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.

His lips are moving.

It’s an old joke, and a bad one, but hell, he’s earned it. Take the gala event from last week, where he obliged to let some words drop out of his mouth for the great unwashed to gather up and cherish. It was only twenty one minutes long, but was carefully worded and notable for both what was in it and what was not. As always, he sees no need to reference reality in any way whatsoever, instead mouthing palliatives for the masses — soothing baby talk to calm them so they... [More]

Half Life 2 is a breakthrough game for one main reason: its physics engine. Don’t get me wrong, the Source engine looks nice, but its graphics don’t impart the same atmosphere as Doom 3, which has much more detail and immersiveness. The graphics and sounds are good, but not revolutionary. There is a lot of attention to real-world detail and architecture, which pays off; the screen shot to the left is one of the best available, but isn’t representative of average in-game graphics.

The physics... [More]

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL by Håkon Wium Lie, Michael Day (O'Reilly XML.Com) responds to a line drawn in the sand in webarch.pdf by Norman Walsh, a noted XSLFO proponent. In it, he said:

“…web browsers suck at printing … they all suck. And CSS is never going to fix it. Did you hear me? CSS is never going to fix it.”

That’s pretty much all he has to say about CSS in that paper; it actually discusses a general style sheet, written in XSL, that transforms an HTML document to printable FO. If you motor on over to that link, even with Firefox’s... [More]

If you listen carefully, you can hear the voices of alarm as 48% of America continue to nurse their wounds and seek to understand what happened. It’s called the End Times and it’s all the rage. Battlefield Earth* by Bill Moyers (AlterNet) describes the method to the madness gripping the US. Once you learn the reasoning, you don’t feel much better about it. For a little taste of the numbers that most interest our leadership in this, the most secular of countries, with its treasured separation of church and state and so... [More]

Guide to SpringField USA is an excruciatingly detailed map of Springfield, home to the Simpsons. There is a ‘sliced’ version, which shows zoomed-in and browsable maps of the different sections, a Big Map (in PNG format) and also a PDF version, which can be printed.

The authors subjected themselves to “numerous viewings of most episodes of the Simpsons”, then built the map:

“While the placement of most locations is arbitrary, many are placed according to where they appear in relationship to each... [More]”