Now here is something unusual... an article that actually justifies one of my visual design decisions on my website. See... very light background colors actually make text easier to read because your computer screen is not paper; computer screens emit light that may be hard on your eyes especially when they are bright; they work that way, and a natural consequence is that you can read a computer screen even in total dark, but you cannot read a paper in the same condition.

A while ago I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout. I haven't mentioned it much since then here, but the switch has stuck. I've started another keyboard experiment as of yesterday. The Caps Lock key is effectively useless, and in a prime keyboard position. Some people like putting Control on that key, but I think that's because many keyboards actually had a Control key there, thus making it a habit, not a logical choice.

I semi-seriously considered doing NaNoWriMo, but I decided it wasn't a good idea to stack that on top of my other hobby programming projects I'm undertaking. I did get as far as the first sentence: Ph'rillar hated his name. I'm not sure if comedy-sci-fi is the best genre to NaNoWriMo, but hey, is there really a good genre? (Maybe if "hackneyed and cliched" is a genre...) Perhaps next year. Maybe with the new weblog system.

From the "poor timing" department w.r.t. my "not time to panic about civil liberties" post, Bush signed some sort of martial law law, which I have not had time to analyse, but certainly set the Slashhorde off. (Not that that takes much; the Slashhorde has the political acumen of a five year old; even when the horde is right, it's by accident.) Link goes to Slashdot because the summary seems to contain useful links that are down now (even a day after posting, some other site must be shutting it down, maybe Digg); you can try later.

I'm continuing work on my new weblog system, which should allow commenting and just generally modernize things. I've got the basic HTML rendering working, but I've got to write the RSS feed now, and categories aren't quite up yet. I really ought to scare-quote "write" because it's hardly worthy of the term. Throwing together a weblog with Django is pretty trivial. For instance, Django has a module for generating RSS so I won't really be "

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

This is a test of my weblog system. If you see this post, my transfer to my new host account has succeeded. My previous web host was a free account from a former coworker. It was a small account and I always tried to maintain a small footprint; static HTML pages, no dynamic features like a comment system, low bandwidth usage, etc. Unfortunately, I drew some fire from a website defacer and caused my former coworker some work.

A general comment I've wanted to post several places lately, especially after seeing this sort of thing: I'm all for alternate suggestions on how to deal with the problems of the world right now. I'd be absolutely stunned if our government (including not just the Bush Administration but also Congress) was handling everything optimally, just on general principles. But I see so few suggestions that don't boil down to:

Non-programmers should read this entire article to see the arguments presented in a neutral-to-you context. (Unless you have strong baseball opinions in which case the first bit may not be quite neutral.) Programmers should read this because it's true, even if you're not a Perl programmer.

I've learned to be careful about the definitions for the words I use. Our lives have become more complicated and even as our vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds it's still not enough. Ever finer and sharper distinctions must be drawn in order to convey the information; I can spend a good ten pages just defining "censorship" and "free speech". Today's word that is bothering me is the word "