Have to hand it to CNN - which looks like the first major US news organization with the cajones to declare 'Global Warming is the real deal.'. 

This of course clashes with official government policy, which is that global warming is a myth perpetuated by tree-hugging enivronmentalists in order to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to guzzle gas - which would deprive Exxon and Saudi Arabia of their constitutional right to make lots of money.  

So don't bet on the US signing Kyoto or ever showing any leadership on the issue. It's up to you and me.   

1989 - The oil tanker Exxon Valdez creates the second largest (man-made) environmental disaster in history by spilling 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

The largest? That would be the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. We'll be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of that disaster next month (April 26th). 

[This doesn't bode well for the grade point average of at least one student.]

Microsoft's new operating system 'Vista' has been re-scheduled to January 2007 instead of Q3-2006.

Microsoft said Vista is delayed because it wants to improve overall quality, particularly in security, and that PC makers didn't want the operating system introduced in the middle of holiday sales, because a new version would create instability in the market.

Talk about creating instability in the market. What this does is guarantee that there will be no PC's given as Xmas gifts this year. Why would you give somebody a rather pricey gift that will need to be replaced next month?

But every silver lining has a cloud... if you're looking for a hot new Linux server, the PC makers will be dumping their old stock at Xmas time at ridiculous discounts both to make way for the Vista boxes and to boost the anemic sales. 

Just don't try and run Vista on one of these puppies. I've heard through the grapevine that this is going to be the most bloated Windows yet. You're going to need a new 20ghz PC with 100 gigs of RAM and a few zotabytes of hard disk space if you want to see Vista work...

The FBI, who I ranted about last week for spending a half billion dollars on a relational database, are apparently having difficulty providing agents with Internet email accounts. It's not in the budget. Whoa! A half billion for a database and they can't afford email? [Actually it stands to reason - they're being taken to the cleaners on the database deal - it would be stupid to give them any more software money. They probably were quoted upwards of a billion dollars by Lockheed-Martin to setup a Linux box with some email accounts.]

These aren't meant to be secure accounts - we've been assured that there is a secure internal email system (My guess is that very likely it's PROFS, running on a 30 year old IBM mainframe). It's only internet mail they can't access. So why not let the agents have Yahoo or gmail accounts? They're free!

Folks, let's do the right thing. I can come up with a handful of spare email addresses I can part with. Let's get a collection together and donate them to the feds so they can get tons of spam just like the rest of us. 

I might be willing to part with chunkyvomit@baddcafe.com, and even sacrifice loretta.leggs@floozee.com if it's for the good of my country...

The FBI is getting close to awarding a contract for Project Sentinel, the showcase of their technology upgrade. Looks like the bidding is only open to two companies - Lockheed Martin being one of them. Cost of the project is estimated to be around a half a billion dollars.

And what are they buying for all this money? A relational database. Lockheed Martin can build some pretty good airplanes and satellites, but databases? Server farms? I wonder what the cost would be if they opened the bidding to folks who actually have experience building scaleable information systems...

Not long after SBC bought AT&T, the new AT&T announces it is going to buy Bell South. Slowly but surely, Ma Bell - who had her arms and legs cut off by a court order, is re-assembling itself. This would make four of the baby bells back in the fold. Three to go.

It all goes to show the effectiveness of government anti-trust legislation. I'm curious to find out if any of this is even allowed under the anti-trust court order which split up the phone company. It's kinda' like sending killers to life in prison, and letting them out in five years.  But in all fairness, it's been twenty-two years since the Ma Bell breakup. A lot can happen in the communications world in twenty-two years. Cable phones, cell phones, satellite phones, VoIP, the internet.

I was curious what AT&T's strategy was when it sold its cable division to Comcast. That seemed to be the only worthwhile asset it held at the time. Now we see the master plan. This re-unification wouldn't have taken place if they had held onto the cable business. This deal has been in the works for a long time. Maybe for as long as twenty-two years...  

After four years, the government finally released a few transcripts of hearings from Guantanamo that contained names of detainees. It wasn't a list. It was just a few transcripts where the names haven't been blacked out as they normally are. This is in response to a Freedom of Information claim by the Associated Press. 

It has been four years now. Only ten of the 490 detainees have been charged with a crime. Most of the rest of them just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Afghanistan, during the invasion.

The Russians have a word for indefinite imprisonment for undefined political crimes by unspecified people.

Gulag.  

There's a lot of debate going on these days about the so-called MVC programming paradigm.  I've mentioned it before. Have a look at this page, for example. MVC stands for Model, View, Controller.

Basically, this all came about because of the LAMP programming environment. That's Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. When you are writing web applications with PHP and MySQL, you've got essentially three computer languages intertwined.  HTML, PHP, and SQL. Up until a couple of years ago, you just stuck these all into a file and wrote your application. The software purists who like to write pure, clean, re-useable code found this to be an abhorent practice. Three languages in one file. Then along came RSS and added a fourth. By now most of them were frothing at the mouth. Then everybody started playing with Ajax, which relies heavily on Javascript. The software purists were now having irregular heartbeats and threatening to go postal. In fact, a lot of this debate started in 1995 when Netscape added Javascript into HTML pages - and has only escalated since then. We've come full circle.

So the MVC paradigm was born. What it does is separate as much as possible the different languages into their own files. The model is the PHP code or what they call business logic or process. The view is the visible representation or output - HTML (with Javascript) or RSS or whatever.  The controller is the SQL or the input. Wherever possible, they've tried to keep the languages pure and separate. 

This is all well and good, except you've got PHP in all three sections. That's the glue which makes these web-apps work after all.

I think it's all a bunch of hooey. Yeah, I understand the principle, and no, I've got nothing against structured code. In fact I think it was all designed intentionally after the dot-com bust to put programmers back to work. Now you need three programmers where before you only needed one. Three times as many files to deal with.

This is supposed to make programming less complicated and more easily understood. I've worked on a few MVC packages now.  Let's say you want to fix a bug in the bogga.html web page. In the old days, you open up bogga.html with a text editor and there it is. You need to fix something - piece of cake. Now you've got to figure out what function it belongs to, and whether or not the bug is in the SQL code or the PHP code or the HTML/RSS/whatever code. Bogga.html might not even exist as a file, even though you can access it on the web. Once you've done this then you have to look through all the files to find the right place to tweak the code. Trust me, I've spent a lot of time fixing badly written code. Buggy code is buggy code. Whether or not the HTML is mixed in with the SQL doesn't make one bit of difference. All it does is take more time to find the bug - and then even more time to fix it. That's because you can't just glance at the surrounding code to see what effects a change might have anymore. The surrounding code is now spread across the filesystem. 

I  guess what it all boils down to is that if you're not multi-lingual in computer languages, you've got no business writing web-apps. If you are multi-lingual, you should be able to switch context between SQL and PHP and XHTML and XML and Javascript all within the same paragraph. Drop into assembly language to do a left shift a bit faster? Sure, why not? If this hurts your poor little brain, you've got no business writing web-apps.