I'm watching CNN shortly after midnight here, and on the tube is coverage of iraqi elections going on as i'm watching. There's a reporter trying to report on the status of one polling station and I'm having trouble understanding her because the voters lined up in the background are so exuberant, singing some kind of arabic song and clapping their hands, smiling broadly in what i have to believe is at least partly showing off for the camera. :) While I didn't support the war, and I still disapprove of the way its being conducted (especially the torture which is *still* going on), it is heartwarming to see these people so intent and determined to exercise their right to vote.

and yet, that report was followed by one about the steady sounds of mortar fire going off around the city. it is tragic and reprehensible that the goal of the insurgents in the area is to keep voters from voting at all. its becoming more and more clear to me that there is a fundamental problem in that region of the world, and a problem which is rapidly spreading to this country: fundamentalist, intolerant religious forces are at play, intent on quelling any sort of dissenting views. Just as it is vital for the future stability of the middle east--indeed, the world at large-- that the battle against the insurgents is won in iraq, we must also win the battle against the fundamentalists currently staging a constitutional coup here at home. And yes, when I speak of them, I am very definitely including these people.

i've always kind of liked CSS, but now i'm starting to really love it. I mean a lot. Like, i'm going to buy it a valentine's day card.

I've always stayed away from a strictly semantic html+css for presentation mostly because of the difficulty of getting it to render approximately the same in most browsers. at this point i'm willing to say "screw old shit" mostly because its been 5 years since IE 6 was introduced, and firefox is starting to gain enough traction that I can reasonably expect most users will have one of them (preferably firefox) installed, and thusly be able to make some sense of my documents. I expect things will only get better as they go on.

some of the other things i'm happy about using css:

• i can switch stylesheets and instantly have a mobile friendly version that runs on a small screen
• easy 508-compatibility with screen readers
• no more table-magic for layout
• i can sleep better at night
• women instantly find me more attractive
  

ok, the last two are wishful thinking.

I logged into friendster today and saw this:

Popular searches in my network

1. height and weight calculator
2. hipster quiz
3. what's my phone number spell?
4. william hung death
5. boners in speedos
6. new hair styles
7. miss india USA 2004
8. short hair styles
9. online tarrot card reading
10. vampire name generator

There's something terrifically amusing about that...

Man, creating a good generic Content Management System is hard work... I'm in the tail end of the process of doing some major renovations to a CMS I wrote for Juilliard a year and a half ago--changes which might be more accurately termed "total reconstructive surgery"--adding things like user authentication (kind of an important oversight for the first go-round, but somethign which just got spec'ed out as password protection using .htaccess), plugin system, better UI, logging, etc.

When I'm finished its going to be a very competitive product in terms of extensibility, and I hope over time becomes world-class. I'm going to open-source the core of it, and allow myself the possibility of writing closed plugins and modules I can sell, like a web-services plugin, for instance. Right now its written in PHP (alas, i decided I had to stick with 4.x for the sake of all the bloggers I hope use it and their free/cheap web hosting accounts which don't support PHP 5 yet), but I might migrate it to java with freemarker/velocity templates over time. If nothign else its been an interesting case study in object oriented design in PHP. Everything is object oriented here--i think i might have one or two functions which are just utility functions, but that's it. everythign else is a member function of something.

The old version is currently available in CVS at Sourceforge--no real website yet though. I warn you though, don't put too much effort into understanding the code--its ALL changed.