And finally tonight, a Special Comment about President Clinton’s interview. The headlines about them are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back.

It is not important that the current President’s "portable public chorus" has described his predecessor’s tone as "crazed."

Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as Al-Qaeda; the nation’s "marketplace of ideas" is being poisoned, by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit. Nonetheless.

The headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done, in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

"At least I tried," he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. "That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried."

Thus in his supposed emeritus years, has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by anyone, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama Bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."

The Bush Administration… did… not… try.—

Crooks and Liars » Olbermann’s Special Comment: Are YOURS the actions of a true American?

I hope this links correctly, because this is some of the worst pwnage I've ever seen a politician unleash on a reporter. Chris Wallace interviews Bill Clinton, asks a long accusatory question about why he didn't do more to kill Bin Laden, and gets a 13 minute ass whooping in return.

A must see. Gold star.

Clinton PWNS Chris Wallace on Fox News - Clinton Interviewed on Fox News Sunday - Google Video

Graph Visualization
Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. Automatic graph drawing has many important applications in software engineering, database and web design, networking, and in visual interfaces for many other domains.

Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. It has several main graph layout programs. See the gallery for some sample layouts. It also has web and interactive graphical interfaces, and auxiliary tools, libraries, and language bindings.

The Mac OS X edition of Graphviz, by Glen Low, won two 2004 Apple Design Awards.

The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in several useful formats such as images and SVG for web pages, Postscript for inclusion in PDF or other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser. (Graphviz also supports GXL, an XML dialect.)

Graphviz has many useful features for concrete diagrams, such as options for colors, fonts, tabular node layouts, line styles, hyperlinks, and custom shapes.

In practice, graphs are usually generated from an external data sources, but they can also be created and edited manually, either as raw text files or within a graphical editor. (Graphviz was not intended to be a Visio replacement, so it is probably frustrating to try to use it that way.)

Graphviz

Why would the pope raise these volatile questions, and in an academic lecture that he surely knew would be reduced to sound bites that distorted his meaning? I think that Benedict knew precisely the risks he was taking and thought the risks worthwhile. Why? Because he believes in the power of reason to cut through the fog of passion. Because he believes that serious problems — such as those posed by jihadist Islam — can be solved only by examining them at their roots. And because he might well have wanted to extend a helping hand to those Islamic reformers who are trying to convince the extremists among their fellow Muslims that irrational violence in the name of God is, in fact, offensive to the one true God.

Will the pope's wager prove foolish or wise? An influential Italian Muslim commentator, Magdi Allam, writing in Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading daily newspaper, got the point: Why is it, he wrote, that "Muslims, especially the so-called moderates, never stand up ... against the true and perpetual profaners of Islam, the Islamic terrorists who massacre Muslims themselves in the name of God?" Against the jihadist calls for Benedict's death, voices such as Allam's suggest that, far from provoking a clash of civilizations, Pope Benedict XVI has put on the table the questions that have to be debated, rationally, to avoid just such a confrontation: How do we imagine God, and how do our ideas of God shape the way we live?

Pope posed tough questions that the world must answer - USATODAY.com - OPINION

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat - New York Times

You can rate the sizes of azz this way. Useful frame of reference for... azz discussions.

Flickr: Ass-praisal

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

Visit the FireBug website for documentation, screen shots, and discussion forums:

http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/

A quick overview of FireBug's features:

* JavaScript debugger for stepping through code one line at a time
* Status bar icon shows you when there is an error in a web page
* A console that shows errors from JavaScript and CSS
* Log messages from JavaScript in your web page to the console (bye bye "alert debugging")
* An JavaScript command line (no more "javascript:" in the URL bar)
* Spy on XMLHttpRequest traffic
* Inspect HTML source, computed style, events, layout and the DOM

Works with:
Firefox 1.5 - 3.0 ALL

I was very frustrated doing AJAX/AHAH development until I found this tool. Firebug lets me inspect any part of the DOM I want, and it lets me look at the XMLHttpRequest and its response. This, along with Catalyst's DBIx::Class debug information from the console allows me to monitor my web application from the client presentation to network communications to server side processing to database queries and back. Pretty damned cool.

FireBug :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software

Welcome to the Spread Toolkit!

Spread is an open source toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across local and wide area networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast, group communication, and point to point support. Spread services range from reliable messaging to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees.

Spread can be used in many distributed applications that require high reliability, high performance, and robust communication among various subsets of members. The toolkit is designed to encapsulate the challenging aspects of asynchronous networks and enable the construction of reliable and scalable distributed applications.

Spread consists of a library that user applications are linked with, a binary daemon which runs on each computer that is part of the processor group, and various utility and demonstration programs.

Some of the services and benefits provided by Spread:

* Reliable and scalable messaging and group communication.
* A very powerful but simple API simplifies the construction of distributed architectures.
* Easy to use, deploy and maintain.
* Highly scalable from one local area network to complex wide area networks.
* Supports thousands of groups with different sets of members.
* Enables message reliability in the presence of machine failures, process crashes and recoveries, and network partitions and merges.
* Provides a range of reliability, ordering and stability guarantees for messages.
* Emphasis on robustness and high performance.
* Completely distributed algorithms with no central point of failure.

TCP for the application layer?

The Spread Toolkit

RSF-1 Features

RSF-1, the Resilient Server Facility, makes applications and services highly available by automatically switching between servers should a server or service fail. It provides a multi-directional redundant facility allowing servers to constantly monitor and "shadow" each other.

No Redundant Investment

Rather than keeping a standby option idle as your failover server, RSF-1 allows operational systems to act as standby servers for others and vice-versa, ensuring that your hardware investment is not wasted. In the event of a server failing, its shadow will initialise the failed service(s), thus ensuring continued availability.

Highly Available Services

RSF-1 not only provides a highly available platform but also highly available services, allowing individual applications to be stopped, started and migrated between nodes, without affecting other application execution environments or requiring shadow systems to be rebooted.

Automatic or Manual Switch-Overs

When a server or service fails, RSF-1 detects the breakdown and can either restart all associated services on an available cluster node or signal an operator. RSF-1 also monitors the health of individual services on a node via service agents. Should a failure be detected, it can either restart the service or fail it over to another node in the cluster.

Monitoring and Control

RSF-1 includes both a Java and Windows based system administration modules that allow RSF-1 cluster to be monitored and adminstered in real time. They also show the status of any RSF-1 instances available on the network and provide manual switch-overs functions.

Multi-Protocol Heartbeat

RSF-1 uses disk, TCP/IP and RS232 connections to establish heartbeat mechanisms providing independent monitors; all of which must fail before a machine is deemed to be unavailable. The RS232 component uses a custom protocol and is completely independent from network service daemons.

Secondary IP Addressing

Floating host names and IP addresses are used to alleviate the need for any changes to client configurations after failovers. The node in the cluster that is restarting the services simply assumes the identity of the failed machine.

Load Sharing

RSF-1 treats applications as individual process units and executes them on one of a number of servers, as defined by the RSF-1 configuration.

Typically, each server will be a primary node for a group of services, which will all be initiated on one server at system start-up. Once running, the RSF-1 administrator can switch individual services to other nodes in the cluster. This can be used for server optimisation, load balancing, or to grant more resources to certain applications. For example, a Payroll application may require more system resources on certain days. Using this feature of RSF-1, the administrator could move all or some process units to a shadow server to achieve this effect.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Shadowed systems can be geographically disparate, providing high availability across multiple sites and a framework for disaster recovery.

High Availability : RSF-1 Features & Benefits

I've been collecting navel fluff (just my own) since 1984, and upon learning of this, people usually ask "Why?". To this I answer "Why not?". In my mind, the worth of any collection depends on the following factors (in which my collection rates well):

* Uniqueness - millions of people collect stamps and coins, but as far as I know nobody else collects navel fluff. That makes my collection unique!
* Rarity - the navel fluff of Graham Barker is produced in very limited quantities by only one person and is not easily obtainable by others (not that anyone would want to).
* Completeness of collection - I've been collecting my navel fluff consistently for around 20 years and have seldom missed a day's harvest. This makes my collection almost complete, a bit like having the full set of a country's currency.
* Good condition of items - like uncirculated banknotes or stamps, my navel fluff is in mint condition. When harvested, I remove any body hair from the fluff then store it immediately in a jar, where it remains uncontaminated.

I've thought of doing this, but never did. Now... I don't have to.

Graham Barker's Navel Fluff Page