I’m putting the finishing touches on Endurance Central. Basically the UI is done and all of the user functionality is complete, if not yet fully exposed. I have started to collect race data (the current data on the site is unreliable test data - I need to clear that out).
One of the last features that [...]

On the Mac, I use iTerm, an open source project, as my Terminal client. I don’t have any strong objection to Terminal, I haven’t really used it enough to tell. iTerm has tabs, I installed it the day I got my Powerbook, and customized to my needs. It has keyboard shortcuts to open terminals on [...]

This week both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have pointed fingers at the press for focusing on the bad news from Iraq. These attempts to salvage US public opinion in favor of Iraqi War and against President Bush follow on earlier effort by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to shape media coverage to [...]

Last week Andrew Sullivan was raising the issue of ex post facto claims that the speaker/writer knew Saddam did not have WMD. Examples here,here, here, and here.
The central nugget:
I’m now overwhelmed by how many people say they now opposed the war all along because they could see that the WMD issue was invalid. It’s amazing [...]

Our President is famous for the nicknames he bestows on those around him. Karl Rove is “Turd Blossum”, Condi Rice is “Guru”, Vladimir Putin is “Pootie-Poot.”
I’m in favor of censuring the President for authorizing criminal acts, but even if I weren’t, I’d find these more than a little creepy. The scatalogical and homoerotic overtones of [...]

My rule of thumb for analyzing an argument was anticipated by Wiio1 in the late 70’s.
My argument:
The likelihood of the conclusion of an argument being true is the product of the likelihoods of each statement used in reaching that conclusion being true.
Wiio’s conclusion from an inspection of each statement takes this my argument to its [...]

I found a bug in the acts_as_authenticated plugin. The activate method in User fails to update the user record when using both activate and 2-way reversible encryption. The symptom that I was is that @user.save was false in the controller.
It fails at this line:
update_attributes(:activated_at => Time.now.utc, :activation_code => nil)
This fails because there are a series [...]

Scarborough County seems to have jumped the shark. (It was a very little shark.)
In the February 13 Newsweek, Marc Peyser writes about Stephen Coubert:
He’s the host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” a takeoff of talk-show blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Joe Scarborough.
Newsweek and MSNBC are owned by the same company, and if you look [...]

I’ve been thinking over the past month more about experience, permanence and regrets.
The conventional wisdom is that in a person’s life, they make mistakes when they are young, which they regret, learn from and never do again.
This sounds great to me. Let’s encourage everyone to make as many mistakes as possible, then they [...]

The holidays are over. Happy New Year to everyone.
Our holidays were interesting on a number of fronts. I took a great number of pictures which I’ll try to put up on flickr soon.
My oldest daughter has recently acquired a number of tattoos. Over the holidays these were brought up a few times, always with [...]