Month: June 2003

Prominent pro-Arab lobbyist Möllemann dies, very likely by suicide

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Möllemann published an anti-Israeli flyer during the federal election campaign last year causing a scandal that cost the FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei) a lot of votes, unfortunately just enough to let Schröder squeak by with a tiny majority of about 6.000. It turned out later that Möllemann may have financed the flyer by illegal campaign contributions and is also possibly guilty of fraud and other offenses. After months of investigations the Bundestag revoked his parliamentary immunity on Thursday, shortly afterwards police raided 25 buildings in four European countries. Less than 30 minutes later Möllemann plummeted to his death while parachuting; since there are no signs that his equipment was sabotaged suicide seems very likely.

Stefan Sharkansky has more; he has kept an eye on Möllemann for over a year and has even devoted a website to him: moellemann.com.

Suicide bombing kills five in Kabul

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Four of the dead are German soldiers, 30 more soldiers and bystanders were injured.

As terrible this is it still is telling that attacks like this are rare enough to be newsworthy in a country that has been liberated less than 18 months ago. It really seems as if the remaining Taleban and Islamists in general are no longer capable of conducting real operations and are reduced to blowing themselves up like Palestinian terrorists.

Going after European targets is a seriously boneheaded moveon the side of the Islamists; for all their hypocrisy about the American approach to the war on terror European governments are much less concerned with respecting the human rights of terrorists once they feel forced into all-out war. The European camps are going to be much less pleasant than that at Guantamano Bay, not to mention much larger.

Virus warning

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Bugbear-B, a particularily nasty mass-mailing worm is spreading rapidly and may even hide in emails that seem to be sent by colleagues or others inside your own organization/network.

The Register reports on Bugbear-B and links to more detailed information at the McAfee website.

Robust Blogging

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Steven Den Beste has some thoughts about Blogger and blogging that are worth reading. As a longtime Blogger user I certainly agree with him on most points, though I think Blogger can be adequate if one understands its limitations. For example, it’s true that Blogger sometimes eats posts – which is why I have always composed (and saved) mine in a text editor. But my approach works less well for a group blog, because it’s prohibitively difficult to restore archives using multiple contributors’ saved text files.

Blogger’s rickety archiving system is also a problem, not because it doesn’t work but because it requires a great deal of time and attention to keep it working. Permalinks didn’t function on our blog for a month or two. I thought it was a system-wide Blogger problem and didn’t do anything about it, until Joe Katzman suggested that I rebuild our archives, and suddenly everything worked again. What a relief. But then, the fact that to solve a recurring problem I had to take a particular action, and didn’t know what that action was before someone knowledgeable told me about it, does indicate a system-wide problem.

Fortunately, the situation is probably not as bad as I initially feared, because I’ve got our blog’s archives backed up in HTML format on my computer. Also, Sylvain tells me that he was able to access our archives by figuring out what their URLs should be and entering those URLs directly into his browser. OTOH, I don’t know how stable our archives are on Blogger’s server, and restoring the blog from my saved HTML files would be a big pain in the ass. The bottom line is that it isn’t worth sticking around on Blogger to find out the answers to these questions, and Blogger was a time sink even when it worked properly.

Steven likens Blogger to training wheels. That’s a good comparison. When I think of Blogger I remember what a Russian programmer acquaintance told me, about how it was once common practice in the old country to improvise PC data-backup systems out of VCRs. Sure it works, but you shouldn’t use it if better technology is available. For non-geeks, Blogger was pretty much it a couple of years ago. And Blogger is still safe enough if you back everything up and take the time to practice various defensive rituals to avoid Blogger’s pitfalls. But it isn’t worth it.

We got much more than we paid for out of Blogger, but it’s time to move on.

Magic 8 Ball

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While we are rebuilding our shattered e-world, we Chicago Boyz manifest our stolid determination to overcome all disasters by singing jolly tunes as we e-dig out of the e-rubble and begin e-rebuilding this site. Let me share with our dear readers a particularly apropos tune to help restore a tired but sincere smile to their lips, evidencing interior serenity and joy, in these troubled times.

This page has a link over on the right to the song Magic 8 Ball by cub. You should listen to it. More than once. It is good. It is catchy. It is sweet but not cloying. It has a killer chorus. It is a neglected classic. You should then not resist the urge to sing it tomorrow morning while bathing or driving in your car. You should not be alarmed when it lodges in your brain and won’t get out. You should ask yourself, is that a great song, or what?

Decidedly so.