Monday, May 10, 2004

PERMALINK

Our broken-record president It's always seemed as if President Bush had a bizarrely inhuman ability to latch onto a single idea or phrase or message and stick to it regardless of changes in circumstantial reality that discredited the idea. We saw this in action with his tax cuts, which, as Paul Krugman bore witness, began life as a way of disposing of the federal budget surplus and then got repurposed into an antidote to the recession after the economy went south. One policy -- fits all events! Now Will Saletan of Slate has prepared a remarkable chronological record of presidential quotations that demonstrates this phenomenon at its most damningly, painfully extreme. We've all heard, one time or another, Bush's boilerplate rhetoric about "Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms." As the other rationales for the Iraq war evaporated, this one, at least, seemed rock-solid: the U.S. invasion had shut down those torture chambers and rape rooms. This sounded great, until we learned to our horror and disgrace that in fact those enterprises had simply undergone a change of ownership. Go read Saletan's quotes, in which Bush and his men keep parroting the line about torture chambers even as the scandal of American-sponsored torture in Saddam's notorious old prison was grabbing headlines worldwide. No matter -- the old message just kept on trucking. On April 30 -- two days after CBS had broadcast its photos of Abu Ghraib -- Bush, like some malfunctioning android, was still saying: "And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq." Again, on May 3, he says essentially the same thing. The images that have much of the globe reeling were apparently unable to dislodge this message-of-the-day formulation from the president's cranium. In a struggle against a global enemy that demands the utmost of nimble flexibility on our part, we are cursed: our leader has a brain of clay. Once the mold is baked, the mind is set, there's no give. comment [] 11:11:03 PM | permalink

"Metadata for the warfighter" Yes, that was the actual title of a session at the Defense Department conference on software development I attended last month in Utah. It's taken me some time, but here's a column outlining some of what I found there -- including how "XML and Web services are crucial for protecting America." comment [] 11:07:20 PM | permalink

"Editing by committee" is a phrase that strikes terror in many writers' minds, but J.D. Lasica is unfazed. He's working on a book, Darknet, on a subject dear to my heart: "exploring the idea that digital technologies are empowering people to create, reuse and reinvent media." And now he's posting the book, chapter by chapter, on a wiki, which means that anyone can go in and edit the book. Take a look and wade in with your (metaphorical) red pen. comment [] 4:12:25 PM | permalink

Rip this joint For years I was a happy user of MusicMatch to organize and play my digital music collection, and I even paid the company for "lifetime upgrades" to its software. A few months ago MusicMatch did one of these "upgrades," apparently to support its new online music store, which I have no interest in, and somehow the software developers broke the product. It crashed on my Windows 2000 box, a lot. It froze, it coughed, it was generally unreliable. MusicMatch provides one of those "automatic update" services so I crossed my fingers and prayed that its programmers would fix the bugs fast. And to their credit, they took care of a lot of the problems. But one stubborn bug remained: I couldn't get the program to rip my CDs without freezing after one or two songs. Since my habit these days is to rip a CD as soon as I buy it, this was a disaster. This weekend I finally gave up on MusicMatch and decided to spend $20 on the latest Real jukebox, even though that meant changing habits. Sure enough, Real ripped my CDs just fine. Ironically, a day later MusicMatch updated itself again -- and fixed the ripping problem. Frustratingly, MusicMatch offers almost nothing in the way of serious, in-depth technical documentation on its Web site -- or if they do, I couldn't find it. Consumer software: still a mess! comment [] 1:02:24 PM | permalink