OneMind

I don’t use this valuable space to promote specific sale offers very often, but this is one I really felt compelled to share.

My favorite development tool, Revoluton, has just announced an Independence Day sidegrade offer to owners of Macromedia Director, REALBasic, and Microsoft Visual Studio. You can save $100 or more by taking advantage of this offer. (I don’t get it. Why is a UK company offering a reduced price on a day celebrating the uppity Colonists’ audacity in breaking away from Mother England? Must be the cold. Heh heh)

Details are here.

Take my word for it. Or don’t. Revolution is the only commercially supported cross-platform RAD tool that lets you deliver standalones on Mac OS X (with Universal Binaries no less!), Mac Classic, all flavors of Windows, Linux, and some flavors of Unix out of the box. Oh, and they’ve just added support for delivering on the U3 USB Disk platform as well.

Check it out.

Hard to believe, but the United States Supreme Court,in a relatively rare show of backbone, slapped down the Bush Regime’s outrageous efforts to treat terror suspects as war criminals. The court, in a 5-3 ruling, told Bush that attempting to do so violated both U.S. military law and the Geneva Convention.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court, said the Bush administration lacked the authority to take the “extraordinary measure” of scheduling special military trials for inmates, in which defendants have fewer legal protections than in civilian U.S. courts.

A breath of fresh air wafts through the fetid stench that is the Bush Regime’s roughshod trampling of human rights.

My filmmaker buddy and son Tomas Hernandez sent me a link to the newly released documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. Or rather to a PBS interview and profile of the film and its producer.

This is bitingly good stuff on a topic of great importance. A lot of folks will pooh-pooh the overtones of conspiracy (one famous wag says, “Who killed the electric car? General Motors did, that’s who!”) but the movie is important for the questions it asks, the insights it offers, and the lame responses to serious questions offered by establishment spokespeople of various stripe.

It was released today in NYC and LA. Coming soon to a theater near you. In Monterey, we have to wait until July 28 to see it at the Osio.

Until yesterday, I’d never launched Pages, the word processor-cum-page layout tool that comes with Apple’s $79 combo package called iWork. I bought iWork for Keynote, the outstanding presentation tool, because I sometimes need to take Keynote presentations and convert them to PowerPoint for display on various client and personal Web sites.

Faced with the task of laying out a newsletter for my church, a task that required runaround text and multi-column layout, I decided to fire up Pages to see if it was up to that task without a steep learning curve.

I am blown away. This is one of the sexiest products I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a very capable word processor for my everyday needs, interoperates with RTF, Word, and PDF, and handles most common page layout needs with aplomb. It took me only a few hours to create a six-page newsletter that is better-looking than anything we’ve done since our graphic designer left. And she used the $700 Adobe inDesign product to create a newsletter that isn’t substantially better than mine.

Very cool technology. Nice to know Apple can still do awesome stuff like this.

Seems the Cubs natives in Chicago are restless and calling for my old friend Dusty Baker’s head. Calls for his firing are becoming strident.

As I look at it, there’s not much Baker can do, really. But the manager is always the scapegoat and Dusty knows that. Being a baseball manager — or a manager in any pro sport for that matter — is one of those jobs only masochists take on.

He’ll probably get fired at the end of the season if not before, but he’ll land on his feet. I think he’s one of the greatest managers in the history of the game and he has four Manager of the Year awards to prove it.

I don’t care who the President is or how much I agree or disagree with him, giving that office a line item veto authority over spending would be tantamount to abandoning the bedrock concept of separation of powers in this country’s governance. It’s a bad, bad idea.

Why? Read on.

President Bush, like many others before him from both parties, is pushing Congress to give him that authority. But the Constitution clearly reserves to Congress and Congress alone the authority to determine spending and control budgets. The fact that 43 states have some form of line-item veto is irrelevant in this debate; states do a lot of dumb stuff for stupid and petty political reasons. That doesn’t mean the Federal Government should follow their lead.

If the President — any President — had authority to pick and choose the items which items to kill in a budget passed through a public and hard-fought process in the Congress, the President would in effect control Congress. He could hold hostage some legislation in return for an agreement not to veto specific items in a pending spending bill. He could arbitrarily cut items because his opponents had proposed them or just because he pesonally disagreed with them. That’s far too much power to concentrate in one man’s hands.

Bush says this power would bring harsh light to glare on pet Congressional projects. He can do that without a line-item veto by bringing those specific issues to public attention through his bully pulpit.

I agree with Bush and many of his predecessors who say that Congress too often burdens otherwise good legislation with pork barrel favoritism. I agree that practice ought to be stopped. But a line item veto isn’t the way to do that.

The conservative Supreme Court flexed its muscles in support of police goon squads this week by ruling that it is permissible for police to enter your home armed with a warrant but without announcing themselves first. The old “Knock First” rule — on the books for centuries for good reason — was kicked to the curb by a bench that is absolutely disinterested in citizen rights or human rights and far more paranoid about crime and terrorism than is warranted.

Nobody wins in this ruling. Police who don’t announce themselves before bursting into private homes — often enough the wrong homes, by the way — may find themselves increasingly on the receiving end of a homeowner justifiably assuming that a bunch of armed men crashing through his door with no notice are probably bad guys. And more homeowners will be killed or injured (many have been, according to several studies) despite their innocence as paramilitary SWAT teams with no business invading homes at all become bolder now that they can operate like the old Gestapo.

I worry about how this country will survive Another 2+ years of the current regime. But I positively tremble at the future of this country for decades to come thanks to the horrible appointments the right wing has managed to force onto the top court in the land.

(Thanks to Tony Seton for the pointage to John Tierney’s New York Times column on the subject to which I’m not linking because that newspaper charges to read its online content.)

I’ve spent a good bit of time last night and this morning poring over and poking at the UI AJAX widgets cooked up by Yahoo (available here) and I must say I’m pretty impressed.

In a relatively short period of time I have almost completed a small Web application for a client. Well, I’ve almost comleted the UI and basic interaction of that app. I have a bit more work to do on the server-side component. And I have identified what I think at least is a bug on the Calendar component of the YUI stuff. But this library is huge and well-documented (including lots of examples) and quite accessible. I have a feeling I’m going to become fast friends with it.

Over the years, I’ve become something of a fan of the interview show, “Inside the Actors Studio.” Host James Lipton conducts some of the best interviews I’ve ever seen. At the end of each show, he asks his guests a series of questions he borrowed from a French TV interviewer he admires.

This week, my daughter Krista, who is also a bit of a fan of the show, sent me her answers to the questions. I won’t share those. Maybe she’ll post them on her blog and I can link to them. But she asked for mine and I thought I’d share them here.

What turns you on?
Open-mindedness

What turns you off?
Bigotry

What’s your favorite curse word?
S.O.B.

What sound or noise do you love?
My wife singing

What sound or noise do you hate?
Explosions

What is your favorite word?
Oneness

What is your least favorite word?
Never

What profession other than your own would you like to try?
Quantum physicist

What profession would you not want to try?
Medicine

If there’s a heaven, what would you like God to say when you get there?
“What would you like to do in your next life?”

Sen. John Kerry, who would be President right now if the Republicans hadn’t stolen the 2004 election, has taken the radical position that U.S. troops should be pulled out of Iraq by the end of 2006.

It may or may not be possible to do that. I suspect his position is a bit more posturing and negotiating than it is statesmanship (which, as a politician, he’s entitled to do, of course). But George W. Bush doesn’t get it, either. He continues to resist setting up any milestones of progress that would trigger troop drawdowns on the ground. That’s just stupid.

I know it’s difficult if not impossible to say, “We’ll start pulling troops on such-and-such a date and have them all out by such-and-such a date.” There are too many risks on the ground yet. But we now have an established if shaky government in place and we know the objectives we’re trying to accomplish, so why can’t Bush set some milestones along the way? No reason other than political obstinacy. One could argue that a position that says, “We’ll leave by Dec. 31 regardless of the situation in Iraq” could encourage the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq to keep up the fight longer than they otherwise might. But saying, “When the Iraqi army is handling 50% of the security in the country in terms of territory or population, we’ll start withdrawing half our troops,” would give us a measurable objective and a goal.

Bush doesn’t like goals and plans. He likes to say, “Mission accomplished” and “oops.”