obvious absurdity — that America is now frantically scouring Afghanistan for anything left standing that might be worth a bomb — you are doing a disservice to yourself and to your society. Rowan Atkinson’s main worry — religion and laws on religion — is a joke with several possible punchlines, most of which we already know. Last week Downing Street attempted to mock the comedian by arguing that it understood the difference between a few laffs and incitement to hatred perfectly well, but it did not explain how Salman Rushdie might have survived a Blunketting, or how Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, that oft-banned masterpiece, would have fared from the attentions of outraged sky pilots of every stripe.

It isn’t just humour as normal that is threatened at the moment, but conduct of civil life as normal. The Telegraph has picked up on the suppression (not by the government but by the liberal US press itself) into the question of who actually won the US presidential election.

What happened in September was appalling. However, it is quite wearing to hear Americans talk as though either no one else has ever suffered at the hands of terrorists or that this shouldn’t happen to Americans, as though it would be all right if, say, the aeroplanes had targetted Canary Wharf.

James Rubin, former assistant secretary of state, spent quite a bit of the first few days after the atrocities denying that there was any connection between America’s foreign policy over the past few decades and the terrorist attacks. Now he’s whingeing because some people in Britain think that Americans are overreacting to the threat of anthrax.

Let me see: one person has died, a total of seven people have actually been infected, but otherwise everyone exposed is healthy and in no danger. Yet Americans are rushing to buy ciprofloxacin, in at least one case going to Mexico to buy it. If that doesn’t suggest overreaction, what does? That article in Time talks about all the common sense in the world not being able to stop the juggernaut of anthrax anxiety. That sure sounds like overreaction to me. This is what an American says:

Congress. What a bunch of pussies. An anthrax scare and they shut down WARTIME sessions for 4 days??? You’ve got to be fucking KIDDING me? And I voted for these people to represent me and protect my freedom? I am DISGUSTED. What a bunch of pansy-assed, soft mostly-white men.

On the other hand, you’ve got to feel sorry for the people who live on Anthrax Street.

While we’re talking about anthrax: Bayer, who manufacture Cipro, have been engaged in a patents lawsuit with Canadian company Apotex since 1996. The Canadian government has just given a contract to supply ciprofloxacin to Apotex.

What’s going to happen to the world now? How will everything work out? Slate considers good and bad possibilities. Some of it makes odd reading though:

By 2002, the United States will have adopted the model the British went to at the height of the IRA bombings. We will be on our way to having national identity cards, for example.

Despite the draconian inclinations of Straw and Blunkett, we still don’t have ID cards in the UK, and it’s not at all a certainty we ever will. I think I would trust the prognostications more if they showed better knowledge of the current world.

Churchill was well known to be a staunch supporter of Edward VIII, and there has been a general assumption that he remained favourably disposed towards the Duke of Windsor following the abdication. Apparently not. Letters still classified as "top secret" show a great deal of animosity towards the Duke. The real question, of course, is why Churchill’s letters to the Duke should be classified simply to protect the sensitivities of the pampered figureheads installed in Buckingham Palace, Clarence House, and so on.

If there is one sector making money out of the Net, it has to be the porn industry. Clearly aware of this, Hutchison 3G are planning to offer soft-core porn over mobile phones. I could be wrong, but I can’t see people rushing to pay for poor resolution images the size of a couple of postage stamps.

The recent appearance of Bert (and yes, I really had never heard of him before this) from Sesame Street on posters with Osama bin Laden led to the sad demise of the Bert is Evil site (I had time to see the Bert the Ripper page, which I liked). However, maybe Bert had another purpose in standing at bin Laden’s shoulder: perhaps Bert is not Evil.

Talking of Osama bin Laden: Osama, which means big cat, is a common name in the Middle East. Hence the unfortunate existence of a shop in Lawndale (Illinois, I think) called Osama Foods. Fortunately, the locals seem to be sensible and the owners are not being hassled.

People definitely are stupid. But most people aren’t this stupid. If you were inclined to buy drugs, make a list of people you wouldn’t try to buy them from. I’d bet a uniformed cop in a marked police car would have to be on that list; obviously not everyone would think so — hence the easiest drug bust in police history.