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America wants somebody to restore honor and dignity to the White House. That is what America is looking for. - George W. Bush, March 9, 2000

This one goes out to all the dumbasses who voted in a "conservative" president in 2000, and then re-elected him again in 2004.

Let's take a look at Bush's resume:

• More than doubled the rate of growth of the federal budget (Clinton's increases were about 50 billion each year, Bush's increases are about 100 billion to 300 billion a year)
• Cut taxes, gave rebates, and issued stimulus checks (because spend more, earn less works for the average American, it oughta work for the government)
• Undermined the US Constitution by eavesdropping on US citizens
• Failed to apprehend Osama bin Laden
• Invaded a country on false pretenses
• Refused to sign the Kyoto protocol
• Violated the Geneva convention
• Hired three consecutive attorneys general who either eroded the civil rights of US citizens, approved the use of torture, or both.
• Approved, or allowed his staff to approve the felonious exposure of a CIA agent to the press
• It was his watch where Condoleeza Rice ignored a memo that said "Bin Laden Determined to Attack America"
• Failed to provide federal relief for an event that reduced our proud city of New Orleans into a 3rd world country
• Gave the foreign minister of Germany, Angela Merkel an unwelcome shoulder massage at a diplomatic event
• Is reported to have asked the President of Brazil, Fernando Cardoso, "You have blacks too?"

Add to that a stunning statement he made to the President of the Phillipenes: "I want to tell you how proud I am to be the president of a nation that -- in which there's a lot of Philippine Americans. They love America and they love their heritage. I am reminded of the great talent of the -- of our Philippine Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.... And the chef is a great person and a really good cook, by the way, Madam President."

Thanks to all of the 50,000,000 voters who voted this idiot into office in 2000, and as if he didn't make a damn good mess of it in four years, thanks to the 62,000,000 of you who voted him in a second time in 2004.

Last night Christine and I caught a sneak preview of Wall•e at Pacific Place.

In summary, this is simply the best movie of the year, and the best Pixar movie ever made.

The story telling, the characters, the themes, the movie excels at all of these, and more. The visual quality of the movie is astounding. I had to keep reminding Christine that this wasn't a real scene, particularly during the beginning of the movie where the bulk of the animation is spent on characters named Wall•e, Eve, and a cockroach.

I don't know how they do it, but they make the lead characters endearing without any significant dialogue-- and they're robots!

I give it five stars... I suspect this will break ground in ways that no animated movie ever has.

John McCain got some heat about his comment that the US military could stay in Iraq for "a hundred years".

To be fair, the full context of that comment was at a town hall meeting in response to a question, which, should be pointed out, McCain never let be fully asked...

Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years
McCain: Make it a hundred.
Q: Is that …
McCain: We’ve been in South Korea … we’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans … As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me, I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Queada is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.

[See the full video of it, where you can hear McCain rudely cut off the questioner.]

Later, in TV interviews, McCain clarifies:

My point was and continues to be, how long do we have to stay in Bosnia? How long do we have to stay in South Korea? How long are we going to stay in Japan? How long are we going to stay in Germany? All of those, 50-, 60-year period. No one complains. In fact, they contribute enormously, their presence, to stability in the world.

The point is, it's American casualties. We've got to get Americans off the front line, have the Iraqis as part of the strategy, take over more and more of the responsibilities. And then I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years. What they care about is a sacrifice of our most precious treasure, and that's American blood. So what I'm saying is look, if Americans are there in a support role, but they're not taking casualties, that's fine.
...
Could be 1,000 years or a million years... We have bases in Kuwait right now. We have bases in South Korea and Japan, Germany. I mean it's a straw man. It's a fallacious argument by people who don't understand that it's not American presence, it's American casualties. If we can get American casualties down and eliminate them, Americans are not concerned — in fact, they may be glad we have a secure base in that part of the world as we do in Kuwait.

In full context, this doesn't seem so bad, but I think John McCain needs a little lesson in history.

First of all, comparing Iraq to South Korea, Japan, Germany, even Bosnia is not fair. In each of these situations, the United States' participation in military retaliation came as a result of unprovoked attacks.

Our presence in Korea was a result of a war of Soviet/Chinese aggression, and North Korea remains a significant source of instability in the region. More importantly, the reason for our involvement, and continued presence, in Korea was based on a rogue state which has aggressively pursued nuclear weapons to maintain its chokehold on the North in light of having its traditional Soviet/Chinese lifelines cut.

Our presence in Japan and Germany were also in response to the Soviet threat. Had we not maintained significant troop levels, the Soviet influence in the East and the West would have simultaneously expanded like the Soviets attempted in both Vietnam and Korea. And as victors of World War II fighting the Nazis and the Japanese, it was a right we had cause to exercise, and this has come to be accepted by the Japanese and German citizenry today, an overwhelming majority of whom repudiate the actions of the imperial Japanese and Nazi regimes.

Our action in Bosnia was supported by UN resolutions, and a direct result of violent action against UN peacekeeping troops in response to active and on-going genocide. And the fact remains that our continuing presence in Bosnia is a result of our participation in international treaties.

Similarly, in Kuwait, we were invited to protect their borders after the war of Kuwaiti liberation by the Kuwaitis. Iraq was clearly the aggressor in that fight and again a multinational UN force was employed, including Arab states, to push back the aggressors.

Contrast this with Iraq. Clearly Saddam was no boy scout, but he was not a threat to US security or to US interests in the region. (Anyone who thinks that the Israelis, the Turks, or the Saudis couldn't have repelled an Iraqi attack, even without the promise of US support that would have quickly been provided, is badly deluded)

He possessed no demonstrable WMDs. He was not credibly aiding or abetting Al-Qaeda forces. And while the Iraqis may have embraced the deposition of Saddam, that could have been accomplished without US military involvement. (The first Gulf war, the ensuing no-fly zones and embargoes deprived Iraq of any significant air force, and as the first Gulf War demonstrated, air superiority is a critical advantage over a tank/infantry-heavy Iraqi army)

So with an illegitimate causus-belli, what we opened was a huge can of worms that Al Qaeda was happy to exploit, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Fringe elements in Iran took advantage of this weakness to destabilize the region further.

The question is, now that we are in this mess (which, it bears pointing out, rightfully should result in the impeachment of Bush and Cheney), what is the right thing to do, both to restore US credibility around the world, and for US security?

The answer certainly doesn't start with suggesting that the US has cause and the right to remain in Iraq for 100, 1000 or a million years, as McCain arrogantly brags-- as if Iraq wasn't a sovereign nation that we attacked, unprovoked, while the actual provocateur for 9/11 remains, to this day un-apprehended in the mountains along Afghanistan and Pakistan! Rather, the US strategy should be to extricate itself, while showing accountability for what is clearly a war of unprovoked aggression against the Hussein regime by holding those who falsified intelligence accountable for tens of thousands of casualties, American and Iraqi alike.

In Japan, Germany, Korea and Bosnia, our troops weren't regarded as imperialists, as unscrupulous torturers and murderers. But in light of some of the scandals that have rocked our invasion of Iraq, from Abu Ghraib to Haditha, the US needs to, as gracefully as possible, remove its presence from the region while inviting Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanese peacekeeping troops into the area to take up the cause of peacekeeping with our UN allies.

If we don't do this, then I think John McCain is deluding himself if he thinks that our enemies won't be able to exploit our illegitimate presence in this area to continue spilling American blood. The illegitimate invasion of Iraq will continue to be a polarizing factor in extremist muslim communities priming the extremist propoganda machine for new jihadist recruits.

It is disingenuous to equate Iraq with areas where we have had a legal and moral cause to take military action, and to suggest that our ongoing presence there is either convenient, morally justifiable, or in the interest of US national security indicates a stunning display of poor judgement.

In 1995, the rage on the Internet was Netscape. They had just released Netscape 1.1, and it shipped with a new feature called "server-push". The guys at Netscape applied a concept from email (MIME type: multipart/mixed from mail attachments) and created multipart/mixed-replace. The idea was that sometimes you don't want people to download your web page, and have it remain on the screen-- sometimes you want the content to be refreshed, when and if the server chooses, and replace what was pushed a moment before.

I recall opening up Photoshop, creating several layers, and exporting GIFs that would get refreshed, and writing some CGI programs that would use this new mime type to display, what were in effect, server-driven animated GIFs. On the server side, you had to convince httpd (now apache) not to server-parse the response to the client... Since you, the programmer, had to decide what content to push to the client, having the server compute the mime type (is it a JPEG? A GIF? A HTML document?) or the content length (is this GIF larger or smaller than the one before it?) by parsing the content wouldn't work. So, a convention was born to precede any such scripts with "nph-", meaning, "let me tell the client what kind of file and how big it is..."

I just finished a project that incorporates this technology, but didn't realize that I'd be brushing up on this technique I first learned 13 years ago.

With a baby on the way, I wanted a baby-monitor I could check even when I was back at work. Most off-the-shelf baby monitors use limited range 900Mhz wireless spectrum with no Internet capabilities. Instead, I got a couple of Panasonic pan/tilt/zoom webcams, and to save $80/unit, I also got some Panasonic powerline adapters so I didn't have to buy the more expensive 802.11g versions. The adapters allow me to avoid inconvenient wiring, and keep the video IP traffic off my wireless network.

The cameras have a live video feature, which I didn't really think much about how it worked... It worked just fine in Safari and Firefox, and that's all that mattered. But live video is limited-- you can't see what activity has taken place throughout the day. Well it turns out the cameras have security features, allowing me to upload JPG still captures from the cameras when their motion detectors are tripped.

But the problem was, each time the sensor is tripped several dozen images would get uploaded to a remote directory, and I'd have to manually go through them one at a time.

It was neat, however, to be out and about, and to be able to pull up my iPhone and see who's been at my front door, or if my cats have been jumping into the crib...

The first incarnation of this project was simply an apache directory-index. Click the file, see the still, click back, click another file... Repeat ad nauseam.

So I thought, hmm, perhaps I can build a file manager and use some software to seam the images into an mpeg movie, or motion-jpeg. Group the images by hour of day, and provide a "delete" function so that I don't have thousands of images piling up...

Then the thought hit me to use server-push (by now you probably saw this coming), and as I did a little tcpdump (network packet sniffing) analysis, I realized that this is the exact same thing that the camera's firmware is doing for any browsers monitoring the "video" feed...

After a little web coding (1455 bytes to be exact-- I'll post it if anyone is interested), I wrote a simple script that lets me browse all the events that my camera has captured and uploaded to the Internet, view them in equivalent video quality as the camera's built-in server, and when I'm done, delete the batch of files representing that video.

But best of all, MobileSafari.app (the browser on the iPhone) can handle multipart/mixed-replace content!

Ask most people who the worst president in recent history is, and I'd wager that most people would offer up Richard Nixon. I think he's got a lot of competition from this Administration though.

Let's see. First, let's talk about wars:

Both Bush and Nixon were faced with a bloody war on their hands-- a war extremely unpopular with the public, where thousands of Americans have died. Nixon's exit strategy: "The Nixon Doctrine", which is basically a plan "to gradually build up the South Vietnamese Army so that it could fight the war on its own". Similarly the "Bush Doctrine" is the same thing-- to build up the Iraqi forces to they can fight the insurgency alone. I'd call this one even, but the point for W.P.E. goes to Bush for the simple reason that the French got us IN to Vietnam, and they were trying to keep us OUT of Iraq. Nixon didn't get us into Vietnam, so point goes to Bush.

They both had war scandals. Seymour Hersh broke the My Lei Massacre. Bush had Abu Ghraib. The buck stops with Nixon, who went so far as to pardon the perpetrator of the massacre. Not bringing Rumsfeld to justice is damning, but the Iraqi people were tortured and humiliated, not massacred. Point Nixon.

Nixon had the Plumbers and G. Gordon Liddy. Bush has I. Scooter Libby outing Plame. Verdict: Tie.

Nixon's administration had the Watergate scandal, where the President, in an effort to quell anti-war sentiment, broke the law in authorizing illegal search/seizure of Democratic Party Headquarters. This operation was orchestrated by G. Gordon Liddy. Nixon also asked the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation into the break-in. Bush, meanwhile, broke the law in authorizing the NSA to conduct illegal wiretaps contrary to FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Verdict: Tie-- what's worse, a political opportunist trying to dig up dirt to stay in power, or a demagogue willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater to catch "terrorists". I call it even.

Nixon had Hanoi Hannah. Bush had Baghdad Bob. Decision: Bush.

Nixon: "I'm not a crook". Bush "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie". Point decidedly Bush.

It's 5:3 by my count: Bush wins!

* Considering "Evar" was coined most likely in the late 20th century (I would guess on "The Simpsons"), "Evar" does qualify for "recent history", from a particular point of view.

I've always been a patriotic person. Perhaps it's because I was an expatriate from birth, and only recently have I spent more time in the US than I spent outside of it, and have seen the conditions in many countries that helps me recognize the amazing wealth and opportunities we as Americans often take for granted.

Or perhaps it's growing up on an Air Force base that does it, around people who wear the flag on their shoulders, who serve their country, or the culture that exists in such an environment. For example, I thought that every theater in the US, like the base theater, would play the national anthem before every movie.

And I'd get annoyed at baseball games and other events where the national anthem was being played and people wouldn't stand, or talk through it, or wouldn't remove their hats. I was, until 9/11, the most patriotic person I'd find occasion to meet.

Yet, even then I found jingoistic patriotism offensive, particularly what I call the "Christian Conservative" brand of it... For example (no offense to Rus' son Berkeley who apparently loves the song ;-) Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to be an American".

In particular, given the erosion of our civil liberties by the Bush administration, people still sing the song, as if they don't even understand the lyrics. The standard of "where at least I know I'm free" sounds like a pretty darn low bar to set for being satisfied with the example our administration is setting with the rest of the world.

Not to mention the premise in every utterance of the disgusting phrase "God Bless the USA"... As if God really favors the USA over any other nation. I've read through the bible, and I missed which verse states that he favors the US over any other nation. Seriously, do people honestly believe that God, in his infinite wisdom and omnipotence, would ordinarily have been thinking He ought to just sit back and let hurricane Katrina, the Chinese earthquake or the great tsunami take place (maybe He has a non-intervention policy when it comes to national disasters and terrorist attacks?), but might actually reconsider if a few of his followers were to solicit his blessing?

I can see it now... God's up in heaven, and hears a prayer: "Well I was going to take the Sunday off to play cosmic golf on Ceti Tau Alpha 7, but Doreen McNamara in Topeka said "God Bless the USA" and now that I think about it, she does have a point..." Holy Infinite wisdom: 0, 100 IQ Doreen: 1.

I tend to lump the folks that are most likely to utter such meaningless phrases into the same pit of fair-weather "patriots" that have no problem displaying tattered American flags on their cars, or those dirtied on their bumper stickers. They let them get torn, dirty and faded, and buy flags that are clearly not all-weather flags, and let them sit on their cars come rain or shine, and let them sit on their cars day and night, when in fact just about any true patriot (or boy scout) can tell you, is against the standard of proper flag decorum.

There's such a "patriot" whose pickup truck I have occasion to walk past every so often who mistreats a US flag by attaching it to his radio antenna. The first flag he destroyed (while not helping his gas mileage out any) got so tattered, well over half of it was missing... Eventually this "patriot" removed the flag.. and replaced it with another one.. as if the new one is going to fare any better than the last one he bought for $0.99 at the dollar store (made in China no doubt).

Pop quiz: True or False-- The preferred way of disposing of a flag is to burn it.
The answer will surprise many "anti-flag burning amendment" people... The proper way to dispose of a flag that is no longer serviceable or presentable is to burn it in a dignified way (no chanting death to America while stomping on it, or burning Uncle Sam in effigy-- just a simple fire pit and slowly stoking the fires to ensure a complete burn which renders the flag unrecognizable is sufficient) just don't do it within sight of the flag desecrating, lee greenwood listening, god-bless-america freaks...

In a similar vein are the bumper stickers I see every so often that say "Power of Pride"... First of all, I thought "pride" was one of those deadly sins the religious conservatives are so careful to avoid. But what exactly is the power of pride? The power of such foolishness to empower a president to invade a nation with false pretense (lest we forget, we needed to depose Saddam because he possessed WMDs)? The pride to live in a country where we repeal FISA? To make a joke of the protections of the Constitution? To repudiate the Geneva conventions? To kick into motion events that led to the killing, murder and rape more Iraqis than Saddam ever did? And to do so with the blood of thousands of true patriotic service men and women on your hands, while you speak of tax cuts, in a time of war while your true patriot veterans are denied benefits?!?? This, dear readers, is not something that we should feel powerful or proud about.

But I digress, because when I think of the word "Pride" I often think of "Gay Pride", so that led to me making my own version of this bumper sticker:

If I was a "bumper sticker" kind of guy, I think it'd be fun to put on my car, just to get some guy sporting a Jesus fish to flip me off while he passes me on the freeway in his gas-guzzling suburban.

The rumor sites are agog about the forthcoming 3G iPhone. Some rumors suggest that the iPhone will come with built-in GPS, others suggesting larger capacity in a smaller form-factor.

Even if the new iPhone remains at 8GB and remains the same size, "3G is enough" because the biggest bottleneck of the current iPhone is the speed of the EDGE network. With broadband comes the ability to network the iPhone with computers in your home and work networks.

I think this is likely to be a cross-platform integration, meaning that so long as your computer is running Safari or iTunes (which means either Windows or OS X), broadband 3G access means ubiquitous access to your bookmarks and your music library anywhere you can get a 3G cell signal. This also opens up the potential to be able to browse the iTunes music store from your cell phone, even outside the range of WiFi.

But another bottleneck exists on the current iPhone, which could actually just be lifted with a firmware upgrade, no 3G iPhone necessary. I'm talking about the requirement of a USB cable to sync your phone when the wireless bandwidth is there today (at least with WiFi). How cool would it be to sync your phone not only without a cable, but from anywhere in the world?

But I think limiting the iPhone to syncing with a single device is rather limiting... A key strategy for nearly every business is to sell your customers a product, and then find a way to sell that same customer another product. This strategy is simply what is responsible for Apple's recent meteoric rise on Wall Street-- they went from selling computers to less than 5% of the overall market, to selling iPods to nearly every man woman and child, to selling music tracks to selling phones, and set-top boxes...

...Set top boxes... which is where I think there is a lot of potential for Apple to expand their growth. It's not a far cry to consider than the iPhone could very well be a sophisticated remote control for your Front Row software on your Mac, or for your AppleTV, for that matter. But the AppleTV hasn't seen the kind of success that the iPod, iPhone, or even the Mac has in recent years.

In a previous post I suggested that ubiquitous uber-broadband access that would allow streaming HD content is still quite a ways off, at least over the Internet. And so I think an opportunity exists for Apple to shift their strategy around the AppleTV in order to capture more of the set-top-box market.

But as my friend Gavin pointed out, people just don't want another box in their entertainment console. The AppleTV would have to displace something to make significant inroads, and I see two simple feature additions that Apple could provide to get there.

The first of which, and the least likely of the two by my estimation, is one or more CableCard slots and/or a coax slot. The AppleTV, with its built-in hard drive, could put many a DVR to shame. Clearly TiVo has some of the best software on the market, but providers like Comcast still have a shocking number of their DVRs in American homes, sadly, including mine. This could even be sold in such a way as "miss something on your DVR? Download it from iTunes.com with your AppleTV"...

The second way to break into the consumer set-top-box market would be to simply drop in a BluRay drive. Clearly, Sony has the lead in this area today with their PS3s leading the BluRay revolution, and the reason they can afford to do so is because of the upside to Sony if BluRay gets a good portion of the market from licensing, movies, games, and media. They also have a financial model to make up the hardware losses with software and licensing margins, but so, presumably, would Apple.

In particular, getting revenue from iTunes music store purchases, video downloads, and monthly DVR service, the extra cost of putting in a BluRay drive might not be that much of a stretch of the imagination.

How likely is this scenario? There's a lot of speculation in this post, and I think it's very unlikely that it'll all come true, but I leave you with this final thought:

If I'm right, and Apple is still executing its strategy to move from "Apple Computer Inc." to the ubiquitous stylish consumer technology company "Apple", then the branding of the glue that ties all of these consumer devices together as ".Mac" begins to seem quite "off-message"... What you'd need, if indeed the iPhone becomes the central "remote control" of your digital lifestyle, if it becomes the device that defines the way you come to interact with data and services on both your computer, and your media center, is a service that is branded around the fact that it gives you access to "all of your stuff" no matter where you are*.

Which is my long-winded way of explaining what I think is the reasoning behind the purported rumor that Apple is renaming "dotMac" to ".me.com"...

(* So long as you're in range of a 3G data network)

I've been on a tech-projects update kick recently. Not only did I upgrade the disk in my laptop a couple days ago, I also ordered the parts I needed for two other tech projects.

First, my good friend Gavin was moving and he didn't have the time nor inclination to fix his Apple 20" display, so he generously offered it to me with the warning that it was potentially on its last legs.

Also, I have an "800Mhz G4 iMac (Flat Screen)" (that's precisely what Apple calls it) that I've been wanting to install OS X 10.5 "Leopard" onto. In particular, I want to dovetail that computer onto the network backup scheme I've got going between my laptop and my Drobo. This computer is essentially my home "server", which runs Apache, MySQL, and a few other open source tools and utilities. Problem is, Leopard only installs on computers that have 512MB of RAM and a 867Mhz G4 processor or better.

Apparently the failure rate of the 20" displays are high enough that there's a cottage industry of replacement parts you can buy from companies like lcdparts.net. And as far as the 800Mhz G4, there's a neat utility called Leopard Assist which overwrites your CPU settings stored in Open Firmware with 867Mhz to fool the Leopard Installer into thinking your computer is faster than it really is.

Sure enough Leopard Assist allowed Leopard to begin installing, except I was reminded that my G4 iMac only has 384MB of memory-- 64MB in the user-installable slot, and 256MB in the "factory installed" slot. Drat. So, I ordered 512MB of RAM from Buy.com for the user-installable slot.

Well I installed the lcdparts.net inverter board, and the 20" display went from half-dim and partially usable, to not usable at all, which was a painful discovery after putting in all 27 some screws back in and reassembling the whole thing.

Taking it all back apart and putting the old, broken board (incidentally you can see the capacitor that gave up the ghost which spewed all its guts on the circuit board) back in confirmed that in fact, lcdparts shipped me a defective inverter board. *sigh*

But my tech projects sense of accomplishment was not all for naught... I still had the RAM upgrade to perform... My 144-pin SO-DIMM (which stands for "Small Outline Double In-line Memory Module") had arrived from Buy.com, so I could still achieve one of my goals!

So I open up the Buy.com box, and what's inside?

A packing slip that shows two parts-- the one part I ordered, and another part, a 168-pin DIMM. And what's in the box is... yep-- a 168-pin full size DIMM. ("Small Outline" RAM chips are used in laptops and constrained volume computers like the iMac and Mac mini)

Argh!

So back to the drawing board... Until I realized that the factory installed memory module takes the kind of RAM Buy.com wrongly sent me. So I pulled out my torx screwdriver set, took apart the iMac, pulled out the 256MB memory in the factory slot, and installed the mistakenly shipped product. I had hoped to have a 768MB Leopard box, but 576MB will do the trick too.

At least Other World Computing sent me the right hard drive and upgrade kit, as that's the only tech project that went off without a hitch this week.