Playing With Sharp Objects

I have submitted a patch to Feed On Feeds 0.1.9 which also requires files from the original Reblog Addon. Ignore the included patch file which was intended for version 0.1.3 and use mine instead. The idea originally came from the Magpie Blog, home of the underlying feed parser used by FoF. This has been expanded for use with the Reblog system, but I don’t like what they’ve done to the simple FoF interface. Now includes menu panel links for simple published item navigation and management. Note that the publish function requires that you add the following column to your feed_items table:

`publish` tinyint(1) default '0'

Update: 2005-10-09 You can pick up the tarball for the whole thing here.

From Blogs of War and JawsBlog comes this plea. If anyone knows of similar drives for other branches of the armed services, let us know.

Rabbi Irving Elson is the Jewish Chaplain for the US Marines and has been on the front lines in Iraq. Recently, Rabbi Elson has asked for the following message to be passed on to passed on information:

The military hospital in Landshtull, Germany has requested DVDs and personal DVD players for our Marines who are recovering from battle wounds.

You can send them to:
Chaplain Irving Elson, Rabbi
c/o Commanding Officer
Headquarters & Headquarters Squadron CHAPLAIN
P.O. Box 452013
San Diego, CA 92145-2013

Rabbi Elson’s office will rebox them and put them on a MEDEVAC flight to Germany to be hand delivered to the Marines.

This story, while still dealing with the usual Philip K Dick topic of the effects of chemicals on people, is more along the lines of what we have grown to love in movies like Total Recall. An unsuspecting man is suddenly thrown into a situation that is not of his making and which he must desperately try to escape. To explain how this happens and how he gets out of the situation would be to ruin the story. However, the message that one takes away from the book is that love conquers all. The survivalist instincts built into us since the dawn of time can only help temporarily. Whether by virus, war, or short telomeres, looking out for only oneself will only get you so far and cannot stave off the final outcome - only love will survive you as the vase in the story represents, love of neighbor is the only thing worth pursuing because anything else is lost to time. The lead character learns this as he must come to rely on people on the story that are not the sort of people he normally deals with in his high Hollywood lifestyle. He finds there is more to this existence than money and possessions and in the end is at the mercy of the society that once held him in high regard.

The title of the book is a reference to the piece by 16th century composer John Dowland who set music to the following poem by an anonymous author. Dowland was featured in other Philip K Dick stories such as The Divine Invasion of the VALIS trilogy.

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs,
Exiled for ever, let me mourn
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

The story is not on the level of The Man in the High Castle, which combined alternate history and science fiction, and which I consider his best work ever. It is more along the lines of Ubik,
which had basically the same story flow of people trying to desperately escape a strange situation they have been thrown into.

For a non-fiction book that looks into this topic, check out Bill O’Reilly’s Who’s Looking Out for You?, which actually deals more with the idea that you should look out for the people around you so that you in turn will also be looked out for and in this way build the group of people that love you.

This month’s release of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 and last month’s release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 are just the beginning of a trend away from the unsecure, buggy, and relatively unsupported Internet Explorer that has dominated the free web browser scene. Ever since Netscape sat on its laurels after their 4.x versions, Microsoft slowly gathered steam to the 95% they once held. The recent 7.x versions of Netscape have just been ad-bloated versions of old and buggy Mozilla suites that are nothing more than a sideshow attraction. The opera browser, once the darling of the alternative browser scene, is a commercial browser with less capability that just cannot compete with “free.” Read On…

With the release of Mozilla Suite 1.7.5, the Mozilla Foundation continues to show their commitment to timely releases of bug fixes and security holes for their mature Internet toolset, which also includes IRC chat and HTML editing. To top it all off, they have just announced that the Sunbird calendar tool will be integrated into Thunderbird, under their Lightning project, aimed squarely at Outlook installations. Given an Outlook connector and integration with the Mozilla suite, it could be a drop-in replacement at Exchange sites that are looking for additional security. No doubt there are many waiting for theis opportunity to make this move.

With a pair of New York Times ads under its wing, the Mozilla Foundation has boosted its market share to 5% and bumped Microsoft to 92%. If Microsoft would just put more thought into the security of its products and implement long sought browser enhancements like tabbed browsing, they could prevent this loss. Given that the browsers are free, the stakes are not direct revenue loss, but instead involve loss of services that are associated with only the IE browser, and then possible from people who make the next jump away from the Windows operating system. For the majority of computer owners that do nothing but check email and browse the web, this is a reality. For corporations, this is a much harder thing to do as many of the serious applications that are used at the heart of a company for financial and project planning are only available for Windows. Many of these tools are Outlook integrated and wit ould be impossible to compete with that kind of interoperability. Given the strong surge that Mozilla has now, it very much resembles the Linux that I was playing with in 1991 that everyone called hobbyist junk. One day it will be capable of so much more.