It occurred to me this morning that choosing a web development platform expresses one’s philosophy of the world. So, to help that process, here are some thoughts.

First of all, you should of course develop using HTML, which reminds us never to implement any feature as a “test” or as a joke. Doing so will ensure that someone will find it indispensible, and it will persist until the end of time.

Develop using a Wiki, which celebrates the endless human quest for truth by the repeated application of ignorance, misinformation, lies, and buy your v1@gr@ h3re!

Write your code in Perl, PHP, Python, *and* Ruby. And perhaps Java, for good measure. This teaches two important lessons. First, that no matter how beautiful and elegant you make something, someone will use it to create ugly things. And, second, that in coding, as well as in presidential elections and life, most people would rather criticize something else that they don’t understand than to expound on the virtues of their own solution.

Use CSS, a glowing illustration of forcing people to adapt to the solution, rather than adapting the solution to the problem.

Publish your content in RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom (I probably missed one), to celebrate the human tendency to recreate rather than simply talk to one another to arrive at consensus.

Then, when you’re done, invite people to comment on your work, so that you can get flamed by people who misunderstand what you are trying to say, or perhaps who just want to use the free platform to expound on TIME CUBE.

My Mac has arrived. I’m posting this from my Powerbook G4. I think I’m happy about this, but time will tell. It is certainly very shiny, but it’s also sufficiently different from what I’m used to that I think that there will be a lot of frustrations and annoyanced. Or, perhaps not. We’ll see.

I *love* the keyboard, which, strangely, I thought I would find a little annoying. It is soft, but with exactly the right amount of feedback. The key travel is perhaps just a trifle too short, but I expect I’ll get used to that. As expected, I don’t like the trackpad. But, then, I just don’t like trackpads, so what can you do?

Anyways, to all my Mac-fan friends, I expect that I’ll be asking all sorts of questions over the next few months. Or maybe it will just be so intuitive that I won’t need to.

Yeah, Most of my readers already know that free software is amazing. But, wow, it’s really really amazing. Can I convey how amazingly amazing it really is?

Today, I’m most impressed with RT and Webalizer but there are so many other things out there that make me look like I worked hard, when in fact I just downloaded something and ran a script, or followed a few instructions.

RT is an *incredibly* professional “commercial quality” application. It has all the features that I want in an issue tracking system, as well as some I would never have thought of. And it makes me look smart. I can put up an issue tracking system in a day or two, and it costs me nothing at all, and it’s a slick package.

So, a hearty THANK YOU to Jesse and whoever else is involved in RT these days.

And, webalizer. Well, what can one say. I own Web Trends, but nobody can read the reports. They’re too detailed. Too full of inscrutable statistics. Webalizer is free, and people understand the results. What more can I want? So a big thanks to the folks at webalizer, too.

This well-stated posting Ian Grigg and Adam Shostack is worth reading, as well as other remarks in the same forum.

When Verisign chose to hijack DNS for their own commercial advantage, they clearly demonstrated that they should not be entrusted with such an important responsibility. It is absurd to extend our trust to them again.

The Internet works because of open standards safeguarded by disinterested parties. There must either be a total separation between this management and corporate interests, or those corporate interests will tend to abuse their power to legislate monopolies for themselves. Verisign has demonstrated that they intend to do exactly that with any power that is granted them.

Those of you who have influence in such affairs should carefully consider the options, and exert this influence to have Verisign eliminated from the running.

Note to self: Before spending 2 hours trying to get sound card working, make sure that the volume isn’t set to zero in software. Then, when you finally discover that fact, make sure that the physical speakers aren’t turned up to 11.

Wow. That was loud.

Sheesh, do I ever have my work cut out for me. It’s going to be an interesting job, anyways.

Oh, yeah, and I found out I’m expected to wear a tie. Every day. If they had told me that earlier, I would have tried to negotiate it away. 😉

When I first installed RedHat on my desktop system, I fought long and hard to get my printer working. Now that I’ve upgraded to FC3, not only can I no longer print, but attempting to start cups locks up the system so hard I have to physically turn it off. Why, why, WHY is printing so darned hard in Linux? It drives me buggy! Now I’m going to have to move my printer over to my Slackware box, and set up printing there. Or something equally goofy.