A long but fascinating insider account of the build up to war inside The Pentagon, and the influence of the neoconservative Office of Special Plans (OSP) over the White House policy decisions that led to the war in Iraq: Saddam Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his people, and was continuing in that mode, becoming an imminently dangerous threat to his neighbors and to us—except that none of his neighbors or Israel felt this was the case. Read more...

I don’t often discover much arbitrary lockout stupidity these days. The Web Standards message seems to be getting through to the people at the code-face: developers at large corporates or their design agencies. Occasionally a site will crop up with 2000-era broken browser-sniffing, like O2’s XDA site. I surfed on over using my browser of choice (Mozilla Firefox) and was presented with the following message: This website has been optimised for Internet Explorer 5+ and Netscape 6+. Read more...

We run around in a 1994 Vauxhall Corsa 1.5 TD GLS, previously owned by Kathy’s dad. When we got it, in 2001, it had clocked up 139,000 miles. To date, it has done about 178,000 miles. Apart from a bad year in 2001 (alternator, radiator and who knows what else went wrong) it has been the most reliable car I’ve ever owned. It always starts first time, apart from yesterday, when it started second time. Read more...

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So His Gingerness is leaving Southampton at the end of the season. He will be missed, as he’s taken Saints up a notch from the annual relegation dogfight to pushing for European places. Southampton have confirmed that manager Gordon Strachan will leave the club in the summer to undergo a hip operation. — http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/s/southampton/3381791.stm Gordon: all the best—I’m sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Thanks for the memories, especially beating Spurs 4-0 last year and the Cup Final. Read more...

HNY!

Great day for The Saints yesterday: a comprehensive 3-0 win over local rivals Portsmouth, with a direct-from-a-corner goal by "The New David Beckham" (Jason Dodd), a superb individual effort by back-from-injury Marian Pahars and a diving header by James Beattie. Saints are fourth in the league again. Unless we keep winning, though, we could just as easily be in the relegation zone, like The Skates. We’re closer in points to our old rivals, 1214 places below us, than to Chelsea, one place above us. Read more...

Thank goodness: this year’s Christmas Number One is a product neither of Pop Idolnor Fame Academy: Little known US singer Gary Jules has clinched the Christmas number one with his cover version of Tears For Fears’ 1982 hit Mad World. — http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3302887.stm What’s even more refreshing is that it’s a "real" song (albeit a cover), rather than a cheesy "comedy" outing (think Mr. Blobbyor Kim Wilde with Smith & Jones). Read more...

I’m in the process of installing Panther (OS X 10.3) on the iMac DV+ sat next to my desk, which is used for cross-platform testing. It used to run OS 9.1, and wasn’t actually used that much. Due to its Unix underpinnings, OS X should make it a more useful machine, as my place of work is a pretty-much exclusively Linux shop. I have chosen to install X11, so I’ll be able to open gvim (my editor of choice) from a server, and have it display on the iMac. Read more...