Archive for September, 2005
The Pleasure of the (reStructured) Text
Every item that you read on this site was composed not by tediously applying HTML angle brackets to delineate the paragraphs appropriately or create hyperlinks, nor by selecting elements and clicking icons using a "WYSIWYG" editor that may or may not generate valid XHTML, but by using a plain old text editor (e.g., Notepad for [...]
“Raining blood”: Suicide bombings in Iraq
In the deadliest attack of its kind since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in April 2003, a suicide bomber killed 114 in Baghdad yesterday when he lured civilians to his vehicle with promises of work, then detonated a bomb.
A survivor said that in the midst of the chaos caused by the explosion, it was "raining [...]
Hurricane Katrina, limited government, and pure public goods
Having absorbed more than a week’s worth of U.S. media commentary (primarily via the Web) on the federal government’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’d like to round up some highlights here, draw a few tentative conclusions about the political significance of that response, and relate those conclusions to some other developments. The [...]
Al Qaeda in Argentina?
Much has been written on the relative irrelevance of Latin America to the United States since the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, due to its lack of importance to America’s strategic interests. So whenever something like this article from conservative Argentine daily La Nación catches my eye, on the entry of 26 individuals linked [...]
Optimizing Plone performance with caching
NOTE: This document is something of a brain-dump. I’m still experimenting with various caching techniques, and would like to organize it somewhat better, so it’s currently a work in progress.
I’ve long been a big fan of the Plone CMS, which powers this very Web site. Any ambivalent feelings I may have had about [...]
Launching the site
Welcome to my third or fourth attempt at a site resembling a Web log! This one runs on a state-of-the-art Python-based, open source Content Management System called Plone. Certainly far more more firepower than any Web log needs, but I’m thinking that using this as a platform will have spillover effects that create [...]