Thursday, June 29, 2006
Hamdan Decision
The Supreme Court has handed down the decision in the Hamdan case. The Court in a 5-3 decision (Chief Justice Roberts had to sit it out having ruled on the case before his appointment) ruled that the President doesn’t get to blanket authority to make it up as he goes along.
The Court has not ruled that the detainees can’t be held. It expressly disavowed such a notion. Rather, the Court found that President was without the authority to create the special commmissions to charge the detainees because: 1) there was no provision for them in military law or the Geneva Convention and 2) Congress didn’t authorize him to create such commissions. To remedy this the President would need to get Congressional authroization.
It is nice to see the Court getting it right, although, it wasn’t my guys getting the job done. (Scalia, Thomas and Alito, each wrote dissenting opinions)
link
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
seen in front of..
...the elementary school our older daughter attends.
Doesn’t a sign like this make you feel all warm and fuzzy?
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Doing my part for Jay and Silent Bob ...
Not that I’ll win any prizes in their banner contest, but I like this one, so I’m putting it up anyway:
Monday, June 19, 2006
Mark Rasch on data retention
Worth a read: Retain or restrain access logs?
In a nutshell:
Now whenever government seeks to increase the powers of law enforcement at the expense of freedom or civil liberties, it always hauls out the troika of organized crime, terrorism and the protection of children. After all, who is opposed to preventing terrorism? Who is in favor of organized crime? And who can be opposed to protecting kids, after all?
I trust any government, conservative or not, to abuse this cornucopia of data once it’s available to them. If they’re that concerned about child protection, why don’t they cut back on the blanket monitoring of phone records and stop pulling law enforcement staff off actual child abuse cases?
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Happy Fathers’ Day!
A bit late, but I hope those of you who have reproduced are being appropriately celebrated today.
Elwed got a new digital camera (to replace our seven-year-old one). He’s been happily playing with it. Nothing to cheer a geek up like giving him some new electronics where the instruction manual is bigger than the gadget itself.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
EE vs. Drupal, early impressions
Not that anybody cares, but I’ll post it anyway.
The packages have a different focus, although there is some convergence. EE looks like it evolved from a blogging package; while it is significantly easier to theme, it is harder to extend in “unexpected” directions. Drupal was a portal/community package from the start and handles blogging and many other tasks by default or with relatively little effort. I don’t believe that there is a clearly superior package and it will be interesting to see where both are in two years.
Once you’ve figured out the basic concepts and administrativa of each package, setting up a basic site is a matter of minutes. I suspect that creating a theme/template from scratch will be easier for EE than for Drupal, but I could be wrong.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to draw up a table with a feature by feature comparison; it’s a moving target, anyway. One feature of Drupal that I miss in EE are books, although arguably EE’s new wiki module is a possible substitute.
To be continued…
now what…
Looks like any new forum posts show up as “moved” in the forum itself.
I have to admit that I’m beginning to lose patience…
It bears remembering…
...that a virtual private server (VPS) is a shared resource.
It’s a bit annoying that Les and I both run into similar problems these days.
The Comparison That Hardens Opposition
Eugene Volokh has spoken out often in favor of gay rights. He has some interesting thoughts on the topic as to how the granting of new rights does not come without a cost. More so than that though, he talked about the knee jerk reaction of folks who support gay rights to make the comparison of those in opposition to gay rights as the moral equivalent of racists. He’s not in agreement on that point with gay rights advocates. In doing so, he put his finger on how the debate is hardening stances:
On the other hand, perhaps my tentative judgment on this is wrong; perhaps the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts really are morally tantamount to racist organizations. But if that’s so, then that just further explains the intensity with which many traditionalists are fighting the gay rights movement: If the essence of that movement is to suggest that traditionalist religious and social groups are morally tantamount to racists, those traditionalist groups have a great deal to lose (whether rightly or wrongly) in this particular culture war.
volokh.com
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
To Drupal or not to Drupal…
I am now using Drupal for the third sort-of major revisions and I find myself in the paradoxical situation that despite being very happy with Drupal I still consider migrating to something else.
To make a long story short, for all it’s power, Drupal’s core is just a bit too lean and it’s hard to run a site without using contributed modules or themes. I can see why the developers draw a line in the sand and leave everything falling outside of a narrow scope to the user community. I’m very grateful for the work the developers and community members have done and I don’t even complain (too loudly) if some contributed software lacks a bit polish. Having said that, it’s a good thing that Drupal is actively developed and that major releases happen with some frequency. It’s also a bad thing, because the internal APIs evolve at a rapid pace, too, which puts a strain on contributers.
It would be a lie if I said that I don’t enjoy to tinker with technology, but I’d prefer to treat content management systems as a tool that I hardly notice while mouthing off about whatever tickles my fancy. Therefore, the appeal to switching to another software platform that is feature-complete as far as my needs are concerned is rising. It’ll probably be another two years or so until Drupal stabilizes (stagnates, some would say) to the point where the version upgrades cease to be such a hassle.
Next question, migrate to what?
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