The Linux Extremist

I’m not known for sugarcoating things. Thus I can say without shocking too many people, Democrat voters of New Hampshire, yes you, the accountant in the phony Scottish tartan flannel shirt and the Soccer Mom who believes that bumper stickers on the back of her giant Volvo estate are a way to save the environment - you’re idiots. You are mind numbingly, blitheringly dumb. Hopefully God has blessed you in other ways because obviously He didn’t give you the capacity to think.

Why am I saying this? For those who missed out on the news, Hillary Clinton narrowly won the Democrat Presidential Primary in New Hampshire, thus reviving a campaign that should be gathering mold and icicles in the morgue of American political history.

Hillary Clinton represents much of what I hate. Before feminists leap down my throat, it’s not the fact that she’s a woman. It’s because she couldn’t come up with a genuine emotion if her life depended on it: absolutely everything about her is contrived, marketed, packaged. When she speaks, it’s as if she is lecturing a bunch of not-too-bright children on how to behave. That said, what really grates on me is her sense of entitlement. Try this exercise - whenever she snaps at someone, mentally preface her statements with “how dare you”. You’ll find that it not only fits, it shows the real character of the woman: she believes that she is destined to win the nomination, destined to be President and no one has the right to question her plans, her policies, her experience or her temprament. She has been acting like this for years.

There is something familiar about her approach, and her presentation as the inevitable, logical choice, the industry standard, the voice of experience. From my perspective, she sounds a lot like Microsoft.

If one really thinks about it, Hillary Clinton is the Windows Vista of candidates: we are being told this is the upgrade America needs. After the Windows ME years of President Bush, the country needs all the packages and upgrades that are being foisted upon it by this woman. For example, her ideas on health care mandates - basically forcing everyone to buy health insurance - sound Microsoft-ish: we’re going to make you take it out, you are not free to make choices for yourself. No doubt, she is more or less slickly packaged; however, it doesn’t take much stress for cracks to appear.

This is in stark contrast to Obama. He apparently has learned something, indeed, a central principle of the Open Source movement: greater participation is key to progress, and a monolith is not nearly as good at advancing things as a diverse group that pulls together voluntarily.

For example, from day one, he has called upon Republicans and independents to work with him, in spite of being opposed to many of their beliefs. Presumably, he regards their participation as providing a proof of concept of his own plans. Additionally, his speeches are notable for calling for participation from the wider public: by no means has he suggested that he alone is the agent of change, rather, it will require change driven by the nation as a whole. Unlike Hillary, he hasn’t included mandates in his plans; he has stated that he assumes that people will be intelligent enough to choose health insurance for themselves.

At the very least, this call for citizens to be active in the life of their country is a sign of inclusiveness that Hillary’s top-down approach lacks. Furthermore, it shows humility, a quality that no one sane would accuse her of having.

Before I’m accused of going completely off on a weird tangent, I should point out by a strange coincidence, according to Netcraft, Hillary’s website is running off of Windows Server 2003, and Obama’s is running off of Linux.

So again, I have to say to Democrats in America: you pick this woman at your peril. As someone on this side of the Atlantic, I have to say the yakkity yak that we hear out of this pantsuited nightmare is already tedious. No matter how intelligent you may think she is, her brainpower does not outweigh that of a whole country; in understanding the frontiers of his intellect and personal power, Obama shows that he’s smarter than she. The only way she could be attractive is if you find thinking hurts you and you’d rather she did it in your stead.

The primaries are about to move on to Nevada and South Carolina. Hopefully the winter freeze hasn’t dulled their senses in the same way that it did the faux LL Bean lumberjacks and the silly mums who are fighting middle aged spread and think they’re on an episode of Desperate Housewives. Hopefully, they’ll go Open Source and make the right choice.

It’s a sign of impending middle age, but I enjoy watching television programmes about property: Relocation, Relocation, Property Ladder, Grand Designs, you name it, when I land on a channel that’s featuring something involving renovating a house or moving to a new location, I find it compelling. It may be the tinkerer in me: the idea of turning, say, a crap 1960’s council house into a luxury development is similar to what Linux does to old PCs.

My lady likes these shows as well; she’s the kind of person who looks in various house and home magazines, looking for ideas on how to stick an additional toilet into a ridiculously small place, among other things.

So, we were watching Property Ladder last night; the programme featured a rather irritatingly nice family that were developing and selling houses for a profit. Think of Disney Does Real Estate and you have a fair idea of what it was like. Sarah Beeny, the presenter, said “they’ve cleared a £58,000 profit…before tax.”

My lady seized upon that. “That’s the first time she’s said the phrase ‘before tax’ - if it’s a second home, it’s subject to capital gains.”

As I regard property development for profit as being a more complicated way to commit suicide than taking arsenic, I hadn’t really thought about it before. Loads of people have bought houses and then redeveloped them under the assumption that at most, they’d have to pay 10% to the government on their gains. For those in other countries, you may not have heard that Gordon Brown recently raised this tax to 18%.

Hitherto, I thought that Gordon Brown just might win the next general election, whenever that may be. Yes, his government is full of corrupt wankers who have all the morality of a lobotomised weasel on meth. For goodness sake, any decent human being realises that taking money from a businessman who wants to donate anonymously has at least the air of dodginess about it, and given that they’re supposed to be in public service (cough, cough), they shouldn’t do it. We could live with that if it was accompanied by an air of competence and self-criticism. We’ve seen neither.

First take self-criticism. Speaking for myself, whenever the presenter on Sky News or BBC News says they have someone from the government on to defend some indefensible mistake, I get a sense of a dread. Few inspire more loathing in me than Hazel Blears: she has a smile that is as plastered on as that of the Joker from Batman. She tries to appear like she’s one of the “ordinary working folk” from her constituency of Salford, but you know that she’s got Sancerre in her fridge and if she ate a doner kebab, her head would explode. Furthermore she’s wound up so tight that you’d like to see her handed over to a crew of Liberian sailors who had been at sea without female companionship for 6 months, possibly the only way that would shake loose what’s been bunged up in her.

In precise tones, she always carries on, says that the government is competent and knows what it is doing even when the banking system is near collapse, the economy is plumbing depths that the passengers of the Titanic would recognise, and youth crime is such that a television presenter like Jeremy Clarkson can’t shake one of the little scrotes that’s bothering him by the scruff the neck, without thinking, “Oh crap, am I going to get done for this?”

Perhaps the most disgusting element of all is that Labour seems to think it is entitled to stay in power forever. Funny, I thought we lived in a democracy. Sort of, anyway. Part of the idea is that power should change hands from time to time. As much as I was cynical about New Labour in 1997, it was clear that the Tories were showing signs of wear and tear after 17 years; it wasn’t good for democracy that they were in power forever. At least the Tories went more gently into that good night. Labour thinks it can replace a charismatic leader with one who has to duct tape his smile into place and magically make it so they stay in office till the end of time.

Fortunately, they have made the fatal mistake of jacking up capital gains tax. So much of our economy is based on madness with housing; they just shot at all the little developers like the nice but irritating family. They shot at the small business owner. They shot at the people working in finance and all those who depend on them. And they’re not showing any signs of remorse, they’re just trotting out Hazel Blears.

Labour is done. Yes, yes, the pundits say they can come back from this. Pundits generally speaking live in London and hang out at dinner parties with people who discuss this very seriously no doubt. The view out here in the provinces is a bit different: they are dead, dog meat, and should lie down and accept the inevitable. Gordo plotted and schemed to become Prime Minister to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if sacrificing the lukewarm blood of babies to Satan was involved. In the end it was futile; the sell by date has expired, all that remains is the long walk to the graveyard.

This is not to say things will get much better with anyone else. Generally speaking, decisive governments tend to anger people. For example, President Sarkozy in France just told the unions to bog off, and there’s a lot of unhappiness with him. Bush was decisive in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, now the entire world is angry at him to the point that they forget how the porky guy (who used to have chemical weapons) gassed the Kurds. Given this, most politicians try to just muddle on and not do anything courageous. So the recession will not be called off, and we will get just as fed up with the new lot as we did with the old one. But given that we are imperfect people, we should expect governments to be just as frail, ignorant and ridiculous as the rest of us. All of it springs to mind what Churchill once reportedly said - democracy was the worst form of government….except compared to all the others.

The weather in Britain has been damn awful as of late. Thus the following sketch from the geniuses Armstrong and Miller appeals to me greatly:

If only.

I read an item in the newspaper yesterday which made me raise an eyebrow. Apparently, Al Gore is on his way to Oslo, Norway to accept his Nobel Prize for his work in “raising awareness” about climate change. From there, he will be going on to Bali for the present international conference on protecting the environment.

I really hope I’m not the only one who has spotted some disturbing things: air travel is supposed to be bad. It is supposedly a major contributor to the carbon emissions problem. Yet Al Gore and all the Bali delegates aren’t canoeing to their destination.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. These international conferences tend not to happen in crap, nasty places; rather, they meet in Bali, which is supposed to be beautiful, warm and have sandy beaches, and Rio which is beautiful, warm and has sandy beaches, and…you get the idea. Neither conference location is close or convenient for most of the delegates from countries that are supposedly the root of the problem, namely Europe and North America. In fact, Bali and Rio aren’t particularly close for the “new era polluters” like India and China. Indeed, if one wanted to pick places on the map that would require the most carbon burned in order to reach them, only the Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica would have been better.

Meanwhile, these same politicians and “experts” are drawing up a blueprint to tell the rest of us how to live. I can imagine Al Gore, puffed up with pride and pomposity, sitting down to a lobster dinner with these people, basking in the glow of their mutual self-righteousness. To someone who has to stand in a queue on a cold December day in West Sussex in order fill up their car with increasingly expensive fuel, this is an irritation. If they continue to fail to lead by example, these officials are bound to provoke a backlash.

I don’t think they get it. For someone who goes to Tesco on Saturday mornings and watches every penny, picking store own brand when possible and feeling like getting “Tesco Finest” is something of an indulgence, being told that one’s life has to change is fairly ridiculous. I’m not poor, Britain is not a poor country (clue: poverty doesn’t generally involve owning satellite dishes), but the grand assumption that I and others can afford more green taxes is ridiculous.

Forget the punishment element of it too. Public transport in this country is expensive and its coverage is too poor to get me to my work directly. At least in Britain I have some idea of the relationship of these costs to what I pay to drive myself; driving is cheaper. This cost in Continental Europe is masked through paying higher taxes. Meanwhile the governments of the world are expecting people like myself, and the Pierres, Hanses and Luigis to keep the economy going through spending and borrowing.

My father once told me, “it’s easy to be socialist when you’re rich”. The same applies to Green; these officials think about people like myself as an abstraction, part of a faceless mass that has to take on their prescriptions of less consumption, more taxation, and greater inconvenience. This elite feels they have done their duty by “raising awareness”; their lifestyles which span across the globe do not change.

They should be warned: the other day, I did give up my car because I was tired from spending hours on the road, due to the fact that planning for roads was simply inadequate for the demand. I had to take a cab from a train station to cover the deficiency in public transport. En route, the driver told me that he was sick of the taxes on fuel, sick of how the local authority had rejigged the traffic lights in favour of buses, and anyway, those buses were due to disappear given their subsidy had been cut off, and said that “no one trusts this government”. Unless the same people who tell us that our lives have to change, show some sign they can change their lives too (I know for a fact they could meet online rather than go cavorting with Balinese bikini girls), they will be met with this skepticism, and rightly so.

The Bank of England cut its base rates yesterday from 5.75 to 5.5 percent. Stock markets rose. The “alleluia” chorus in the newspapers was near universal. Additionally, President Bush just announced a deal by which mortgage lenders would “voluntarily” keep rates down for subprime borrowers. Those panicky, nervous herd animals we call investors moved in a positive direction.

I, however, am not overjoyed. This is not just because I’m a professional curmudgeon, who sees a dark cloud in every silver lining. Working in technology does give one a dim view of humanity, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that it’s very bad to let stupidity go unpunished.

The subprime crisis is stupid. Stupid is a harsh word, not one to be bandied about lightly; it doesn’t just indicate a lack of intelligence, there is a hint of willful lack of understanding too: “I’m going to do what I want to do even when the facts are against me”. But the subprime crisis is a product of just that: banks loaned money to people who hadn’t a hope in hell of paying it back. Now they’re screaming because, ta-da, they woke up and found out that they were never going to be repaid. They spread the poison through the financial system by selling it bundled with other assets; now there is a lot of pain in trying to figure out who is going to pay the cheque.

In steps the Bank of England and Uncle Sam - don’t worry, you fools, we will cut interest rates and thus ease the hurt and make it more likely that you will get something. The bankers heave a sigh of relief, they won’t have to forego all of their bonuses this year, all they have to do is buy a Ferrari instead of an Aston Martin, and get a suit off the rack at Gieves and Hawkes rather than have one custom made. All is well.

Until the next time; as someone in the internet industry, I remember when a mistake at this level of idiocy was last committed, namely at the time of the dot com boom.

Let’s put into context how asinine that was. Boo.com was a leading example; those who have read the book (”Boo Hoo”) written by its sublimely ridiculous founder Ernst Malmsten, will recall how they met with investors and were asked, “What does your market research say?” Malmsten thought that was a daft question, because market research was something one did when one “wanted to market a new brand of toothpaste”. The internet, in his view, relied more on “instinct”. Giving this man money was the financial equivalent of having a vasectomy performed by a lunatic with hedge clippers, but he got $130 million to waste.

I was part of a lesser failure. I worked for a dot com in the Netherlands and was promised $1 million in share options. Unfortunately, the company had a burn rate of $250,000 per month. The directors lived like oriental satraps with lovely offices on the top floor. They had secretaries obviously hired from the finest modelling agencies in Amsterdam. However, the product that was produced was simply not viable. Funding dried up, and the company died.

The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates around 2001 to stave off some of this pain; fortunately, however, it was not an injury they could eliminate altogether. Venture capital for this nonsense disappeared. The foolish companies that had business plans based on hot air have largely been consumed. Internet based businesses are increasingly subject to the same rigours and disciplines as bricks and mortar ones. Stupidity was punished, and we were all better off for it.

The invoice for subprime lending has come due. The chickens have come home to roost, cackle and excrete all over the yard. The worst message that could be sent to the lenders is that they will always have a sugar daddy to count on.

The sugar daddy may indeed do more harm than good; after the stock market crash of 1929, Herbert Hoover was advised to let the pain cycle through, because market forces, and the creative destruction they entail, would ensure that the economy would be more efficient as a result. Hoover chose to intervene and stop the pain; the result, broadly speaking, was the Great Depression.

President Bush and the Bank of England will hopefully take heed . As Herbert Spencer said, “The consequence of shielding men from the results of their folly is to create a world full of fools.” With wisdom can come much grief, and with much grief can come wisdom. Hopefully the inevitable pain can be front loaded, the necessary lessons will be learned, and we can all carry on.

Today, September 17th, two gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun who was working in a hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia. Apparently, she and her bodyguard were shot several times in the back by her assailants, who then ran off.

This follows several days of violent outbursts from the Islamic world to an academic lecture given by the Pope in his native Germany; he was stating that violence and religion should never go hand in hand. In the course of that lecture, he quoted a Byzantine emperor who had some very strong criticisms of Islam because of its adherence to violence.

Let’s re-examine this situation for a moment. The Pope says that violence and religion should never go hand in hand; as part of this lecture, he quotes an emperor who in his critique of Islam, states the same. The reaction of the Islamic world can be largely encapsulated by the statement of Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Mali, a Somali imam, who told his congregation: “Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim.”

The word “irony” springs to mind. It is obvious to anyone who anyone with reason and logic that the reaction of the Islamic world proved the statement of the Byzantine Emperor correct. The irony deficiency in parts of the Muslim world is staggering.

Let’s spell it out, since they obviously have problems understanding this: if they wanted to prove that Islam is a non-violent religion and thus the Emperor wrong (remember, the Pope’s lecture was not a critique of Islam in particular, he was criticising religions that endorse violence), they should have protested with calm, tranquility, and dignity. Rather, the public is assaulted with images of burning effigies of Pope Benedict, the raised fists, the angry shouts of crowds in Jakarta, Karachi and elsewhere. Islam looks extremely poor in this light; it also makes Islam look like a faith for the thin skinned.

The Pope did try to do a service by raising interfaith discussions to an academic level; he wanted to talk about de-linking violence from religion; he said such a link goes against the “nature of God”. Quite so; the good shepherd seeks to guide his flock away from the wolves. The Islamic world missed an opportunity to prove that the rhetoric about their faith being a “religion of peace” was not so much marketing; rather, this episode has diminished Islam in the eyes of the West. A Sky News poll of the British public on the morning of September 17th asking if the Pope should apologise further had a resounding 91% No result. This is all the more astonishing because the poll was taken before the Pope made his additional apology during his Sunday blessing.

The death of the Italian nun will only add more fuel to the flames. It is one thing to burn an effigy; killing a harmless nun, whose primary concern in life was tending to the ill and injured, is an entirely new category of depravity. Islamic leaders should step up and condemn this brutal act, quickly. So far, however, there has been silence on this subject.

This is a pity, because the Pope’s good intentions and high hopes can only now appear to be misplaced. If we are to achieve his noble aim of delinking religious faith and violence, there has to be an understanding of the rightness of this concept. However, it is quite clear that those who gunned down the nun, burned the effigies and raised their fists in anger do not agree. The sad result is that only more violence is likely to follow.

This has been a fairly humourless week, full of pressure at work and the sombre anniversary of September 11th. On a brighter note, there was a good joke to finish it off from an unexpected source, namely, the British Conservative Party.

Apparently the Conservatives hired a design agency to give them a new logo, the goal of which was to portray growth and renewal, yet reliability. The result of this exercise was a tree. Supposedly it’s an oak tree, but it looks more like a few random brushstrokes. Lord Tebbit, a Conservative peer, said it looked like a sprig of broccoli. To me, it’s hilarious: it’s another example of rebranding gone mad.

Let’s consider the tree as a symbol: perhaps you too have been walking through a park on a summer’s day, with blue skies and soft breezes, and the grass almost glows in the afternoon sunlight. As you stroll along, thinking how lovely England is at this time of year, your eyes happen upon a tree swaying gently in the breeze. Your pleasant reverie is then broken when a mongrel dog belonging to a tattooed gentleman drinking a can of Carling Black Label stops for a moment and marks its territory on its trunk.

I am not alone, to be sure, in making this mental connection. Nor am I alone, I am certain, in thinking this amateur piece of pop culture frou frou more belongs to London sophisticates who appreciate modern art than to the country as a whole.

The whole travesty goes to prove a particular point, which my father taught me long ago. It was a lesson learned from his work: his job involved going to various international organisations, meeting with businessmen, technologists and bankers. Out of this experience, he said, that he had discovered that beyond the wall that separates the powerful and famous from the rest of us, one finds that those on the other side aren’t any smarter than we are. In fact, they’re often more ignorant because they’re removed from what real life is like.

The new Conservative logo is a prime example. Does anyone really think that picking what can generously be described as a “soft focus tree” for a symbol actually means that the Conservatives are more electable? People on the other side of the wall think it does; people on this side believe that it’s much more important to have clear, beneficial policies which help the nation prosper. But then again, those on the other side of the wall think that it was Labour rebranding itself as “New Labour” and adopting a more modern appearance and outlook that won it power; in reality, it was policies that promised not to return us to the days when the unions went on strike every five minutes and left the dead unburied, plus a chance for a change that were the actual reasons why they won the day.

As in politics, the pattern holds true in business and technology. The walls that companies build between themselves and the public blind them from what it is that people actually want and need. A good example is the new Microsoft Zune music player. Because it looks like an iPod, functions like an iPod, Microsoft’s management thinks they’re on to a winner; all they need to do is somehow make it “cooler”. However, Microsoft has missed a trick, as Apple has been thinking beyond the wall and about the future: for example, this week Apple revealed their “iTV” device, which is going to speed up convergence between computer and digital television technology.

Of course, the emergence of Linux and BSD variants is also due to this wall. When one can’t get what they want or need from the marketplace, there is a tendency to go make your own. Many users have done just that.

Still, the wall does serve a purpose; it provides entertainment, certainly. Watching the Conservatives and Microsoft scurry about trying to figure out what it is that we want and being clueless in what they deliver is highly amusing. In the case of Microsoft, it gives something to which aspire against. But it should also be empowering for the individual; it’s clear that politicians are neither smarter nor more logical than the average citizen, perhaps with that being abundantly clear, more “average citizens” will take the plunge into politics and restore representative government.

Furthermore, as it’s clear that Microsoft is not led by great geniuses; perhaps as a result, more developers from atypical backgrounds will want to get involved in Open Source; this is already happening. The author bios for the O’Reilly book, “Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason” indicated this: Dave Rolsky, for example, “has worked as a paperboy, supermarket bagger, temporary secretary, ear-training and music theory teaching assistant, and every so often a computer programmer, specializing in Perl.” And yes, the Perl / Mason combination is an excellent solution.

Perhaps it would seem peculiar to think about the last Pope when one is discussing stupidity and potential responses to it. However, I can’t help but think of Pope John Paul II. He once said, “Stupidity is also a gift from God, but one mustn’t misuse it.” By challenging the foibles of those on the other side of the wall, stupidity is used as an impetus for improvement, whether in politics, technology or society. The presence of leaders in any sphere that are not that smart, should compel us to strive towards greater intelligence. Perhaps that is what the Pope meant; if so, as seems certain, he has been one of the few on the other side of that wall to whom “not that smart” would be an terribly inappropriate description.

I remember with perfect clarity where I was exactly five years ago today. It was a gray day in Welwyn, Hertfordshire; I was working as a project manager for a small consultancy there. This was my first job after returning from a stint in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it had been a comfort to come home.

As I was typing away, a colleague poked his head through the doorway and said to me:

“Hey, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre!”

My initial thought was that it was a terrible accident; it would not have been the first time that a plane went awry and crashed into a New York skyscraper. In 1945, a bomber got lost in some mist and crashed into the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building, unlike the World Trade Centre, was built to last; the incident was rather like a toddler running flat into the Great Wall of China. The bomber crew was killed, there was a small fire, but the tower withstood the impact without much difficulty.

My boss brought me back to the present when he suggested that we all convene in the meeting room to watch the news, since the radio was not particularly forthcoming with information. We went downstairs and switched on the BBC. They were replaying the footage of the first plane striking; the angle of the footage was deceptive, it looked as if a Cessna or other light aircraft had hit the tower.

“Awful.” I said. I thought of my mother, who was in the New York area that day, and I wondered if she was watching this.

Just as I said that, the second plane hit. This made it obvious that it was no accident, rather, it was a co-ordinated attack.

The rest of the day is something of a blur; I was very worried because my mother sometimes went into the City for language lessons. I first spoke to my father, and both he and I tried to reach her; the phones were overloaded and we had no success. Fortunately, she sent us both an e-mail letting us know that she was alive and well.

While that was a relief, work after that point was impossible; I went home and watched the news all through the night as the pieces of the puzzle came together. It was a moment, I believe, when the entire world was dumbfounded, sad, and angry all at once. Estimates of the dead ranged up to 10,000; fortunately, the real total was less than a third of that.

It was immediately obvious that we were at war. Britain was not going to let America go it alone in this struggle, and it was pleasing that the Prime Minister went to the United States as quickly as he could. It became clear, rapidly, who had done this, namely, Al Qaeda, and where they were hiding, Afghanistan. The sounds of war shifting into gear, the rumble of the tank on television, the sonic boom of a fighter jet in the distance, became part of the grim symphony of the days that followed.

I don’t think anyone would argue that going into Afghanistan wasn’t the right thing to do; no one who has any sense of decency whatsoever would say the events of September 11th were justified. My boss at the time said, “Well, America got this for backing Israel. I hope they’ve learned a lesson.” He backed down after I forcefully told him to shove it up his rectal cavity and explained that my mother was in the firing line. I stopped working for him not too long afterwards.

Let me reiterate: there can be no justification for acts of this nature. It does not matter what cause it is. Airliners full of innocent people were taken over by extremist hijackers to turn them into flying bombs; they were intended to kill as many civilians as possible. In the West, whenever we hit civilians in a military strike, we consider it a mistake, express regret, and work ever harder to be more precise in what we hit. Al Qaeda’s targeting of civilians was not incidental, it was on purpose. Nothing could be more diabolical.

The strange thing is, five years after the event, many people have forgotten the initial outrage and indeed, how united the world was by this event. Just as a reminder, the only government which did not express sympathy in some form was Iraq. Because September 11th has gone down the byways of memory, people have lost sight of the brutality of Al Qaeda, and the need to keep pursuing them.

To be fair, much of the singularity of purpose may have been lost by the war in Iraq. This is not to suggest that this is what President Bush or Prime Minister Blair intended; far from it. They saw Saddam Hussein as yet another avatar of brutality and terror in the Middle East; Saddam was also incredibly stupid in not revealing his lack of weapons of mass destruction in a forthright manner. The aftermath has consumed the Western world’s attention span. It has led to a delusion (rather like what my former boss had) that somehow terrorists can be appeased or dissuaded; this mistaken view is comforting because it’s easier than fighting.

However, it’s not true. We have no basis upon which to speak with Al Qaeda, no common ground upon which to meet, no halfway point which we can arrive at. Al Qaeda wishes those of us dead who refuse to live under Islamic hegemony. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of the matter. We are either going to have to destroy them or they will destroy us.

This statement of fact should not be interpreted as a wholesale endorsement of the United States. One of the nastier trends to have emerged in the past five years is the rise of Anglophobia in America. This is in spite of the help and support Britain has given from the beginning; Prime Minister Blair told the Americans, “With you at the first, with you to the last”. He meant it, in spite of the heavy cost in both money and blood. However, my experience has indicated that this sacrifice is not appreciated by the Americans; rather, there is a tendency, particularly among conservative Americans, to berate Britain for tolerating Muslims in our midst (though they represent only 1.6 million out of a population of 60 million; also it’s worth noting America has a substantial Muslim population as well) and criticising us for being “weak” and “socialist” whenever the opportunity presents itself. At best, Britain can expect a pat on the head from this segment of American opinion for being a loyal “poodle” of the United States, rather than to be seen as a brother nation, a fighting ally, and a comrade in arms. Obviously, not all Americans feel that way; however those who don’t make no effort to silence those who do. One hopes that Britain’s policy makers are realistic to enough to realise that in essence, we have to join in this struggle with the Americans, but in the end, we matter very little to them. Indeed, we are on our own.

So here we are after five years. Terror still rages, the fires of memory do not burn as brightly as they should, there are even tensions between nations that should be the best of friends, given that their bonds have been reforged by war. In ten years, fifteen, twenty, I wonder what we will have to say. Certainly, the world has not become a happier place in the past five years; it has become more fractious and violent, we are living in a period of war and tension, a time of testing perhaps, which will challenge our resilience as a civilisation. Will the test have been passed in the next five years? Will we move on to the “broad, sunlit uplands” that Churchill spoke of during the Second World War? One can only hope so; for the moment, however, it remains to carry on with life as best as possible, carrying the flame of rememberance, and the grim determination to see the present struggle to a successful end.

It’s very rare that a change on American television news is reported in Britain. However a move by CBS News has been widely noted here; they replaced an old male newsreader with a perky, female one named Katie Couric.

This should mean virtually nothing to viewers in the United Kingdom. To be fair, we do get CBS News’ evening broadcast but anyone who goes to bed at a sensible time would never know it: it runs on Sky News at 12:30 AM.

My girlfriend arrived late this past Friday due to a flight delay, so we had the rare opportunity to watch the programme while we were settling down for the evening. I had to explain to her who the perky American woman was; I also had difficulty communicating that somehow her taking over the role was considered important.

The programme is less than 30 minutes long and in terms of providing “news”, it seems rather poor compared to the channels we get in Britain. The use of emotive terms in items which should have been merely describing facts was notable; furthermore, there was a certain maudlin quality about some of the segments, including the item in which a reporter visited the town where United Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001. If anything, it was a “news digest” with an editorial slant.

So why the fuss? Why has even the ancient and venerable Economist run an item on something of such minor importance? Apparently, it’s because this is the best counterblast the Old Media can summon up against the New Media.

Ms. Couric’s predecessor, Dan Rather, was felled by the New Media. His credibility was destroyed after a blogger noticed that memos that stated that President Bush had not honourably served in the Texas National Guard were fakes; Mr. Rather, however, had assured everyone they were genuine. The management of CBS somehow think that a lot of hype, perky Katie and yes, a bit of work on their website is going to help.

The programme, as previously noted, is something of a flop as a journal of record. The website is a bit better; it’s a standard site, running off of Linux and Apache, and like many news sites, it has videos to accompany its articles. The videos, however, again have the emotive rather than factual slant which appears to be the big problem with the entire news division.

In addition to standard news, there is a blog for Ms. Couric. Presumably this is an attempt to ensure that CBS can fight blog with blog. That said, it’s not always clear if Ms. Couric writes the items or her staff do. Every blog has a “voice”, and her blog appears to be a cacophony. Overall, most of it is fairly bland; what I found amusing were the “Word of the Day” items. I am surprised that she believes people don’t know the meaning of “Nonplussed” and “Ubiquitous”.

Overall, I have to wonder if this is the best that CBS can do. Is this what they were getting the overseas press worked up about? If they really believe that this is going to break ground online and on television, they are sorely mistaken. As television, it has none of the grandeur or eloquence of say, Sir Trevor McDonald. As an online offering, it is not nearly as exciting as what is happening in the world of blogging. Ms. Couric may not be entirely unpleasant on the eyes, but it takes more than perk to gain and retain viewers. At best, I suggest that CBS may have slowed the bleeding, but there’s nothing about Katie that means the bleeding is going to stop.

Yesterday, I was asked by my boss to analyse a new competitor’s website. I tried not to laugh too hard while looking at it.

What was creating my amusement was not the operating system or web server software; they’d gone for a perfectly sensible Linux / Apache combination. I merely found it funny that their site was entirely composed of old-fashioned .cgi scripts. This was Perl programming, circa 1997. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, it’s terribly out of date, rather like seeing someone on the street today using a hugely heavy mobile phone from the 1980’s.

This is not a criticism of Perl, mind you. There are many wonderful sites still using it; but most of those had developers with sufficient brains to switch to mod_perl, which offers far better performance, and requires no re-writing of one’s original Perl scripts. Our competitor isn’t that bright, fortunately.

That said, while making out-of-date technology choices for a new venture is definitely bad, maintaining out of date technology for an interim period is a close second.

My company is brighter than our adversary; we fully intend to migrate to PHP / MySQL, which is current, thriving and modern. However at the moment we’re stuck with a great deal of ASP: classic ASP (not ASP.NET) a technology that is reaching its end.

Classic ASP is in steady decline. I can’t think of any major sites that have been launched with it recently; they would look as strange as our competitor using old-fashioned Perl. To me, it’s always been diabolical; to do something as simple as say, turning a bit of text from lower case to upper case, which only requires one command in PHP, requires writing a function in ASP. Furthermore, debugging classic ASP is right up there on my favourite things to do with dentistry and paying taxes. Worse, classic ASP is the home of VBScript; every respectable programmer I know spits on Visual Basic, particularly in its pre .NET form. In their eyes, VBScript opened the door to web programming for people who couldn’t be bothered to learn a proper language.

Truly, being in the classic ASP ghetto is a maddening experience; I know that my developers can do better, they’re certainly talented enough. I also know that if Microsoft pulled the plug on classic ASP support tomorrow, we’ll have a big problem. Lest this seem a dramatic statement, it’s useful to remember that it’s the Microsoft way. For example, they pulled the plug on Visual Foxpro; considering it’s a 32 bit, single threading application, that may not have been a bad idea. Still, it is dislocating; but so long as “progress” is achived in Microsoft’s eyes, they don’t seem to care.

It is true that classic ASP pages are supposed to port into .NET to a point, they do require “minor alterations” to achieve this. “Minor alterations” in my experience means “rewrite and debug”.

There is also a pointlessness inherent in this technology; it’s like continuing to embroider one’s knowledge on how to make buggy whips or perform maintainance on steam powered locomotives. A few people may need to know, or even find it interesting, but the rest of the world has moved on.

As ever, Open Source looks far more intelligent in comparison. Our competitor made an error in not going the mod_perl route, but it’s not a fatal one. Mod_perl’s support for the old and the new means they can utilise its strengths while they learn how to use technology properly. I certainly don’t intend to tell them, however. Hopefully we will have moved on by the time they’ve figured it out. Classic ASP will have reached an end at that point so far as I am concerned; it will be a welcome development when this end is reached for everyone else.