“If you always tell the truth, you never have to remember anything.”

An idea that’s been recently bouncing around, apparently, is the imminence not only of hordes of slavering Arabiacs biting the heads off of our babies and raping our womenfolk, but also that of clone-like masses of yellow bodies swelling forth from Asia like a tide of army ants, conquering with their socialist sameness all that was ever good and right in this world.

It was mentioned that China is a mighty danger because they greedily take money from sadly hoodwinked western businesses, then... [More]

Smart shoes decide on television time (New Scientist) covers yet another brilliant idea from Britain, in which a home’s television usage can be keyed to a counter in a pair of sneakers. As with many other things British, it has a totally lame, weird name that doesn’t make any sense to anyone outside of Britain: “Square Eyes”. I honestly have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

As with all kooky ideas that will never work, it starts from the best intentions: getting kids to both eat less and watch less TV.... [More]

Everyone Check Your Sources (Plastic) shows that you just can’t believe anything these days, even when it justifies your worldview perfectly — perhaps especially then. Newsweek exposed US Army practices at Guantanamo, claiming that they were using psychological means of breaking the Muslim suspects by “flush[ing] a holy book [the Quran] down the toilet.” The article supposedly sparked protests “throughout much of the Muslim world” (wherever that is) which killed 16 people and included threats of “a jihad... [More]”

Black and White and Full of Crap by Ted Rall (Common Dreams) revisits the Pat Tillman story, one year later, to see which parts of it hold up under closer scrutiny (spoiler: not much).

Tillman was the “the former NFL player who turned down a multi-million dollar football contract to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan” and was subsequently killed in action. First off, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Pat himself probably had his priorities straight. He had his facts all wrong and his brain was squeaky clean from a lifetime... [More]

“Nature doesn’t care how smart you are. You can still be wrong.”

Continuing in the by-now-classic vein of other Bush appointments, Bush’s envoy can actually find Canada (Globe and Mail) tells of the man slated to make nice with Canada for the next several years. The article, published in Canada’s biggest paper, sardonically points out the one good thing about him before going on to describe just how little he’s actually been to Canada.

“Mr. Wilkins’ only trip to Canada was to Niagara Falls, Ont., over a long weekend in the early 1970s while he was posted in Indiana with the... [More]”

The Apple Product Cycle takes you through the life of an Apple product, from inception:

“An obscure component manufacturer somewhere in the Pacific Rim announces a major order for some bleeding-edge piece of technology that could conceivably become part of an expensive, digital-lifestyle-enhancing nerd toy.”

…to the actual appearance of the product…

“The product has sleek, clean lines, a diminutive form factor, and less than half of the useful features that everyone was expecting. Jobs... [More]”

The Next Unreal Tournament gives a preview of the engine and development process that will create UT2007, coming to a graphics workhorse near you in 2007. Epic is overhauling the gameplay in this version in order to address some of the issues affecting the previous two incarnations of UT. Namely, that they didn’t seem to be as much fun to play as Quake because of all the bouncing around, unbalanced weapons and medium- to long-range weapons play.

They’re taking a new approach, tweaking level... [More]

Giant Steps by Michael Levy is a wonderful, fun 3d visual interpretation of John Coltrane’s musical classic. It’s a sign that Flash can used for something other than annoying ads that flicker, flash, make noise, hover around over the web page and find ways around our popup blockers.

Really cool, soothing stuff. Check it out.

Earth day

Battlefield Earth (Daily Show) shows Bush at a fund-raiser in the Smoky Mountains, “the nation’s most polluted national park”. His flight was grounded by a thunderstorm, so he was forced to wing his speech, to some degree. He didn’t vary too much from his standard program, offering his usual batch of lies and uncomfortably long pauses intended to allow the audience to erupt into gales of laughter. Every time he does this, it becomes more and more painfully obvious what a deleterious effect speaking... [More]

As most of you have probably heard, the new Pope joined the Hitler Youth. As you may not have heard, this is not a reason to panic and run around gossiping that the Catholics have not only elected a conservative Pope, but, in fact, elected a Pope who wants to kill all the Jews in the world.

Take a look at the details in New pope defied Nazis as teen during WWII (Seattle Post Intelligencer). After scanning through some charming paragraphs about wartime Bavaria, you’ll get to this part: “he … was compelled to join the... [More]”

Step One (1)

Those parts of reality which make the government look bad are to be eliminated.

Using Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report (Knight Ridder) as a reference, we read that:

“The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.”

Further reading shows that... [More]

Scotland Yard has recently been credited with foiling yet another sinister plan hatched by the nefarious Al Qaeda (the Arabic Emmanual Goldstein, for those living in a box for the last few years). Al Qaeda Poisons Seen Sowing More Panic than Death (Reuters). A literal read of the title indicates that the threat wasn’t so bad, but it includes the words “poison”, “panic” and “death”, so they still get an A for effort. The first sentence of the article cranks it up a notch further, getting everyone’s... [More]

Every day people think of quirky new ideas for web sites. Usually, the site has a funny little Flash video or a game and the site itself is a one-hit-wonder of the 21st Century. There is invariably not enough bandwidth to go around and the site is laid low in minutes by stampeding hordes of attention span-deprived, insatiable internet users.

To avoid those problems, there are now sites based on much larger servers, like Blogger that don’t go down so easily: not even when they host a huge page... [More]

As some of you may have noticed, earthli News articles have become more sporadic and rarer over the last several weeks. This crisis arises not from any personal problems or lack of interest, but rather from a quite real dearth of news about which to complain.

The current events section has long thrived on the antics of a hapless administration led by a chimpanzee-like buffoon who consistently opted for the crass, wrong solution that gave new meaning to the term “short-sighted”.

In light of... [More]

I am the designer, builder, proprietor and main contributor of this site.

Interests

Reading. Writing. Words. Cycling. Hiking. Swimming. Camping. Philosophy. Politics. Programming. Movies. Technology

Career

Resumé

I have over 25 years of experience as a professional software developer, systems architect and technical project manager. I’m interested in high-quality solutions to tough problems. I co-founded Encodo Systems AG almost 15 years ago.

My focus has always been on generalization and... [More]

• Gonzales as Attorney General
• Rice as Secretary of State
• Negroponte as head of Iraq
• Bolton as ambassador to the UN
• Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank (Globe and Mail)

As a die-hard cynic, I’m really starting to appreciate having an administration with such a refined sense of irony.

I can’t wait for the Supreme Court nominations to begin…

“Tact is for those who aren’t witty enough to be sarcastic”

- Unknown (quoted by Eric Sandblom)

The first service pack is available at the WebCore home page. This release includes some smaller bug fixes and some usability improvements. There are also release notes and a change log to read.

The earthli applications have also been updated and have their own change logs: Albums, News, Projects and Recipes.

The results are hardly surprising for those that have tried and used different browsers: Opera wins in amost every category. On Windows, it’s almost twice as fast as any other browser in most of the... [More]

Here’s a neat little take on a possible future for consumers in America called Summer Surveillance Campaign (Flash). It’s about a guy who’s just trying to order a pizza; little does he know that the pizza parlor has recently hooked into “The System”.

1. Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix (2003) − J.K. Rowling
2. Das Rennen Zum Mars (1999) − Gregory Benford (de)
3. A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present (1980) − Howard Zinn
4. Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002)- Ha-Joon Chang
5. Vitals (2002) − Greg Bear
6. Inventing a Nation (2003) − Gore Vidal
7. Understanding Power: the Indispensible Chomsky (2002) − Noam Chomsky
8. Practical File System Design: The Be File System (1998) − Dominic Giampaolo
9. Illuminati... [More]

1. Mort (1987) − Terry Pratchett
2. The Light Fantastic (1986) − Terry Pratchett
3. Equal Rites (1987) − Terry Pratchett
4. The Hogfather (1997) − Terry Pratchett
5. Drug Crazy (1998) − Mike Gray
6. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2002) − Gore Vidal
7. Dreaming War (2002) − Gore Vidal
8. Rogue States (2000) − Noam Chomsky
9. XML In a Nutshell (2001) − Harold and Means
10. Fortunate Son (2001) − J.H. Hatfield
11. Interface (1994) − Neal Stephenson
12. Echt Zauberhaft (1994) − Terry Pratchett (de)
13. Der Kleine Hobbit (1999) − J.R.R.... [More]

1. Culture Jam (1999) − Kalle Lasn
2. Black House (2001) − Stephen King
3. Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy (1998) − James Heartfield
4. Ordeal of Change (1963) − Eric Hoffer
5. Age of Access (2000) − Jeremy Rifkin
6. God’s Debris (2001) − Scott Adams
7. Count of Monte Cristo (1844) − Alexandre Dumas
8. Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot (1996) − Al Franken
9. Voltaire Stories (Candide, Micromegas, Zadig, Ingenu, White Bull) (1759) − Voltaire
10. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) − J.K. Rowling
11. Harry... [More]

Media bias is a question mulled often by the media itself and by its usual victims: conservatives. It is truly amazing with what perseverence and clarity of purpose the extreme right is able to continue in the face of this truly debilitating onslaught.

Televisual Fairyland by George Monbiot (Common Dreams) provides some comparisons of media bias one way or another. If you’ve read Manufacturing Consent, this theory will be very familiar. He actually covers two related points using the recent resignation (sacking?) of Dan Rather... [More]

Bush nearly triples request for tsunami relief tells me that Bush “increased [the US] pledge by another $600 million”. When the shock of the disaster was fresh, this administration was moved to donate $15 million. Now, that figure is up to $950 million.

What changed?

The article takes care to justify the charity by noting that “the massive U.S. aid has helped this country’s image across the Muslim world”. Some questions:

• Are we helping them because they need and deserve our help and we are a... [More]

OS X is a demanding environment for budding applications. There are a lot of customs, rules, standards and recommendations to follow in order to integrate properly with the rest of OS. Since the OS that Apple delivers is so strongly integrated in its look and feel (you can’t change the Aqua theme without third party software), applications that do whatever they like feel somehow “wrong” and get uninstalled.

Delicious Library (Ars Technica) reviews the product of the same name (their attention to graphic... [More]

So Miss Condaleeza Rice has magically become the Secretary of State. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. Of course, it wasn’t quite the slam dunk the White House thought it would be — there was dissent, after a fashion.

Condi Rice had to sit in front of a Senate committee* and stonewall a bit before she got her job as Secretary of State. She’s used to it and seems at least capable of doing that for long periods of time. There was really no doubt that she would get the job; the confirmation... [More]

Fake Windows Features (Something Awful) is the latest installment of the Comedy Goldmine feature there. The two graphics below are the two I thought were the best, but feel free to have a look around yourself. They deal with the small things that Windows just can’t seem to get right: applications that steal focus and sorting by name in the programs menu.

It’s funny because it’s true.