Amazing stuff today. The market is going nuts. I heard on the news that this is the best week the market has had since October 1982. The market has gained 12% of its value from a week ago, and has risen for 8 days straight (which hasn't happened since 1996), the DOW gaining 235 points today.
Delta airlines has gained 42% over the past week, Continental gained too. The way the person on the news put it is that if there's any way to tell how people feel safer flying as a result of this war, you can look at what's happening with the airline stocks.
And oil prices are dropping (whoda thunk?) This whole enterprise is so fundamental to our war on terror it's incredible. Once Iraqi oil starts flowing at market prices, the Iraqi people will become wealthy. Importantly, this will mean the end of OPEC, which will of course put all the terror-supporting states such as Saudi Arabia in a bad place. You watch.
I hope this shows our president that the people appreciate it when our country shows strength and decisiveness, and that we don't care whether France is happy or not.
Mark was the Raging Platypus. Cool. I actually had a thought along those lines because of all the standards stuff on the right side. 
I want to use some of those buttons! 
Introduction
After thinking about my weblog archives, and getting helpful suggestions from friends, and looking at other sites, I've pretty much decided on how my archive URLs will be structured, with one option.
Right now, the only archive URLs that exist look like this:
http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/3621 for this post
http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/2003-03-21 for today's posts
Archive URLs
I'm planning to create archive URLs that look like:
http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/Mar/21
That gives you a day's worth of posts. You can take off each part of the URL and get the month's worth of posts, and then the year's worth of posts. The main archive page gives you a summary view of all years and all categories. However, the old links will continue to work "forever". Keep in mind that this hasn't been implemented yet.
Alternatives
Another option for the archive URL is:
http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/03/21 (with a numeric month instead of a textual month). I'll make both work in the code (that's easy), but I have to decide what to use by default. I'm leaning towards the textual month. If you have an opinion, let me know.
The capitalization of the month was also a question. I'm going to make it work no matter what case you put in, but I think initial uppercase looks the best (and is more correct according to English anyway).
For now, I'm going to leave the individual post URLs the same. I like how short and simple they are. However, I really like how Simon has his weblog set up, with URLs that look like:
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/03/19/pythonResources
So, over time I may put in short names for posts that are unique within a day and can work like that. Then, posts that don't have titles will still be able to be found by a url like:
http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/Nov/07/4024
and that will work regardless of whether there is a title such as:
http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2003/Nov/07/HappyBirthdayToMe
Categories
Categories are an issue. The problem is that each category is basically like its own weblog. The problem is that you can't just say:
http://www.keithdevens.com/weblog/category/6 (or /06)
and have it dump all the posts ever in that category. So there needs to be some way to organize those posts too. There's no reason I couldn't set up the same type of archive scheme, but that seems to be redundant.
One major consideration is that the posts on a given page (unless it's the "latest" page - i.e. the index page) shouldn't change. So if I were to have /category/6/page2, that would change over time, and that's wrong. I suppose I could set up date ranges, maybe a month at a time. I'll have to think more about this.
Plus, I would like to set up English category names eventually, rather than just numbers, but there's a problem if the category name ever changes. I plan someday to have a "renaming" mechanism in my CMS, so that someday that won't matter and the old URL can continue to point to the correct place, or at least forward to the right place automatically.
Conclusion
I really like how Simon does his site and his archives. He suffers from that "all posts in a category" problem I mentioned. He consistently has the post count within a category, month, etc., which is cool, and I'll copy in one way or another.
I also like how Mark Pilgrim does his site and his archives. He uses a similar scheme to the one Simon uses, so I think they're both onto something.
I've also looked at sites like CNN, etc. If you have any other sites you'd like to point me to I'd appreciate it, and if you have any comments, let me know. I know this seems like a trivial issue, but it's really not a trivial issue.
I was really hoping we wouldn't have to do this. <shudder>
Man, I'm sick to my stomach watching this. I really wish they had surrendered before it came to this.
Plus, since we're destroying palaces and such, we're probably destroying evidence of things we'll want to know about after the war.
ONJava.com: Space-Based Programming
"Space-based programming" heralds a new way of building distributed applications. The dominant methods of distributed programming are based on remote procedure calls (RPC), most notably embodied in the technologies CORBA, EJB, and COM/DCOM. Space architecture supplies a surprisingly compact model that completely replaces the RPC paradigm. Its inherent, minimalistic approach predisposes it to a wide range of applications while endowing it with the advantages of modularity, scalability, and source code economy.
I came across a link to Michael Moore's site on blogdex tonight and noticed the title of the article at the top of the page: "A Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush on the Eve of War".
So I start reading, and see the line: "Dear Governor Bush:"
I thought "Huh? When was this written? What war is he talking about?", and I checked the date of the article and it was in fact March 17th, 2003.
I thought, "Oh, he's trying to be clever".
I stopped reading.
Update: Brian and Scott have given Moore the fisking he deserves.
Via Matt, IBM developerWorks: Charming Python: Multiple dispatch, "Generalizing polymorphism with multimethods".
Object-oriented programming gains much of its versatility through polymorphism: objects of different kinds can behave in similar ways, given the right contexts. But most OOP programming is single dispatch; that is, just one designated object determines which code path is taken. Conceptually, a more general technique is to allow all the arguments to a function/method to determine its specialization. This article presents an implementation of multiple dispatch in Python, and shows examples where this makes for better programs.
If there's anything more that'll help me understand multiple dispatch, this article will be it.
I think since I started my CMS and changed my URLs over, Google's been indexing more of my site, which was one of the benefits I hoped for. Cool.
Friday, March 21, 2003
Permalink
new⇒Calif. Supreme Court to take up gay marriage ban
I would argue the point is notdefinitional. While the wordmarriage is su...
Justin: Nov 20, 4:37pm