Events

The New York Sun is reporting that President Bush authorized leaking Plame's identity, at least implicitly, according to the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby: A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from...

My old personal site, www.braverman.org, has seen better days. It's creaky, it hasn't been maintained, and I think this blog has mostly supplanted it. It does, however, have a library of hundreds of jokes, all dying to be read again. So starting today, I'm adding a new category: Jokes. (No, I'm not changing the name to the "Waspj Blog.") Here's the first one, from an anonymous fan: Eulogy for a Dog Morris in Brooklyn lived in a big home with his pet dog that he loved for 12 years. His best and only...

First, the House last night passed a campaign-finance package last night on a strict 218-209 party-line vote: The House approved campaign finance legislation last night that would benefit Republicans by placing strict caps on contributions to nonprofit committees that spent heavily in the last election while removing limits on political parties' spending coordinated with candidates. Lifting party spending limits would aid Republican candidates because the GOP has consistently raised far more money than...

Anne brought to my attention the security practices at a medium-sized company in Chicago that make security nearly impossible: the company's IT department assigns Windows domain passwords to the users. In a recent communication, IT said this practice made the domain more secure. It actually made me mad to hear about this practice. They're not only wrong, they're wrong in a particularly ignorant and incompetent manner, and someday they're going to have a significant security incident. Secure log-ins...

Experts say the Enron executives' testimony is extremely risky for the pair. They will have to overcome the obvious conclusion that they knew they were robbing hundreds of employees and thousands of investors before company collapsed. Stay tuned.

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay is not seeking re-election. This is the best political news I've heard in days. I'm going to bed as happy as I can be back in Nashua.

I mentioned Friday that I've completely refactored the section of the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™—the Idea™—that handles quantitative functions. (I've also decided to make some SDK documentation available.) The actual design of the IMeasurable classes—Length, Speed and the like—bears more discussion. What I have, essentially, is a collection of .NET structs that implement IMeasurable, one for each kind of thing you want to measure. The old design had a single struct called Numeric that could...

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has a new column today reminiscing about the hype of 1997 because it's back in vogue: The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords. There is endless coverage of a few atypical stories in the trade press, mainstream media, and even on specialized Internet-focused websites. Once again, it's worth remembering: your site is...

Krugman weighs in (sub.req.) on the immigration debate roiling the GOP: For now, at least, the immigration issue is mainly hurting the Republican Party, which is divided between those who want to expel immigrants and those who want to exploit them. The only thing the two factions seem to have in common is mean-spiritedness. Nicely put.

Appyhay Aprilhay Oolsfay Aday! (Evenhay ymay eatherway itesay ishay inhay hetay piritsay.)