There’s a rule-of-thumb in software development called the 90-90 rule usually stated as “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time” and attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs. This may also be related to Sturgeon’s Law. Well then why not just dump the 10% and leave the 90%? The painful answer is that the two are inseparable.

I also have another famous quote for you: “The people is the sea in which the People’s Army [i.e. revolutionaries] swim”. This is usually attributed to Mao Tse Tung but I actually believe its author is Lin Piao.

Now I have some questions and they’re questions that I want to admit up front that I have no answers for. What proportion of a group have to be terrorists or people who tacitly support terrorism before the group becomes a danger? Is it possible to catch the fish without draining the sea?

In his post today Michael J. Totten offers some advice to the Dutch people:

So here’s some free advice: Isolate, imprison, deport, or kill (if it comes to that) the extremists. Liberalize those who remain. Otherwise, brace for hell.

Of Michael I ask the question, are the extremists separable?

On Imus this morning James Carville, certainly a keen political observer, gave his prescription for Democrats winning at the national level: develop a convincing narrative. I think that he and I differ somewhat on this. While I believe that developing such a narrative is necessary, I don’t think it’s sufficient. I think some actual changes in the positions the party espouses are necessary as well. Not on the social side (although those are the positions most people are talking about these days) but on the foreign policy and defense side.

I think that Joe Katzman’s comment on a Winds of Change thread is a good start on such a narrative. Some other components of such a narrative that I believe in are

• We sincerely believe in harnessing the power of government to help the truly needy. Only the truly needy have such a call on the public purse.

  While such a position seems to me to be eminently reasonable, it flies in the face of current Democratic orthodoxy. For example, means-testing Social Security or Medicare is currently strictly off limits.

• No one has a right to either goods or services that they neither purchased nor created.

  This flies directly in the face of Mr. Kerry’s claiming of health care as a right. Now I don’t have any problem with bestowing goods and services as benefits on the truly needy but I do have a problem with claiming that they are rights. If such a claim has any meaning it would seem to mean that they should be available freely to all. That in turn either means that the government must pay the market cost for such goods and services however high they may become which is impractical or that the producers of the goods and services must provide them for less than the legitimate market value which is tyranny.

Frankly, I don’t see either of these ideas being adopted any time soon.

[continue reading…]

Or Black Pepper Cranberry Sauce

I think I’ll stay with my preparing for the holidays theme in my recipe for this week. Over the years I’ve pretty much settled into a standard menu for Thanksgiving. Several years ago I stumbled across the recipe that this recipe is based on in Food and Wine magazine and it immediately became part of our standard Thanksgiving roster. This relish is good with all kinds of meats but particularly good with your Thanksgiving turkey.

Cranberry Sauce with Zing

Or Black Pepper Cranberry Sauce

1 cup bourbon
¼ cup chopped shallots
Grated peel of one lemon
½ cup sugar
12 oz. (1 package) fresh cranberries
1 Tbsp. freshly ground black pepper

Yes, you read it correctly. That’s one cup of bourbon. And I did say one tablespoon of pepper. And just the yellow part of the peel, please—not the white pulp.

1. Place the bourbon in a 3 qt. saucepan, add the shallots and lemon peel, and reduce over high heat to ¼ cup.
2. Stir in the cranberries and sugar and cook until the cranberries begin to burst.
3. Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool for 15 minutes.
4. Stir in the black pepper.

When the sauce has cooled it may be placed in the refrigerator until needed. Caution! The better your pepper and the longer you let it season before serving the more zing it’s likely to have. Depending on how tart you like it (and the flavor of your cranberries) you might want to add up to ¼ cup more sugar.

Today, of course, is Veterans’ Day. I won’t attempt to tell you what the holiday celebrates or what the sacrifices of our veterans mean to us. The White House press release does that just fine. Joe Katzman of Winds of Change has a fine round-up of resources on Veterans’ Day (or Remembrance Day as Canadians call it) particularly from a Canadian point-of-view.

But before it was Veterans’ Day November 11 was Armistice Day and as such it commemorates the conclusion of World War I, The Great War. On November 11, 1918 the World War War I Allies signed an armistice with Germany and the greatest war the world had known up to that time concluded.

World War I was not a war of necessity. It was a war of choice. It could be argued that America entered the war because of the sinking of the Lusitania or because Germany was trying to drum up trouble with our neighbor to the south or to demonstrate that America had arrived, at last, on the world stage. But the real reason that America entered The Great War was that it was the right thing to do and, as a member of the world community, sometimes you just have to do the right thing.

Look at the table below:

American deaths in World War I	126,000
American participation in war in days	585
Deaths per day	215

Yes, that’s right. We had as many deaths (on average) in five days of World War I as we’ve had in the more-than-a-year-and-a-half of the Iraq War.

America’s greatest entertainer of the day, George M. Cohan, wrote a song—Over There—to stiffen the resolve of the troops and of the nation for the conflict. He was decorated for it.

Fewer than 700 of the young Americans that went over there are alive today. And so Armistice Day which became a national holiday in 1938 has been transmogrified over time into Veterans Day. But I recommend that you spend a little time today thinking about those American soldiers who went over there so long ago. And about doing the right thing. Then think about the young Americans who are over there in Iraq right now and what it will mean to the people of Iraq if their mission over there fails.

The only force in the world which can cause that failure is the failure of our resolve.

UPDATE: Submitted to Beltway Traffic Jam.

Last night my wife and I put Tally and Jenny into the car and went off hunting for the Northern Lights. They’re unusual but not unheard of here in Chicago and we’d heard that quite a few people here had seen them on Sunday night. We’d gone out Monday night for a while but had come up dry. It was just too overcast.

It’s remarkably hard to find a dark spot within striking distance of the Chicago area. I’d wanted to go out to some of the parks or forest preserves northwest of here but my wife wasn’t crazy about the idea so we went straight north. The best spot we found was in Lake Bluff right on the lake. The bluffs there are nice and dark.

We tried there and a couple of other places but still came up empty handed. Nonetheless it’s still good for the soul every once in a while to leave your everyday cares behind and go out searching for wonders.

Firefox is now available for free download in its first official release, version 1.0. It’s gone from a fly speck to an actual challenge to the hegemony of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on the browser scene in a remarkably short time due both to its reliability and its security relative to Microsoft’s product. Firefox has been my preferred browser for quite a while now. Since adopting it I’ve been impressed with its speed and how much better web pages look than under Internet Explorer and browser-related system crashes—which used to be a multiple times daily event for me—have largely become a thing of the past. Its tab functionality (which Opera pioneered IIRC) simplifies my weekly production of the Carnival of the Liberated over at Dean’s World.

It’s hard to go to any technical site these days without someone singing the praises of Firefox and urging its adoption to anyone who will listen. But that’s the wrong lesson to take from Firefox.

IE is the preferred attack portal for hackers because of the bang for the buck. By targetting a single browser you get a potential pool of tens or hundreds of millions of victims worldwide. As Firefox gains in popularity it will increasingly become the subject of the same kinds of attacks because it will make sense to do so. And if Firefox becomes the preeminent browser it will likewise become the preeminent target.

You want greater security? Abandon the proprietary vendor-based software environment and embrace a standards-based environment. Then let many flowers bloom. Adopt new browsers that adhere to the standards quickly—they won’t be subject to the attacks the current leaders fall prey to.

I honestly don’t believe that however much time and money Microsoft puts into a more stable and secure computing environment that it will do a great deal of good. So long as the reward in the form of the huge number potential victims is out there some doofus is going to devote the time to cracking the security. The only way to attack the problem is to reduce the potential reward by going to a more diverse computing environment.

I won’t tell you about the costs associated with the current monoculture. Everyone is investing time and money into firewalls, anti-virus software, anti-adware programs, and near-daily software upgrades. And all that software sucks up space and compute power. Not to mention the costs of a security breach. I just can’t believe that the value of the software monoculture that fosters this kind of environment exceeds its cost.

The problem is not Internet Explorer. The problem is software monoculture. Not that anyone will pay any attention.

When does the press have a responsibility to report rumors? There are rumors going around the left hand of the blogosphere of massive vote fraud in favor of Bush in Ohio and Florida. No one in those states with any thread of official standing—not even the respective states’ Democratic campaign managers—have anything but scorn for the idea.

But I’ve heard this reported by the mainstream media twice today. This morning I heard it on Don Imus’s program (admittedly not part of the press) and this evening ABC Evening News devoted 2 full minutes of their precious news time—nearly 10%—to examining the factual basis for such a belief (there isn’t any).

It’s hard not to start feeling a little paranoid about this.

This week’s Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of the best posts from Iraqi bloggers, has been posted on Dean’s World. This week there are posts about the U. S. election returns, the death of Sheikh Zayed—a story that did not receive enough attention in the Western press, and the battle of Fallujah. Check it out!

Dean Esmay has posted a mild, temperate response to John Perry Barlow’s post “Magnanimous Defeat”:

Do you disagree? Okay. That’s fine. That’s your right as a human being. But you guys did more than disagree. A lot of you were just plain assholes about it. You could have talked to us but instead you wanted to tell us that Chimpy McSmirk was the new Hitler and a big fat liar just because you didn’t agree with him. It offended the shit out of us, because we did agree with him and we didn’t think he lied (and most of us still don’t). We saw a good, decent, moderate man in Bush who decided to take a big gamble and do the right thing for both America and Iraq and finally, finally, finally bring down the monster Saddam. Which should have been done a long damned time ago if we’d had any decency as a country.

You don’t agree. Fine. You don’t have to. But don’t think that acting like an asshole about it gets you my vote. You guys may have whipped a bunch of dumbass kids into a rage by feeding them Michael Moore style hate-propaganda, but you equally pissed off a bunch of other folks in the process who showed up to vote just to spite you guys for being such mean-spirited, reactionary, paint-by-numbers, bigoted, closed-minded jerks.

Dean, don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel.