Anthology of Ideas

Because of his writings, especially his maxims, La Rochefoucauld is historically seen as overly pessimistic; however, one should consider first if this is really a “bad” thing and if the maxims were written in a pessimistic style to encourage debate? If he had written “people are nice” I doubt anyone would have read them, let alone remember then for hundreds of years. More specifically, I doubt anybody would have even taken him seriously because unfortunately, people are not “nice”.

The The just released version 0.2. I have been watching it for a while now, but even though it has some features that I really like, it still hasn’t reached a point that I would consider switching this website from WordPress (mostly because I would have to rewrite far too many need-to-have plugins). However, recently I started thinking about re-writing some of my plugins for it–especially what will eventually become INAP 3.0, but when I try to find reasonable plugin documentation, it just doesn’t exist–not even simple tutorials.

Simplifying mightily, its bumpy path to democratization goes roughly as follows: set up an empire; inherit a caliphate; fight on the losing side in a world war; in desperation dissolve the caliphate and submit to the autocratic rule of a modernizer who pushes Islam ruthlessly to the margins; the wait the better half of a century for the emergence of an Islamist party that looks mild and moderate enough to be trusted with the reins of government.

I’ve been playing around with WordPress 2.3 Alpha and so far I like it. Good Things: I like the new post status “Pending Review” and the ability to sort posts by status. Somone posted pictures here. Tags are looking good.. A UTW tag importer is built in; of course, I realized this only after I created one. The “categories” database tables have been retired and everything is tag based (categories are a type of tag similar to the ways pages are just a form of post).

Matt Cutts [was at Wordcamp] shared with the audience…that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. –News Blog This is very good news.

As mentioned previously I have been trying to move INAP away from a simply function based system to a class based system. The PHP was unbelievably easy to convert. It literally took a couple hours to convert the entire program from prefixed functions to nice, neat and easy-to-read classes. It was rolled out with a few bugfixes and very little stress. Then I started to do the same to Javascript, so the plugin could clarify its variables and functions and still “play nice,” and I swear the all the Javascript was specifically coded to make it difficult.