From the NY Times:

The cities of Chicago and Seattle will be the focus of a $16 million exercise next week to test how well the federal government would deal with simultaneous attacks by terrorists using biological and radiological weapons. The exercise, said to be the largest domestic security drill ever carried out by the federal government, will be played out over five days starting on Monday and involve dozens of federal, state and local emergency-response agencies.

OK, reading that it seems like not such a bad idea. See how people react. Prepare for the unexpected, right? Then I read this (from USA Today):

Although participants have been told when and where the simulated attacks will occur, and that they involve a radiological device and biological agent, the details remain secret to allow for some elements of surprise.

What?! Exactely what element of suprise is left? They know What, When, and Where. Will they be suprised because they get jelly beans at the command center instead of donuts?

It is wonderful to know that our governement will be fully prepared the next time that the “bad guys” send us an invitation to their attack complete with full description of the items being served.

As many of you know, I have gone back and started taking classes again now that I work for the College of William and Mary. As you may also know, the professor for my class this semester is awful. My classmates and I were very expressive when we completed our course evaluations, but we had yet to experience the final exam. Below is the letter I wrote the chair of the department after turning in my exam. Enjoy.

Letter to the chair of the W&M CS department

Something good to come out of Richmond:

Governor Mark R. Warner today ceremonially signed two bills to raise the penalty to a felony for high volume unsolicited bulk e-mail, known as “spam.” The new anti-spam provisions of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act make it the toughest such law in the United States

Full Press Release

As with any skill that you do not use on a daily basis, your knowledge of the details is going to fade. This is especially true of technologies like XML that have lots of syntactical quirks that are easy to forget. This is where XML in a Nutshell comes in. Like all O’Reilly Nutshell books it does an excellent job of cramming all of the little facts needed to work with XML into a concise easy to reference book. <div style="clear: left"> </div> But, like all Nutshell books, this is not a tutorial! You need to know what you are doing with XML and why you are using XML before it will be of much help to you.

The book itself is divided into 4 sections.

First an overview is given of the basic concepts to help you brush up on the fundamentals. This covers the basics of XML formatting, entities, DTDs, namespaces and how to deal with non-US character sets.

The second section covers what the authors refer to as Narrative Centric Documents. I would better describe this as methods of using XML that relate to presentation of data. This covers XHTML (and it’s helper CSS), and XSL (and it’s helpers XSLT, XPATH, XLINKS, etc).

The third section covers using XML as a data storage format (which can then be presented using the technologies in section 2). It also covers the technology and methodologies used to access XML documents; SAX and DOM.

The forth section is a reference to all of the syntax and formatting issues that you need to know to generate valid forms of the technologies discussed.

If you need to learn XML and what it can be used for, this is probably not your book, but if you need to look up the attributes for the xsl:output tag, this is what you need.

After much procrastinating, I have finally posted some photos of our spring flowers. I hope this gets the ball rolling and I will start taking and posting more.

Photos under Spring 2003.

From this interview:

Q: Based on what you?ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush?s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

A: That they are nonsense.

But it seems that the war wasn’t even planned by the people who are actually trained to fight wars. Hello?!?!?

The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.

Got this email from my friend Peter in Canada. Quite funny.

1. Cabal of oldsters who won’t listen to outside advice? Check.

2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check

3. Imposing country boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.

4. Unshakeable faith in our superior technology? Check.

5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.

9. Fear we’ll look bad if we back down now? Check.

10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.

11. Land war in Asia? Check.

12. Right unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.

13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.

14. Soldiers about to be dosed with our own chemicals? Check.

15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.

16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.

17. B-52 bombers? Check.

18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.

19. In-fighting among the branches of the military? Check.

20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.

21. Local experts ignored? Check.

22. Local politicians ignored? Check.

23. Locals used to conflicts lasting longer than the USA has been a country? Check.

24. Against advice, Prez won’t raise taxes to pay for war? Check.

25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.

26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don’t go our way? Check.

27. Unpopular war? Check.

Vietnam 2, you are cleared to taxi

But unfortunately it does all seem to fit.

Practice to Deceive - Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan. Very scary indeed. And more so because it matches what I am seeing everyday on the news.

I can only hope we can get some sense back into the political system in 2004.

Spring is almost here. Flowers are ready! I am really looking forward to see how the hundreds of flowers we planted last fall turn out. The flowers at left are very tiny, and they have a wonderfully sweet smell. View full sized image.