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Personal

Baby Atkinson Update

My wife, Vicky, went into labor today. We were up and headed to the hospital around 7AM this morning and waited out the whole day. Tre, my first son, bounced between his uncle Gene and best friends Bob and Tina today. Now I’m home for the night to be with him. Vicky’s still in the hospital, resting.

The technical details: Vicky’s having contractions about every 3 minutes. She’s at 4cm. It has been that way since about 4PM today (July 4th). We’re at 34 weeks, so it’s a bit early, but not too early. They don’t stop labor once you get to the 34th week. But they also aren’t encouraging it. There’s some chance that the new baby will need oxygen, but otherwise there aren’t big risks associated with being premature.

We’re just resting tonight. They may give Vicky a sleeping pill so she can sleep. Hopefully I can get some rest here at home. (It seems like the neighbors aren’t doing their bottle rocket marathon this year.)

Tre had a nice talk with his mom over the phone tonight. He’s been a very good boy all day, I’m told. He actually had a lot of fun going to a parade, Nancy Boyd Park and a BBQ at Becky’s and Keith’s.

Bob has been very, very nice to watch Tre for us, offering to stay the night over here. Luckily we’re getting this short rest before the big battle tomorrow.

I’ll update things as I can.

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Uncategorized

OS X is Dead

Steve Gillmor likes to talk about MS Office being dead. I’m ready to say OS X is dead, shambling dead, but still dead. Once the Mac hardware switch to Intel, it’s just too easy to run Windows. In the end, dual-booters will find themselves hanging out in Windows more often than not. The story will be, “I like the look of Apples and I need reliable hardware for this messed up Microsoft OS.” Nevermind that Apple has had a series of hardware goofs in the past year.

Check out this story about how a Microsofty ran presentation about Vista and Office 7 using Vista running on a Mac laptop. Then check out Cory Doctorow’s annoucement that he’s switching to Ubuntu. Cory admits to being an Apple fanboy. When people like him publicly switch, it tends to inspire a lot of people. And it usually means that the smartest people already connected the dots a year before.

I’ve recently switched my desktop machine at work to Ubuntu after running Dapper on a little Dell laptop for four or five months. After I figured out that I could run Meeting Maker under WINE, I only had to wait for client work to ease off to make the switch. Nearly everything just works. I have an ATI video card, which is less convenicent than one from nVidia. nVidia play nicely with the open source crowd. Anyway, it’s a minor annoyance and kind of fun to play around with.

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Marketing News

CMP Trademarks Meaningless ‘Web 2.0’ Moniker

I read on Slashdot that CMP trademarked the term ‘Web 2.0’ and promptly started suing people who use the term in association with their conferences. CMP and O’Reilly started the Web 2.0 meme, I believe, with their conference of the same name. It’s become clear that the term in fact has zero meaning. It’s an interesting exercise to ask several people what they think it means. The best consensus you’ll find is it means “cool” or “modern”.

I was already tired of the term, and now I have a good reason to refuse to use it any more. I just removed all of the web2.0 del.icio.us tags I had and replaced them with tags I wouldn’t be embarrassed to see a couple years from now.

Categories
News Politics

It’s Time to Destroy Iran

It appears that world is finally waking up to a reality some of us have recognized for a long time. Iran is a cancer we must now remove. A headline in the San Diego Union-Tribune (I was on vacation last week) read something like “Iran is years away from nuclear weapons”. It probably came from a New York Times article on 4/13. The claim is that the terrorist state is 5 to 10 years away from developing nuclear weapons. I’m sure the statement was meant to imply that we have time–time to procrastenate, time for more terrorist attacks, time to let Iran come up with better defenses. I read it as “there are only a few years to act before Iran uses nuclear weapons against us.” What if someone told you in 1993 not to worry, it would be years before the terrorists came up with a plan that would bring down the World Trade Center?

I’m afraid we’re in for a long slog–one of valueless debate in the U.N. But after that, we will likely see the unfolding of a scenario similar to the one in Iraq with one key difference. Iran will have no strong neighbor able to send terrorists across its border. If the Bush administration is sucessful with regime-change in Iran, it will be very hard for anyone to talk about Iraq being a failure.

When we’re through, let’s replace the Islamic Republic of Iran with the Republic of Persia.

If you haven’t yet, please read Robert Tracinski’s argument for war against Iran, titled Time to Fight the Real War.

Update: while I still believe the government in Iran is capable of creating a real tragedy, I have abandoned the idea that any government, including the United States, can do anything positive to prevent it. The idea of government ought to be buried in a garbage pit along with religion, slavery, war and all the other bad ideas of antiquity.

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Core PHP

“Angels sing when I open [Core PHP]”

I love it when I read comments about my books that go like the following.

I also picked up Core PHP Programming (3rd edition) by Leon Atkinson and Zeev Suraski (Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference. Angels sing when I open it. Pithy, example-driven text. The binding and page layout are beautiful as well!

(From the Renaissance Geek blog.)