One of the latest white house dispatches changes the order of succession should the secretary of defense become incapacitated or dead.

Here's the new lineup:

a) Deputy Secretary of Defense;
(b) Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence;
(c) Under Secretary of Defense for Policy;
(d) Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics;
(e) Secretary of the Army;
(f) Secretary of the Air Force;
(g) Secretary of the Navy;
(h) Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller);
(i) Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness;
(j) General Counsel of the Department of Defense, the Assistant Secretaries of Defense, and the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation;
(k) Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Material Readiness and the Director of Defense Research and Engineering;
(l) Under Secretaries of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force; and
(m) Assistant Secretaries of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, and General Counsels of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.

For comparison, here's the old lineup:

(1) Deputy Secretary of Defense.
(2) Secretary of the Army.
(3) Secretary of the Navy.
(4) Secretary of the Air Force.
(5) Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology.
(6) Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
(7) Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller).
(8) Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.
(9) Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology.
(10) Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
(11) Director of Defense Research and Engineering.
(12) The Assistant Secretaries of Defense, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, and the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, in the order fixed by their length of service as permanent appointees in such positions.
(13) Under Secretaries of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, in the order fixed by their length of service as permanent appointees in such positions.
(14) Assistant Secretaries of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force whose appointments are vested in the President, and General Counsels of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, in the order fixed by their length of service as permanent appointees in such positions.

That's a pretty major shakeup. Hope Rumsfield stays healthy. Oh, and the 'old lineup' is before June 2005. For the last six months the president ordered that Rumsfield be followed by the Secretary of the Navy. Period. Who's the navy sec? what happened in June to make the president make this change? Who's the SDI? It's all pretty weird. Smells like a power struggle.

Yesterday was the first time I broke a sales record on the upside since about March 2002, when I had been in business three months. The big difference is that I'm now selling stuff way below cost.

Bargain hunters. They're a very rude sort of people. I don't particularly like them as customers because they're the human equivalent of vultures. They go on a feeding frenzy whenever somebody sells at a loss (or finds some other way to offer prices lower than anybody else on the planet for a particular item). They mob in and pick apart any good meat and leave the useless scraps for whatever rodents might follow. I might mention that this is a very predictable form of behaviour and the large chain stores are built around this model of shopping.

We're living in a vulture economy. That's scary.

One more reason to dump the iTunes DTD... it doesn't exist anymore! Observe the following RSS+XML feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.DTD" >

The 'xmlns' declaration is supposed to give a 'dictionary' of the document language so that an absolute stranger to the itunes namespace can figure it out. I'd have to go dig up the xml spec, but I'm pretty certain they say in pretty strong language that if you sponsor a DTD, you kinda' gotta' haveta' put it at a URL that is never going to change. Ever. This URL comes straight from Apple's own Podcast spec (which coincidentally was invented by MTV veejay Adam Curry, who will soon be the father of the internet according to wikipedia).

Yet if you go to that web address and try and read the language definition, you'll find yourself instead at apple.com/itunes staring at an Apple eShopping mall and in my case telling me that I need a new operating system to install iTunes. Where's the DTD? In fact I'm just trying to extend RSS in another way and was going to use their DTD document as a template (since it's about the only existing extension onto the RSS space). Sigh...

As I've delved into the deepest pits of extending the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), I've found that it has been over-engineered to the point of absurdity. DOCTYPE's, DTD's, XSLT's, RDF, etc.

It's enough to drive an insane person crazy. Extensible? Try it sometime. You've no idea the can of worms you'll open. I think it's time to dispense with the whole mess and get back to what XML started out as. A means to convey information through a '<tag>content</tag>' syntax.

It is an implicit format to allow producers and consumers of information to talk the same language. In doing so, all of the information forms have been forced to be standardized so that the information language is discoverable through namespace declarations and associated style guides.

Why bother?

It's all well and good for something like a web browser which needs to display information, but it's overkill for the use of XML as a simple data exchange format. All you really need is for an information consumer to recognize an element that it knows about and deal with it.

So I'm proposing something new. FreeXML. A freeXML document can look just like an XML document. The only difference is that it doesn't care what it is presented with. Either it recognizes the data or it doesn't. Namespace declarations? We don't need no steenkin' namespaces.

<freeXML>
<html>
<head><title>a freeXML document which contains HTML</title></head>
<body>
Anybody can do it. See?
</body>
</html>
</freeXML>

Now let's go a step further -

<freeXML>
<animals>
<item><name>dog</name></item>
<item><name>cat</name></item>
</animals>
</freeXML>

Either you know what an 'animals' is and how to deal with it or you don't and you ignore it. This is what every XML consumer does now. The only difference is - No DOCTYPE, no namespace declarations with associated DTD, no XSLT. Either the information consumer can handle the data the producer produces, or it can't.

What about extensibility? What about it...

<freeXML>
<animals>
<item><name>dog</name><mypetname>Fido</mypetname></item>
<item><name>cat</name><mypetname>Fluffy</mypetname></item>
</animals>
</freeXML>

Again, either you know how to deal with <mypetname> or you don't. Validation? Why? If you've grabbed this 'animals feed' from a remote source and don't understand a particular element, it wasn't meant for you, and you can ignore it.

What can you do with freeXML? Anything you can do with XML. It's just another type of markup. Heck, you can embed XML into freeXML. Here's an RSS feed -

<freeXML>
<xml>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0" >
<channel>
<language>en-us</language>
<title>Diary and Other Rantings</title>
<description>Life in Silicon Valley by a former software engineer who now runs a music store.</description>
<link>http://macgirvin.com/blog</link>
<lastBuildDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2005 11:57:51 -0800</lastBuildDate>
<generator>Note-a-Day Weblog - Version 2.2</generator>
<copyright>Copyright 2005 Mike Macgirvin</copyright>
<webMaster>mike@macgirvin.com (Mike Macgirvin)</webMaster>
<managingEditor>mike@macgirvin.com (Mike Macgirvin)</managingEditor>

<item>
<pubDate>Sat, 17 Dec 2005 12:00:00 -0800</pubDate>
<title>Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday..</title>
<description>Who could hang a name on you?&lt;p /&gt;Actually, the name is &apos;Ruby on Rails&apos;. It&apos;s quite an interesting moniker for a programming language. OK, the language is Ruby. The &apos;on rails&apos; part has to do with adding the programming language with database classes into a web server&amp;nbsp; and database environment. The example is an entire web-based recipe database in one line of code. That&apos;s impressive, and it&apos;s attracting a lot of attention. It was only a matter of time. Programmers are lazy folks. We don&apos;t like to write the same things over and over. So every time a new language pops up that includes more and more of the stuff that we&apos;ve written over and over again, it&apos;s bound to take off. &lt;p /&gt;But if you look under the hood, it&apos;s not quite one line of code to write a web based recipe database. In fact the tutorial takes three pages of system configuration and database mucking before you get to the one line of code. Some things never change. &lt;br /&gt;</description>
<link>http://macgirvin.com/blog/index.php/DEC-2005#article-17-DEC-2005</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://macgirvin.com/blog/article.php?17-DEC-2005</guid>
<comments>http://macgirvin.com/blog/feedback.php?17-DEC-2005</comments>
<category>software</category>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
</xml>
</freeXML>

First customer:

Do you have any guitar picks?

Yeah, right over here.

How much are they?

Twenty five cents each.

You have anything cheaper?

Nope.

OK. I take one.

Thanks, next?

Glokpee kwaidong?

'Scuse me...?

Glokpee kwaidong?

I'm not sure... Could you point to something?

Glokpee kwaidong bakwtui!

I'm sorry, but I'm all out of glokpee kwaidongs right now. Next?

My violin won't stay in tune, can you help me?

Sure. (I tune it up without any difficulty). Seems to work just fine.

What are those pegs for?

Those are for tuning the violin. You need to adjust them to keep it in tune.

Really? My teacher never told me that.

Next?

Glokpee kwaidong?

I think your wife was here a few minutes ago. She went that way... Next?

You had a new flute in your window for $9.95 about six months ago. I'd like one.

That was a closeout special. It's long gone.

When you get more?

Never. Next?

And so it goes...

It's hard to believe that it was only a week or two ago that I was extolling the virtues of the Drupal CMS. So much has changed since then. If you recall, I made it sort of work for my needs after fixing a lot of bugs. I was all set to contribute my fixes back to the Drupal development community. But then something happened. They released a new version. Cool! I thought. I'll just download it and get all the latest stuff and maybe they've fixed some of the bugs I uncovered. Doesn't work that way. More bugs. Things that I spent time fixing are now hopelessly broken. The fixes I made can't be applied to the new code. It's all different. And Drupal works on a 'module' framework. They only provide a core application, and others in the community add things to make it do more stuff. The problem is that every time they change the core, they make it incompatible with the existing modules. Nothing I added works anymore. I have to wait for all the different modules which I was using to be re-written. Or do it myself. No thanks. They have a nasty habit of making every existing contributed module break on every version release. So you can't just write a module or fix a module and be done with it. Writing a module makes you a lifetime contributor. You'll have to fix the module over and over again and over again and over again - everytime the core application changes. Looking at the development roadmap, this is going to happen a lot. Think I'll go find another CMS package.

Or see if I can write one in Ruby||Rails in a dozen lines of code... 

For decades it has been believed that the first peoples to populate North and South America crossed over from Siberia by way of the Bering Strait on a land-ice bridge.

However, a new study examining the largest collection of South American skulls ever assembled suggests that a different population may have crossed the bridge to the New World 3,000 years before those Siberians.

People with skulls resembling Paleo-Indians were present in Asia around 20,000 years ago, and lacking the technology to cross the Pacific Ocean by boat, they probably crossed the land bridge to Alaska several thousand years before the Siberians, said study co-author Mark Hubbe of the Universidade de So Paulo.

"We don't know for sure, but we believe at least 3,000 years earlier," Hubbe told LiveScience. "We have a difference of 3,000 years in South America, and we can assume the difference is the same in North America."

--

This is being presented to the Journal of the National Acadamy of Sciences. I do not call it science however. My first skepticism is in the part 'they probably crossed the land bridge...' which is based entirely on the belief that people lacked the technology to cross an ocean 10,000 years ago. Throw a big tree into the water and it will cross the ocean. People 10,000 years ago couldn't sit on a floating log? It was too advanced for their primitive brains? Really?

My next issue is pretty plain, in the last paragraph. "We can assume...". Right. That's not science. admittedly I'm one of a small handful of people who have found the evidence to be overwhelming that cultures had come and gone in the western hemisphere long before the great Asian migration of the last ice age. There was humanoid acitivity all over the western slopes of the Andes - long before the Bering crossing. Bolivia, Peru, Chile.  During this time, huge megalithic stone structures appeared all over the planet, including these places.  Most 'scientists' refuse to acknowledge this body of evidence, clinging to beliefs and assumptions about what technologies humans had available prior to written history. We simply don't know.

But I am excited by the fact that we have yet more overwhelming evidence to consider once we get some real scientists to put all the pieces together and tell us what really happened.

Mr. Williams was executed.

I've long since given up taking sides in the death penalty debate. I will only comment on the absurdity of the twenty-four years that elapsed since the sentence was issued. I think it would be a fascinating statistic to see how many death row inmates in the US have actually died of old age.

Having a cup while the operating system is being restored on the system that failed yesterday...

Yet another group of folks is scheduled to come out today and gaze at the bubbling brook outside my store and figure out if there's anything they can do about it. The first guys, at great expense - are going to run a series of high-tech tests to figure out where to dig.  The second group might actually start the excavation.

I looked at the dysfunctional hard drive. Western Digital. Gak... Let me tell you something. I've got a drawer full of old hard drives. Some of them go back twenty years. Every single Western Digital drive I've ever owned has failed,  and almost always have failed spectacularly. Most every other drive I've still got, and I can still access them given the right hardware. Draw your own conclusions.

2:00 PM

The operating system has been reloaded. Restored my most critical applications first. First things first... the printer drivers and the web browser. Then use the browser to grab the backups. The rental accounts recovered flawlessly. Then I open my financial account data. The most recent date on record is 2003. Ouch. Two years of lost data. Including this year. But I just backed up this two days ago. How could that be? Perhaps I loaded the wrong backup. I scanned the server directories. There's a problem... I have two versions of the backup on the Unix box. In one, the file extension is lower case. The other is upper case. And it was created two days ago. So I reloaded with the upper case version of the file.

The newest date is still 2003. Now I'm starting to sweat. My finances for the entire year - I don't seem to have them on backup. I check the other server. There's a file from Jan-2005. OK - let me try that one. I'll at least have a little more data than I do now. But I think the bank will only let you download three months into the past. I've still got a big problem. Doesn't look like there's any way to recover most of this year. I'm really sweating now. So I load the file from January. The newest date is still 2003. You'd think I'd be sweating buckets, wouldn't you? But no. Now I breathe a sigh of relief.

You see, I've used that particular backup before (the one from January). I know that it contains more recent information than 2003. The program migrated the data on the first file I used, and stored it somewhere else. It didn't even look at the two other backups I loaded.

So I deleted all the data from the program, and started fresh with the uppercase file from two day's ago. Bingo. Everything is there. Sync with the bank and everything is hunky-dory.

They found the leak. I've got jackhammers going 30 feet from me right now. Should be fixed in another hour. Glad it was outside the store...