Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

cut and run

17May2004 [directLink] [myth]

Didn’t think Mark Latham’s call to get out of Iraq was very sensible at first (after all, we - Australia, the US and Britain - made a mess of the place, the least we can do is help rebuild it). But now he’s suggesting the US-led coalition get out of there, “handing over security to a United Nations force made up largely of Arab nations”, while continuing to fund the reconstruction.

Which is political genius. Not because the US will consider it a viable option (cos they’d lose control of the oil) but because it calls John Howard’s bluff - it shows that Labor is willing to consider alternatives that are politically sound and culturally sensitive. And meanwhile, Latham’s call has forced the Libs into the unfortunate position of committing to stay there longer (when originally Howard had hoped for “home by Christmas” anyway - in time for a pre-election parade). Robert Hill, Minister for Defence has now said we may be there for three years! Given one of the war’s selling points was that it would be in-and-out in a matter of months, admitting this is rather dramatic (remembering that we knew this all along, but getting the Howard Government to admit to anything is near impossible).

Of course, this will all be forgotten now that the head of the Iraqi Governing Council, Izzadine Salim, has been blown up. George, Johnny and Co (and their friends in the media) know just how to twist such an event to their own warped il/logic. I just take hope from the fact that, every time they do distort the truth, they come out just slightly worse for wear…

SMH 16th May 2004

Domain.com.au Feedback

17May2004 [directLink] [webprog]

Hi, I use your website for a client and I find it very annoying/temperamental. My browser of choice is Konqueror, running on Linux, and when on Windows I prefer Mozilla Firefox - but your site runs terribly on Linux and not a lot better in Firefox. There seem to be a bunch of controls that aren’t coded correctly for web standards (for example, when I edit a property on the ‘Details’ page, the text boxes down the bottom shrink to the (too small) default, whereas in IE they appear larger). That’s kind of annoying but at least works. It gets worse when I want to upload images - sometimes it works fine, other times it won’t at all - regardless of how the image files were created (in Linux or Windows) - if I’m uploading from Linux it will sometimes give me an error page with no useful description and an inconsistent error code. When I click the error code for more information I get file-not-found errors. If I then switch to a Windows XP computer and upload those very same files (shared over the network) it works fine. I’ve tried this enough times now that I know it’s not a file format problem - I’m assuming (given the dodgy non-standard coding elsewhere) that it’s something at your end…

PS. Imagine my disgust when I submit this form (in Firefox under WinXP) and I get another error page - error code 1259440 this time - and when I click the code I get a popup Alert “Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page. This may be caused by cookies that are blocked.” Which is a bit of a nonsense really as I’m allowing all cookies…

PPS Turns out the feedback went through even though I got that error message (I think cos I refreshed the page and RESENT the data). I got a couple confirmation emails - but they didn’t get the post-scripted version for whatever reason.

aligned with evil

11May2004 [directLink] [webprog]
This item was changed on 11December2005

Trying to rewrite this site in standards-compliant XHTML and CSS, but IE6 is giving me hell. This page looks beautiful in Konqueror and Firefox (1 and 2) but gets thrown all over the place in IE6 (1 and 2). So still gotta hunt down the bugs and see what I can do to work around them (preferably without resorting to browser detection…)

EDIT: this problem’s been solved; the evidence is the new website which looks beautiful with left and right floats in any browser… I’ve therefore removed these old examples, and will add commented code asap… Edit2: have struck out the non-existent links as they were confusing the spiders

snow!

03May2004 [directLink] [france]

Source: Reims web

Jazzy Mix Parts I & II (Beats and Blues)

01May2004 [directLink] [music]

Part One (Beats)

Alicia Keys Harlem’s Nocturne
The Roots ft D’Angelo The ‘Notic
Rob Dougan Nothing At All
Reverence Contemplation
Everlast The Greatest
Rob Dougan Drinking Song
Alicia Keys Feeling U Feeling Me
Alicia Keys Slow Down
Salif Keita Tomorrow
Martin Tillman Odessa
Rob Dougan One And The Same (Coda)
Outkast ft Norah Jones Take Off Your Cool
Lakasha I Feel Blue
Alicia Keys Never Felt This Way
Jurassic 5 Swing Set
Rachid Taha Barra Barra
Buckshot LeFonque Some Cow Fonque (More Tea, Vicar?)
Outkast Favorite Things

Part Two (Blues)

Pink Floyd The Great Gig In The Sky
Gary Jules Mad World
Emiliana Torrini Gollum’s Song
George Breathe In Now
Ben Harper Touch From Your Lust
Norah Jones Seven Years
Ben Harper Amen Omen
Matthew Herbert Big Band Cafe de Flore
Norah Jones Above Ground
The Whitlams Fall For You
Adam Alexander Talk of Funny Days
Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here
Norah Jones Nightingale
Annie Lennox Into The West
Pink Floyd Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-7)

and the winner is … (syd-en-ey)

01May2004 [directLink] [france]

Ballot’s complete and I’m going to Reims, which ended up being my first preference, so I’m very happy. Spending a year there from next January, which includes the 4 month European summer holiday! Friends keep promising to visit or just ending up in Europe next year.

Reims sounds like a great spot - small city of 200,000, 1.5 hours north east of Paris, about as far to Belgium, Luxembourg, little further to Germany or the Channel crossing.

Now that I actually know where I’m going I can start making plans for next year - where to live, where to visit…