Something the CNN talking heads said last night caught my attention: the US government encouraged Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistani politics as a sort of “Plan B” alternative to their “Plan A”, the current president Pervez Musharraf. With her assassination, they have no “Plan C”, and are forced to put all their hopes and support behind Musharraf. If that is the case (or even appears to be), it sounds like a motive to me. Not that Musharraf would directly order Bhutto whacked — he’s much too subtle for that. But I would not be at all surprised to find that Musharraf orchestrated the circumstances that enabled this assassination to occur. Bhutto herself placed any blame for her subsequent death on Musharraf’s unwillingness to provide adequate safety measures for her return. Of course, Musharraf will deflect the blame onto Al Qaeda and the Taliban — who probably actually pulled the trigger.

I wonder if Bhutto considered that she might become for Pakistan what Mahondas Ghandi became for India? We can only hope that this will inspire the Pakistanis to push harder for democracy and the rule of law. I’m afraid that the opposite may occur — that voices of opposition will be silenced by fear of attack.

I wish the Pakistani people all the best, but frankly I don’t hold much hope for the near future.

It makes you feel old when you realize that someone you knew and loved would be 130 years old now if they were still alive. Yesterday was my great-grandfather’s 130th birthday, and I knew him until he died at age 87 when I was not quite six years old. We kids called him “Gee Gee”, but my Dad always called him “Grandpa”.He was the first of five Sterling Wyatt Camdens so far (I’m number four), named after his uncle Sterling and his grandfather Wyatt. He usually went by his middle name. He didn’t go to school much (a total of 18 months, I think), but he read a lot and taught himself most everything he knew. He eventually became an accountant — a profession which buoyed his family through the Depression.

He was an ad-hoc inventor — creating something like a tractor for his own use before any such thing was ever marketed. But like all of his contraptions, he never sought a patent for it. I remember a butter churn he made for my great-grandmother. You flipped a switch on the wall, and an electric motor turned a small pulley with a huge belt running to a larger pulley that turned a bevel gear that turned the churn’s paddles. I’ve always wondered why the motor wasn’t attached directly to the paddles, but maybe he geared it down by using different sized pulleys.

His father, Voltaire, was a disabled veteran of the War Between the States who according to my father was given to heavy drinking and abuse of his wife and children. My great-grandfather, on the other hand, never drank alcohol except for one shot of whiskey before bed each night. I was told, however, that he underwent one of the earliest appendectomies, with nothing but whiskey for an anaesthetic.

Though he didn’t follow his father’s tastes in liquor, he did in lickin’. My great-grandmother confided to my mother that when she saw how badly her husband treated their first two children, she “steeled herself” so that they wouldn’t have any more. They always had separate bedrooms.

So it certainly spelled trouble for my father and his brothers when they were left with their grandparents following their parents’ divorce (something quite unusual in those days). They had only occasional visits from their parents from then on, so my great-grandmother’s plan to prevent the further abuse of children was thwarted. My Dad told me that even in his sixties my great-grandfather was strong enough to lop down small trees with one swing of an axe, and he demanded hard work from the three boys — though he expected them to be lazy and good-for-nothing, like all boys. After school he would ask them something like, “So did you screw your teacher today?” And when they answered “no sir” they’d be met with “And why not?!” But they dare not answer in the affirmative, either. My Dad remembered one of his younger brothers being so dead tired at the end of a long day’s work after school that by the time they sat down to dinner at 10PM his head would just collapse into his dish.

By the time I met my great-grandfather he was in his eighties and had gentled down some. In our earliest encounter that I can remember, he pretended to try to steal my mother’s purse. I was outraged, and told him he better not bother my Mommy! He thought that was grand, and we always got along afterwards. He used to walk with my sister and me out to the railroad and around the little farm they had.

He stayed strong all his life, though he required a cane in his later years. One night at about 2AM my father heard banging over at their house (which was across the highway and about a half mile from ours), so he went over to investigate. My great-grandfather, at age 87, was out mending fences while his wife held the flashlight.

The next morning, my mother, sister and I accompanied my great-grandparents into town. My great-grandmother drove, with my great-grandfather in the passenger seat. I was in the middle of the back seat, with my mother on my right and my sister on my left. As we approached the main intersection of the town (which at that time had no traffic signal) my mother called out, “Grandma, look out!” The next thing I knew, something was holding my head like a padded vise.

A drunk driver had turned left immediately in front of my great-grandparent’s old Plymouth. It was a two-door, and the two halves of the front bench seat folded forward to allow access to the back seat. They didn’t put seatbelts in autos back then, so on the impact we all flew forward along with the two front seat-backs, which then whipped back and caught me by the neck. A Virginia State Trooper who was a friend of my Dad’s had witnessed the accident and helped me out. I was relatively unharmed, and my mother and sister were OK. My great-grandparents, on the other hand, had encountered the steering wheel and windshield. They were both taken to the hospital.

My great-grandmother soon recovered. In his hospital bed, my great-grandfather told my Dad, “I think I’ll cash in on this one.” Dad told him that no, for sure he would be back mending fences before the next time the cow got out. But a few days later, he succumbed to pneumonia that he had developed while he was lying in the hospital.

On the night after the funeral, my father was standing on the front porch of my great-grandparents’ house, along with his Aunt Ellie. A terrible storm sent lightning shooting through the swiftly moving clouds, accompanied by frequent, booming thunder. Dad said, “I guess Grandpa made it after all.”

Yesterday I finished reading Adding Ajax, by Shelley Powers. As is my usual method for consuming books in print, I took small doses of this guide to “making existing sites more interactive” to spice up my breakfast each morning.

I found the book to be both pragmatic and idealistic. On the pragmatic side, its intended audience is primarily web developers who want to add Ajax effects to existing sites. Shelley includes many practical examples of how to do that. She’s also pragmatic about what level of cross-browser support you should aim for, and how long you should beat a dead horse before you’re willing to compromise.

On the other hand, Shelley promotes some ideals regarding accessibility, preserving functionality without scripting enabled, and compliance with XHTML and HTML standards. But she also provides step-by-step examples of how you can achieve these goals.

The code samples in the book are well thought out and remarkably easy to understand. I learned some techniques I had never considered before for JavaScript, CSS, and even PHP. Her choice of PHP for the server-side examples elicited ambivalence on my part. On the one hand, it made the examples immediately applicable to WordPress. On the other, I really prefer working in Ruby — but then again, translating algorithms from PHP to Ruby is usually an exercise in instant simplification, whereas the converse would be significantly more difficult.

I was a bit disappointed by the sheer number of minor errors in the book (e.g., “three” instead of “there”). They weren’t bad enough to obscure its meaning, but they were a bit annoying and should have been caught by the editor and reviewers. The Errata page doesn’t show any of these, so maybe I’ll submit a few if I get some time. I also noticed one or two minor errors in the code examples (e.g., using the wrong array’s length for the terminating condition of a for loop). If I could remember where I saw those, I’d compare against the online examples to see if they’ve been corrected there. I should have noted the page numbers of these errors when I saw them, but I didn’t. Again, it was relatively easy to interpolate the correction — though perhaps a beginner in JavaScript might experience more difficulty.

I noticed with some amusement that I’m actually quoted in this book. On page 207, Shelley shows an example of polling for updates. For this example, she used the comments on a post (that I can no longer find on her site) in which she introduced the world’s greatest widget — one that said something to the effect of “please wait while the entire Internet is loaded into the sidebar.” My comment, shown in Figure 6-4, was “Needs caching.”

I’d recommend this book to anyone who does web development. Whether you already know how to use XHR and JSON or you have no idea what those abbreviations mean, you’ll learn at least a few things that will help you make your sites more friendly to your users. Shelley’s conversational style makes reading the book cover-to-cover enjoyable, but the book’s simple organization and ample index render it a good reference work as well.

Next on my reading list I’m moving back into fictional literature with Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, while still continuing to sip my way through Paul Graham’s On Lisp.

(The title of this post is taken from Sophocles’ play Ajax, translated by R. C. Trevelyan).

120 is the smallest 3-perfect (triperfect) number. The sum of its divisors is 360, which is 3 * 120.

Are you ready to upgrade from Vista to XP?

The best in programming profanity (thanks, Reg).

Or instead of swearing, just say Boo. An extensible language for the .NET Framework based loosely on Python (thanks, Arjan).

The true art of blogging? Jorn Barger (who invented the term “weblog” ten years ago yesterday) says it’s all about amping up the echo chamber (thanks, John Murrell). Naturally, Dave Winer claims prior art.

The many meanings of SEO. I like Mark’s own coinage best.

I unsubbed from TechCrunch months ago, mostly because I can’t respect Arrington personally. There’s more.

Me on TechRepublic: Top 5 programming languages (depends on how you rank them).

Me on Geeks Are Sexy: My Johnny Quest fantasy nears reality, the ultimate LOLcats, the Firefox detention hoax.

Tish presented to me the Community Blogger Award. I’m such a great steward of my blog’s community that it has taken me nearly a month to respond. Sorry about that, Tish. You certainly deserved this award more than I.

The award is intended to recognize those bloggers who “reach out and make the blogger community a better one.” I am honored that Tish thinks that I do this for anyone but myself.

Now to spread the honors around to others who really deserve it:

Robert Hruzek not only interacts with his readers, he also sponsors group writing projects that result in lots o’ link-love for everyone — besides providing good blog-fodder on interesting topics.

Shelley Powers has often been accused of not playing well with others, but she sure knows how to ignite some lively and thoughtful discussions. She’s made me a more thoughtful blogger — um, I think.

Diogenes invites other bloggers to contribute a post about what blogging means to them. This introduces his growing readership to many other bloggers, and has expanded my blogroll considerably.

Randy Morin links liberally, helps bloggers get started, and creates tools to promote blogging.

Cooper carries on lively conversations with her readers, and is also “crew boss” for Should Be Famous, a blog to promote the visibility of other bloggers.

Many others in my blogroll also deserve this award, but I’ll stop at five so as not to appear gratuitous.

My new laptop finally made it back from HP after having the LCD display repaired, but I can’t say I missed it much while it was gone.

It was actually kind of convenient having everything loaded on one workstation. The graphics card on that system only has one port, so I had to get used to using only one monitor again, but I moved my 24″ LCD external monitor over to that system so at least I had a pretty decent amount of screen real estate to work with.

I was expecting this system to get bogged down with everything running on it at once, but actually I noticed very little difference. In fact, where I noticed any difference at all it appeared that Windows XP on a 1.8 Ghz P4 actually performs faster than Vista 64-bit on a 2Ghz Intel Core Duo T7200. I’m sure that there are some optimizations to Vista that I still need to perform, but out of the box I’d say that isn’t a “Wow” experience.

Then today Vista got its panties tied in a knot when I was trying to open a folder in Explorer. I can’t say for sure that’s what caused it, but it was coincidental to the second. The “working” icon displayed, and everything else froze. Then the mouse icon disappeared, and even Ctrl+Alt+Del elicited no response. Serves me right for not using the command prompt instead, I guess. I ended up having to give it the 5-second middle-finger salute to power off and restart.

Maybe SP1 will sort some of these things out, but I’m not downloading any release candidate. Microsoft ships fully released versions with enough bugs for me.

Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible, and is an acrostic poem composed of 22 sets of 8 verses, each line of a set beginning with the same Hebrew letter, progressing through the alphabet from aleph to taw.

English slang. That’s English, as in the way people living in England speak (thanks, Mark Vinten).

Carl McColman sees John Lennon’s Imagine as “profoundly Christian” (thanks, Darrell ).

Speaking of Heaven…

Thomas Midgely, evil scientist.

Cross-domain AJAX requests (thanks, Assaf).

Apotheon conjectured that Steve Yegge’s unnamed Next Big Language might be ECMAScript (that’s JavaScript all dressed up for the party), and Steve has now casually confirmed that it is at least “a” if not “the”.

You don’t want to get on Google’s bad list.

How to pass the Turing Test? Talk to the other head.

I’ve been saying this for some time now (thanks, Arjan).

Robert Hruzek collects the posts for his “What I learned from the world of sports” writing project.

Tish’s heartfelt response to my tag on the 3 things meme. Teeni continues it .

Thanks for the link-love, Michael and Brian!

Me on [GAS]: non-evil axis, and V’Ger’s adventure is just beginning.

Me on TechRepublic: our expertise is reasonable, but our ignorance is pricey.

Widget watch: Juriblogsphere uses the tag cloud widget.

Now that we’re far enough past Thanksgiving that all the leftover turkey is gone, I think it’s time for yet another heart-warming Christmas story here on ye olde blogge. This time nobody shoots Santa, but another regular feature of Christmas threatens to be the death of yours truly.

Ten years ago, we lived in a house in California that had an eighteen-foot vaulted ceiling in one room. We called this room the “den”. It’s where we hung out most of the time, and it naturally made a great spot for the annual Christmas tree.

We always got a pretty large tree, but on this particular year our daughter was 16 months old and my wife wanted to get the biggest one yet — reaching all the way up to the ceiling.

We rented a U-HAUL truck, gathered my wife’s two brothers, and drove up US 50 to Pollock Pines in the Sierras, where there was a cut-it-yourself tree farm known for its large firs. They charged by the foot, but anything over twelve feet was the same price, so that seemed ideal to our purposes.

When you have a young child along, everything takes longer than you think it will, so we arrived there late in the afternoon. I knew from the start that meant trouble.

The tree farm covered many, many acres. If you didn’t take note of your path as you entered it, you could get lost there for days. My wife naturally wanted to examine every tree of the requisite height before deciding on “the one.” Complicating this procedure was the fact that we didn’t have anything capable of measuring an 18-foot tree while it was still attached to its roots, so at each tree my wife asked, “Do you think this one’s big enough?”

It didn’t matter what I answered.

“No, I don’t think so,” was her inevitable conclusion, and on we would continue with our search.

I found one that I was certain was large enough, and shapely, too. But I couldn’t convince her that it was “the one.”

Finally, just as it was beginning to get dark, my wife decided on a tree that would do (after much consternation over whether it was big enough). By this time, our daughter was tired and cranky, so my wife took her back to the car and left her brothers and me to cut this tree down and drag it out of the forest. But not before she asked a few more times, “do you really think it’s big enough?” followed by our numerous assurances that it was, indeed, sufficiently enormous.

We three took turns sawing, making a diagonal cut as well as a horizontal one to insure that the tree fell in the right direction and didn’t kick back. When we finally got through the trunk, we gave it a push and yelled “timber!” as the big fir tree crashed down onto the forest floor.

Then we reached down to lift the trunk and drag it out of the woods. It wouldn’t budge. We couldn’t move it a millimeter. By now it was almost completely dark, and we looked at each other and imagined the confusion on each other’s faces. We not only wondered how on earth we were going to get this tree out of the forest, but we were also becoming increasingly concerned about getting ourselves out as well.

Fortunately, the owners of the tree farm shared our concern. The headlights of their four-wheel-drive vehicle announced their arrival on the scene. Maybe we weren’t the first customers to find ourselves in that type of situation, because they came well prepared: four men, flashlights, saws, and even a tape measure.

After we described our situation, they suggested we measure eighteen feet and cut off whatever was left over from the bottom, to make the job lighter. The tree, which my wife had worried might not be big enough, turned out to measure 32 feet. So they cut the lower 14 feet off, and all seven of us dragged it onto their 4WD and we held onto it as we rode back to their office. There we loaded it into our truck, paid for it, drove home, dragged it out onto the lawn, and opened numerous alcoholic beverages. We laughed and recounted our adventure, each of us not saying what we all knew to be true: that yet another adventure awaited us the next day, when we would be expected to erect this monster inside the house.

Though we tried our best not to let it, the next day came as scheduled in the morning. With 14 feet less mass, we were just able to drag the arboreal behemoth to the back sliding-glass door that led into the den, only to realize that it wouldn’t fit through that opening. We took all the glass panels off, and then it would just make it through trunk first, bending its branches inward and scraping the wall as they flung back open on the other side.

We dragged the bottom of the trunk all the way to the opposite wall, and then realized that the top still wasn’t clear of the door. But at least it was down to the part that was flexible enough to bend it through, scraping the wall even more as we did so.

The upper floor had a look-out window over the den, so one of my wife’s brothers and I went up there, while the other brother remained downstairs with the tree. We had purchased two very large eye hooks, which we screwed into the wall beside the look-out. Through these we passed two stout ropes and threw one end of each down to the other brother, who tied them to the upper part of the tree’s trunk. Then we two pulled with all our might on each of the ropes, lifting the tree up while our brother below guided the base of the trunk towards the stand.

The folks at the tree farm must have mismeasured, or else they wanted to be careful not to take off more tree than we asked, because the top of the tree hit the ceiling long before it reached a fully vertical posture. We weren’t about to try to drag the tree back outside to lop off a foot or so, so we just rammed the crest up into the angle of the vaulted ceiling and let it curl over to one side.

Then when our brother yelled up that the trunk was over the stand, we let it down — and broke the stand. We didn’t have another one, nor did we feel like going out to get one. With the top lodged in the ceiling, we just left the ropes attached and tied them off at the eye hooks. Good enough! More alcoholic beverages.

It did turn out to be a beautiful tree, though. An adult could stand by the trunk within the branches, so we decorated it inside and out with red bows, gold silk balls, and hand-painted wooden ornaments. Besides using a very tall ladder, we also reached over from the look-out with a long pruning-hook to grab each high branch, pull it over, decorate it, and then carefully ease it back into place. Seeing the look on my daughter’s face as she would gaze up through the ornamented branches, it was worth all the effort.

How did we dispose of this Christmas Colossus after the holidays? Let’s just say that was the first and only time I have ever witnessed a chain saw being operated inside a house — by the elder brother. It took days to vacuum up all the sawdust.

I’ve been meaning to participate in one of Robert Hruzek’s “What I Learned From…” series of group writing projects for some time, but usually I run out of time before the deadline. This time I may actually make it. As soon as Robert announced the theme for this round, I thought of a story I could tell you that’s equally flattering and embarrassing to yours truly — but does include a lesson.

My Dad and I were famous football fans. American football, that is — Washington Redskins, specifically. So when the newspaper announced a joint tryout practice at the local high school for prospective Varsity and Junior Varsity athletes in the summer before I entered 8th grade, my father encouraged me to go. I was a pretty good runner, so I had big dreams about becoming a star running back. I imagined myself the next Larry Brown.

Eighth grade was a big transition in our school system. Students from smaller elementary schools all over the county were lumped together in what was then called “Junior High”. Thus, when I got to the practice, there were maybe a hundred people there I didn’t know. In fact, I don’t think I knew anyone. In all the confusion, I accidentally got grouped with the defensive tryouts — but I had a good time working out with the group (the older guys were going easy on us younger ones, I later realized). At the end of the day, the coach told the Varsity team to show up again for practice the next day. Somehow in my teenage confusion, I thought he meant the Junior Varsity, which would naturally include me.

And nobody corrected my misconception. For weeks, I came to the Varsity practice every day and got kicked around like a rag doll. “Heck,” I thought, “those other elementary schools sure did produce a lot of big guys.” I only weighed 120 pounds, and some of these monsters were at least twice that. I couldn’t run as fast as anyone else, even the fat ones. I couldn’t hit as hard as anyone else. I worked hard just to stay at the back of the pack. But I knew I had to keep on trying. If they could do it, by gosh I could too.

I remember a tackling-practice machine that literally launched a stuffed opponent-surrogate at you. We’d stand in line and wait to try to tackle the dummy as it sped along its suspended track. It would knock me to the ground, feet flying in the air, while all the other defenders laughed. Every time. But I’d get up, and get back in line, and get knocked down again, and get laughed at again. Every time. Day after day.

But in the locker room after practice, several players would pat me on the back and tell me I was doing a good job, and to “keep on hustling”.

And the day I finally stopped that %*&&@#^ tackling dummy, they all cheered.

Then one day as I was returning punts and getting repeatedly planted in the ground, someone I had never seen before but who was dressed like a coach called out, “Hey Chip! Come over here!”

He led me to where the Junior Varsity team had finally started practice. That’s when I understood that everyone I had been practicing with for weeks was at least two years ahead of me — many of them four years my senior. Somehow that had never come up in locker-room conversation. Imagine how embarrassed I was at my ignorance. Imagine my wonder when I realized exactly what I had survived. Imagine my subsequent confidence when going head to head against mere 8th and 9th graders. What could I fear from mere mortals, when I had battled gods?

What did I learn from this experience? When you feel overwhelmed and defeated, don’t give up. Get up, dust yourself off, and try again. Failure doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on your character or your abilities — you might simply be in over your head. But keep hustling — because if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger.

EDIT: Obfuscated the G-word to go for a G-rating.

“The Number 118 118 is the leading directory assistance service in the UK.” << they have a great ad.

Shelley has an ultimatum for Internet Explorer: “I will no longer compensate for limited or broken specification support in browsers after January 1, 2010.” I say, let’s all follow Shelley’s lead and force Microsoft into compliance or out of a market that they seem to be tiring of anyway. And thanks also for the link-love, Shelley.

Hex words (thanks, Assaf) — and I don’t mean curse words. My favorite wasn’t in the list: “deadbeef”, often used to overwrite released memory in a debug environment in order to help identify its accidental reuse.

Fadebook? Hugh: “If you p*ss in the soup for long enough, eventually it stops tasting like soup.”

Jessica Hagy has an amazing way with words, without writing a sentence.

You can never eliminate the programmer, you can only change the language. Instead of trying to automate programming, maybe you should empower it.

15 Steps to Blog Psychosis.

The Cure. Awesome.

You know you want one, too.

The unwisdom of crowds.

Dan Simard provides an outlet for all your PHP hatred.

Thanks for linking to the OPML Browser widget, JUNED.

Mark Dykeman featured me on Friday, and even composed a haiku for the occasion. Thanks, Mark! Click through to read my retaliatory haiku in the comments.

Thanks for the link-love, Arjan. BTW, Arjan runs one of the most comprehensive link blogs for developers.

Me on [GAS]: Dirty Santa, and a lump of coal for the MPAA.

Me on TechRepublic: not enough time, so just walk away.