“Could I pass for a boy?” I asked. The black skirt of my abaya still trailed the floor, but from the waist up I felt pretty pleased with the effect.

Fahad, the most talkative of the boys, snorted.

“No,” he said. “But I think that’s as good as we’re going to do. We’re going to put you in the middle seat, and if you see someone in another car staring, turn slowly away.”

We piled into the S.U.V., and Thamer clicked through a rap mix CD to find Akon’s “Smack That,” to set the right mood for an evening of numbering. The boys bobbed their heads in time to the music.

“Wanna jump up in my Lamborghini Gallardo/Maybe go to my place and just kick it, like Taebo?” Akon sang.

In reality, getting a girl to go anywhere with him, let alone to “kick it,” is a near impossibility, Fahad explained. For most young Saudi men, a night of numbering is simply a night driving around with friends, listening to music, chasing cars containing black-draped figures that could just as easily be old women as young girls. Since numbering is considered harassment, detention by the religious police is an ever-present possibility.

Out With the Boys for a Night of Numbering - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog

Steve Ballmer egged at Hungarian University

Wow. It's tough to be CEO of a multi-billion dollar software company these days, what with it being so difficult to extend desktop monopoly to the web and getting egged during speeches....

Yes, egged.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was egged by a protester during a speech he gave at a Hungarian University. As this video shows, the protester rose to his feet to challenge Microsoft for stealing billions in Hungarian taxpayer money, then started hurling eggs at Ballmer, who was forced to take cover behind a desk.

Steve Ballmer egged at Hungarian University | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs

Introduction

The way Facebook integrates with external applications can be compared to how a proxy gate can serve pages produced by external servers. It passes the web browser request to the application server and then the page produced back to the web browser. It works just like that but:

* the external page is not served as it is to the client - but rather is a partially transformed and then inserted into the Facebook layout
* all requests from the browser are passed ad POST requests to the app server - this is because Facebook always adds additional parameters (like the facebook id of the user) to the request

This means that the page produced by the application can contain additional Facebook XML tags that are interpreted by Facebook and transformed for bigger HTML chunks, and also cannot contain some HTML tags, but the parameters, relative links work just as if the user was accessing the application server directly.

When producing the page the application server can use it's own databases and additionally it can contact Facebook using the REST api to get additional info.

Catalyst facebook apps.

Facebook applications - Catalyst::Wiki

Earlier this year an article appeared in The Washington Post by Joe Brancatelli called How to Complain: Ten tips for getting just compensation when things go awry on the road. While Mr. Brancatelli didn’t single out Delta from the rest of the travel pack, I’m sure it was guilt by association when he said that travel providers are “spectacularly inept at service recovery.”

I work in Delta Customer Care and wanted to give you the behind-the-scenes take on his 10 tips as they pertain to how we handle our passengers concerns at Delta. Below is a deeper look at each of the areas he mentions in his article (please bear with me, this will be a long post):

Nice list, but lets face it: just getting the Indian call workers you face at Delta customer service for normal customers to understand basic English is hard enough that this list isn't going to be very effective.

Delta Air Lines Blog | Ten Tips for Resolving a Travel Complaint

Track the time you spend on projects with this simple and easy-to-use application. Divide your work into projects, and split each into individual tasks. Stay honest, and not count those coffee breaks with the built-in idle time alerts. A menu bar icon reminds you at a glance whether the timer is running and allows you to easily stop and start the timer.

time-tracker-mac - Google Code

Welcome

Welcome to Google Doctype. Written by web developers, for web developers.

Welcome - doctype - Google Code

@John Clancy: There seems to be a lot more here than "dumb and lazy." With regard to the poles of urban and rural: I tell nearly everyone I speak to that polar thinking exacerbates many contemporary problems, so I agree that we have to be more attentive to (and critical of!) the middle ground. But Kunstler (and others) make a compelling case that suburbia compromises the numbers of urban population with the car-based transportation of rural areas in a way that is clearly not sustainable.

I think he also recognizes that drawing a line around urban cores and declaring "Thou shalt not pass!" is overly simplistic. Vast, uninterrupted swaths of extremely dense and, yes, bleak cityscape are obviously not what he has in mind. Consider a number of very small, townish, walkable, urbanized "nodes" connected by public transit and surrounded by patches of farmland growing food, as Kunstler says, closer to where people live. These would have the same density as a modern suburb, but be much more livable.

TED | Talks | James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia (video)

But if you really consider the Mosul operation on another level, that’s where it gets a little more interesting. It’s part of a pattern of what Cheney, that strategic genius ("Shit, Iran is RIGHT NEXT to Iraq? Why didn’t you tell me? No wonder we’re having all these problems!") expected to happen: he figured that the Shiite’s military energy would wear itself out in a civil war against Al Qaeda Sunnis, both in Lebanon and in Iraq, rather than making problems for their pro-American governments and us. That was the Cheney Plan, except it didn’t happen. Al Qaeda just doesn’t have the support in the ‘hood to take on these neighborhood militias, either in Iraq or in Lebanon. But there was a funny little footnote: Al Q has officially declared war on Hezbollah in Lebanon and "ordered its operatives to defend the Sunni community in Lebanon" according to this story:

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54916&sectionid=351020203

The trouble with being a James-Bond-y international conspiracy like Al Q is that there’s no way on earth you can compete militarily with local, broad-based militias like Hezbollah. Commuting from the Shia slums to West Beirut is one thing, but the notion that Al Q’s International Brigade can all fly into Lebanon undetected and assemble to march on the Hezzies is too far-fetched and idiotic even for a Bond flick. The notion they’d beat Hezbollah if they could manage to mobilize a force against it is even more ridiculous. The Hezzies even scare the IDF, and the IDF has wet dreams about facing Al Q. The rankings are pretty clear, and getting clearer, and they add up to something simple: in Iraq and in Lebanon, two countries the Western powers have operated on like they were diabetics with Medicaid, the net result of all the slicing and cutting is victory, hands down, for Shiite militias that didn’t even figure in the big plans. They just weren’t supposed to be part of the equation, and now they’re on top.

And that’s assuming it’s all being decided by Washington. Suppose we entertain, as they say, another idea: suppose it’s true that the Lebanese Hezzies are just "puppets" of Iran the way Cheney keeps saying they are. Well, if that’s true, then…lessee here: Cheney woofs on and on about attacking Iran and just coincidentally these Iranian puppets just casually take over Lebanon, one of the few supposedly pro-Western Arab states. And they do it without even breaking a sweat. Like saying, "Hello Meester Cheney, joost a leetle reminder, we know zee game about a t’ousand times better dan yoooo, sir!"

There are two possibilities: Cheney is an Iranian mole, and he’s laughing his head off chewing pistachios, kicking back on his prayer mat in front of the flatscreen, something I’ve been arguing for awhile now—or he’s the stupidest human being ever to step out of his league—which would be Wyoming, Little League. Girls’ Softball to be exact.

THE EXILE - From Lebanon To Iraq: We’re In Deep Shia Now - By Gary Brecher - The War Nerd

Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."

So we sent him out to buy some office supplies. While he was gone, we decided that the part of the machine that we were most worried about was the router that delivered messages from one processor to another. We were not sure that our design was going to work. When Richard returned from buying pencils, we gave him the assignment of analyzing the router.

Long Now: Views: Essays

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