In Damn Right We're Angry, Paul Waldman lets loose with a long list of why progressives are justifiably angry with what's happened to the US over the last few years:

We’re angry because of what has happened to our country, because of how we’ve been treated, and because of the innumerable crimes the conservatives have committed. We’re angry at the president, we’re angry at the Congress, we’re angry at the news media. And we have every right to be.

Yes, we’re angry at George W. Bush. We’re not angry at him because of who he sleeps with, and we’re not angry at him because we think he represents some socio-cultural movement we didn’t like 40 years ago, or because he hung out with a different crowd than we did in high school. We’re angry at him because of what he’s done.

... 

Yes, we’re angry about Iraq, and we may be for the rest of our lives. ...

We’re angry that when we talk about ending this monstrous war, the soulless hypocrites who are glad to send more and more men and women to be scarred and maimed and killed in Iraq have the gall to accuse us of not “supporting the troops.” We’re angry that people whose actions exhibit nothing but contempt for freedom and liberty and justice, who wouldn’t know real patriotism if it came up and smacked them across the face, pin a little flag on their lapel and say that we’re the ones who hate America.

... 

We’re angry that America may now be the only country in the world in which torture is an officially sanctioned policy, proclaimed proudly in public. ...

And we’re angry that Bush has made our nation so hated around the world. We’re angry that the next time a Democrat gets elected, most of their time will be spent cleaning up the god-awful mess Bush has made of everything.

We’re angry that we and our children and our grandchildren will have to keep paying off the nation’s debt, which now stands at nearly $9 trillion. We’re angry because every other industrialized country in the world has a single-payer health care system that works, and we pay more for ours than any of them, yet we have 45 million people with no health insurance. We’re angry that the insurance companies have convinced their obedient servants in Congress that the Rube Goldberg perpetual paperwork machine we have now is somehow “the best health care in the world” and preferable to a system in which you go to your doctor, get treated and go home, without having to fill out 10 forms and get down on your knees before the gods of the HMO bureaucracy to get a partial repayment minus your deductible and your co-pay.

We’re angry that the federal government is brimming with people fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agencies over which they preside, the anti-environmentalists who run the Interior department, the mining company lobbyists in charge of mine safety and the union-busters in charge of worker safety.

Read it for yourself.

In last week's tip on using the NVelocity template formatting engine, I described what to set to load a template from an absolute path.

Here's the magic necessary to get NVelocity to load a template from an embedded resource:

 VelocityEngine engine = new VelocityEngine();
 ExtendedProperties properties = new ExtendedProperties();
 properties.AddProperty("resource.loader", "assembly");
 properties.AddProperty("assembly.resource.loader.class",
     "NVelocity.Runtime.Resource.Loader.AssemblyResourceLoader, NVelocity");
 properties.AddProperty("assembly.resource.loader.assembly", "StencilFormatter");
 engine.Init(properties);

We've started using the NVelocity template formatting engine. We were absolutely stymied for an hour, trying to figure out how to get it working with an absolute path to the template file, instead of the relative path shown in the documentation.

The trick is to set file.resource.loader.path. Here's how to load C:\foo\bar\somefile.vm:

 ExtendedProperties props = new ExtendedProperties();
 props.AddProperty("file.resource.loader.path", new ArrayList(new string[]{".", "C:\\"}));
 velocity.Init(props);

 template = velocity.GetTemplate("foo\\bar\\somefile.vm");

I ordered a 17" Mac Book Pro on Friday night. It shipped from Shanghai on Monday and arrived at work this morning. Scha-weet! And spendy.

I've been busy ramping up all day. I estimate that my total lifetime usage of Macs was about one day before today. I definitely have some new habits to learn.

So far, I've installed Mac Vim, Firefox (browser), Camino (browser), Thunderbird (email), Quicksilver (fast launch utility), Witch (window switcher), AntiRSI (RSI preventer), Adium (multi-protocol chat), Skype (Internet telephony), Remote Desktop Connection (connecting to Windows desktops), StuffIt Expander (for classic archives), and KeePassX (password manager).

Some of these have built-in equivalents of course, but I'm using these for compatibility with my existing Windows and Linux setups and data (e.g., Thunderbird, KeePassX) or because I'm too entrenched to change (Vim).

Title: A Meeting at Corvallis
Author: S.M. Stirling
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Roc
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0451461118
Pages: 497
Keywords: speculative fiction
Reading period: 26-27 February, 2007

In Dies the Fire, the first book of the trilogy, the "Change" instantly and permanently disabled electricity, high-powered chemical reactions, and explosives, plunging mankind back into the Dark Ages. Ninety percent of the planet's population died in the first year, mostly from disease, starvation, or murder. Dies the Fire follows several groups that form in Oregon's Willamette valley, including the Clan Mackenzie and the Bearkillers.

The second book, The Protector's War took place nine years later. The tyrannical Protector of Portland and his feudal barons start to provoke war against the troublesome groups to their south.

In A Meeting at Corvallis, full war finally breaks out, pitting the free-minded Mackenzies, Bearkillers, and their neighbors against the neo-medieval Portland Protective Association.

Stirling is well-known both for alternate history and militaristic SF. Here he transplants the Dark Ages onto twentyfirst century America. Post-apocalyptic, but through no fault of our own. Some characters jokingly ascribe the mystery of the Change to Alien Space Bats for want of a better explanation.

Stirling enjoys his battles and works in plenty of them. Gunpowder doesn't work, so they have to be fought the hard way, with swords, bows, pikes, cavalry, and catapults. For all the militarism, he has several sympathetic lesbian and gay characters, and the Clan Mackenzie are Wiccans.

A graffito on a wall in Corvallis sums it up: Help, I've fallen into the RenFaire and I can't get out!

Title: The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Author: George V. Higgins
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Owl Books
Copyright: 1971
ISBN: 0805065989
Pages: 183
Keywords: crime fiction
Reading period: 24-25 February, 2007

So, there's this two-time loser Eddie Coyle, see. Eddie Fingers. They call him that on account of the time that he screwed up and some other guys had to break his fingers. Eddie deals guns and he's facing time in New Hampshire, so he's talking to the police hoping to get his sentence reduced. His friends wouldn't like that if they knew.

This was the first novel published by George V. Higgins (no relation). Written in an impressionistic, dialog-heavy style, Higgins clearly knew his lowlifes. He juggles a sizable cast of cops and robbers, playing them off against each other. Higgins is often compared to Elmore Leonard, as Leonard points out in the introduction.

The book was made into a movie with Robert Mitchum, which has yet to be released on DVD. You can sign a petition at TCM urging its release.

Title: A Play of Isaac
Author: Margaret Frazer
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0425197514
Pages: 309
Keywords: historical mystery
Reading period: 22-24 February, 2007

A small troupe of traveling players spend a few days in the Oxford of 1434 and are nearly framed for a murder.

Frazer evokes the sights and sounds of medieval Oxford during the Corpus Christi holiday, the hard life of traveling players, and the goings-on of a rich merchant's household. Amazingly enough, she almost completely avoids the colleges of Oxford. The mystery itself is thin and occupies little of the book, as the author prefers to concentrate on the other aspects of her tale.

Moderately entertaining.

Title: Shakespeare's Champion
Author: Charlaine Harris
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 1997
ISBN: 0425213102
Pages: 206
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 20 February, 2007

Lily is a cleaning woman in the small town of Shakespeare, Arkansas. A cleaner with a traumatic past, who erects high walls around herself and works out at the gym and the dojo fervently. One morning, she opens up the gym to find a bodybuilder whose larynx has been crushed by a laden barbell. Tensions are already high over the murder of a young black man, and racist literature stars appearing everywhere, followed by a bombing at a black church. Lily falls in with a private detective who is trying to get to the bottom of the hate literature and eventually gets to the bottom of the case.

Harris writes with great insight into her spiky character, making her compelling and sympathetic. The plot moves along briskly, leading to a satisfying if unsurprising conclusion.

This is the second book in the Lily Bard mysteries. Like all the books, it stands on its own.

I have updated the Win64 port of Vim. It now includes a working installer, a working "Edit with Vim" shell extension, and the first 195 patches for Vim 7.0. Get it while it's hot!

Title: Dark Fire
Author: C.J. Sansom
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0143036432
Pages: 503
Keywords: historical mystery
Reading period: 18-19 February, 2007

Dark Fire is set in the summer of 1540, a few years after Henry VIII established himself as the head of the Church of England. Matthew Shardlake is a London lawyer, who takes on a case defending a young woman against the charge of murdering her 12-year-old cousin. She refuses to speak and will be "pressed" by heavy weights until she enters a plea—or dies. In exchange for a temporary reprieve, Shardlake agrees to take on an investigation for his sometime patron, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's first minister. An alchemist claims to have discovered the secret of Greek fire, a terrible napalm-like weapon once used in the Byzantine empire. Shardlake has twelve days to find the cache of dark fire.

Sansom recreates Reformation London, seamlessly blending together a stew of religion, politics, and skullduggery, in a very entertaining mix.

Title: The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes
Author: Marcel Theroux
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harcourt Books
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0156007436
Pages: 216
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 16-17 February, 2007

This book is not a Sherlockian pastiche, although Mycroft Holmes does appear in two short stories within the story.

Damien March is a 30ish researcher at the BBC, who unexpectedly inherits a house on a remote island off Cape Cod, from his late uncle Patrick, a once-successful novelist. He moves to Ionia and slowly starts inhabiting the life of Patrick. Brothers are a recurring theme throughout this book: Patrick and Damien's father; Damien and his brother Vivian; Mycroft and Sherlock; and others. Damien comes to an understanding and a reconciliation of some of those fractured relationships.

One wonders how much of Patrick's character is inspired by Marcel Theroux's father, Paul.

This book drags in the first half, but held my interest in the latter half. Certainly a novel of ideas, rather than of action.

Title: Flashman on the March
Author: George MacDonald Fraser
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Anchor Books
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 1400096464
Pages: 335
Keywords: historical fiction
Reading period: 13-16 February, 2007

Brigadier-General Sir Harry Flashman returns in the twelfth volume of the Flashman Papers. Flashy is a cad, a rogue, a lecher, a toady, and a bully. His reputation for bravery is wholly undeserved, but he has successfully concealed that through an extremely long career, spanning much of the nineteenth century. Flashman reveals all in a series of extremely frank memoirs written in his old age, published long after his death by his "editor", Fraser.

Flashman has many undesirable qualities, but he has a knack for finding himself in the wrong place again and again, and coming up smelling of roses. He survives the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Indian Mutiny, the Battle of Little Big Horn, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Harper's Ferry Raid. He is an acute and cynical observer, giving an insider's view of what really happened.

In this book set in 1868, Flashy needs to get out of Trieste one step ahead of an enraged Austrian duke, and agrees to escort half a million in silver to Abyssinia (now known as Ethiopia), where a British force is mounting an expedition to release European captives held by the mad tyrant, Theodore. General Napier prevails upon him to go undercover and head in-country to make an alliance with a neighboring queen, and "once again I was hoist with my undeserved reputation for derring-do, my fraudulent record of desperate service, and once again I couldn't refuse—not and keep my good name."

Needless to say, he tups several local beauties along the way, callously betraying one of them without a moment's thought. Somehow, he finds himself holed up in a besieged fort in the final battle as the unwilling guest of Theodore, and comes out the hero of the hour.

As ever, Fraser's historical research is meticulous. He has a great ear for dialogue and tells a rousing story.

You'll get more out of this book if you've read the others, but it stands well on its own. Recommended.

Title: The Dante Club
Author: Matthew Pearl
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Random House
Copyright: 2003
ISBN: 0812971043
Pages: 372
Keywords: historical mystery
Reading period: 10-12 February, 2007

This book is blurbed by Dan Brown on the front cover; happily, The Dante Club is a much better book than The Da Vinci Code and Pearl is a much better writer than Brown.

The poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, their publisher, J.T. Fields, and the historian George Washington Greene are completing the first translation of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy ever to be published in America. It is Boston in 1865, just after the Civil War. Two prominent Brahmins are murdered in grotesque manner and the Dante Club realize that the details of the murders are taken straight from the as-yet little-known Inferno. Stirred out of scholarly inaction, they start looking for the killer.

Pearl conjures up nineteenth-century Boston, fresh from the War Between the States, full of little-wanted immigrants, and the distrust of the Harvard Corporation of foreign ideas. He brings his three main characters, Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow to life. He makes a strong case for the universality of Dante; enough so that I am minded to dig up my copy of Dorothy L. Sayers' translation of Dante's Inferno and give it another go some day.

Background information: TheDanteClub.com.

I have been cleaning up some issues with the Win64 port of Vim, including the Edit with Vim shell extension not working very well. When I built the shell extension with VS 2005 on x86, I would get the following whenever I right-clicked in Explorer:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library

Runtime Error!

Program: C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE

R6034

An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

There was no mention of which application was at fault, though it was obvious in this case. I have also seen some mention of verclsid in the error dialog, though not when I took this snapshot.

The underlying problem relates to SxS, Fusion, and all that good stuff. By far the simplest fix was for me to statically link with libcmt.lib, instead of msvcrt.lib, rather than figure out the necessary manifest magic.

I'm slightly more hopeful this week about not Attacking Iran after reading this piece, subtitled Thelma and Louise Imperialism.

You only have to pick up the morning paper to find the most mainstream of official types in an over-the-top mode that, bare months ago, would have been confined to the distant peripheries of political argument. There's Senator Joe Biden, the very definition of a mainstream man, grilling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about whether she believes the administration already has the authority to attack Iran and swearing, if she does, that it "will generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate, I predict to you." (You can add the exclamation point to that comment or to similar ones from the likes of Senators James Webb and Chuck Hagel among others.)

... 

Former officials are now crawling out of the Washington woodwork to denounce Bush/Cheney policy in Iraq and Iran with the fervor (however masked by official Washington language) of an exorcism.

... 

But it took more than [the work of Sy Hersh, Ray McGovern, and others] for so much of official Washington to panic. It took the administration's decision to send the USS John C. Stennis, a second aircraft carrier task force into the Persian Gulf (with hints that a third could follow); it took the announcement of what Juan Cole has termed George Bush's "fatwa," allowing the U.S. military to take out Iranian agents anywhere in Iraq ("Announcing open hunting season on all Iranian visitors to Iraq," Cole wrote, "is like playing Frisbee with nitroglycerin. Bush has gone looking for trouble and is likely to find it..."); it took the detention by U.S. forces of various Iranian officials in Iraq and the invasion of an Iranian office in Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan; ...

but only slightly:

So feel free to imitate official Washington. Be scared, very scared. An attack on Iran, if it were to happen, promises a special mixture of two fundamentalisms deeply engrained in our top political and military officials that may, in the end, combine into a single lethal brew -- and that will, in the bargain, give American policy in the Middle East the full-blown look of a war on Islam. Though our President is a Christian fundamentalist, neither of these Washington fundamentalisms are, in the normal sense, religious or particularly Christian.

Title: Grantville Gazette III
Author: Eric Flint (ed.)
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 1416509410
Pages: 314
Keywords: alternative history, speculative fiction
Reading period: 4th-9th February, 2007

The popular 1632 series is a shared universe of alternate history, where the small town of Grantville, West Virginia has somehow been transported in a Ring of Fire to central Germany in 1631, during the middle of the Thirty Years' War. The townspeople adapt fairly successfully and immediately and irrevocably change the course of history, thanks to their advanced technology.

The Ring of Fire has spawned an active community at 1632.org, leading to a great deal of fan fiction, developing plot lines, fleshing out major and minor characters, as well as lots of geeky speculation about technology transfer.

This book is a collection of that fan-generated material. Only one piece is written by a professional author, Eric Flint, the creator of the series. The rest is a mixture of fiction and factual pieces, many continued from the earlier Gazettes.

I found this to be the weakest book of the series. None of the stories were memorable. The fiction concentrates on minor events, generally the culture shock of 17th century Europeans, trying to adapt to the strange, powerful Americans who were suddenly thrust upon them.

Not recommended unless you're a completist.

Gmail's Mail Fetcher now works for me! As of today, I can now read my reilly.org email through Gmail, instead of the crappy webmail interface that NetIdentity provides. Much, much nicer.

I still prefer to read my email with a real email client, like Thunderbird, but I don't have POP3 access from work.

In related news, it looks like anyone can sign up for Gmail. You no longer need to be invited.

Via Andrew Sullivan, an extremely well cut YouTube mashup of Doctor Who and Monty Python.

Last year, the Washington State Supreme Court handed down its wrongheaded decision on same-sex marriage.

In a delightful piece of political theater, WA-DOMA has just filed ballot initiative I-957:

If passed by Washington voters, the Defense of Marriage Initiative would:

• add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;

• require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;

• require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “unrecognized;”

• establish a process for filing proof of procreation; and

• make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognized marriage to receive marriage benefits.

The intent is to challenge the court's ruling which declares that a “legitimate state interest” allows the court to limit marriage to those couples able to have and raise children together, and hence it is permissible to bar same-sex marriage.

The initiative attacks the specious rationale for the court's ruling. It also attacks the framing that so many of the bigots use.

Three initiatives are planned:

• Make procreation a requirement for legal marriage.

• Prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children.

• Make the act of having a child together the equivalent of a legal ceremony.

As the sponsor of I-957 freely admits in his rationale, these are all absurd, and if passed, would be struck down by the Washington Supreme Court. He intends to undermine the reasoning of social conservatives who have long claimed that procreation is the sole purpose of marriage.

I'll sign the petition as soon as I get my hands on one, even though my own marriage would be annulled by the terms of the initiative.

In my post about Printf Tricks a couple of years ago, I mentioned that "%n is dangerous and disabled by default in Visual Studio 2005."

I got email today from someone who was porting a large codebase to VS 2005. He was getting an assert from %n and he needed a way to get past it. He intends to fix the uses of %n when he has a chance.

I spent several minutes digging around in MSDN and came up with set_printf_count_output. Wikipedia's Format string attack page led me to Exploiting Format String Vulnerabilities, which describes in detail how %n (and %s) may be exploited.

In short, if you have printf(unvalidated_user_input), instead of printf("%s", unvalidated_user_input), then placing %n into unvalidated_user_input can lead to printf writing arbitrary data into memory.

Title: In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line
Author: Neal Stephenson
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Publisher: Perennial
Copyright: 1999
ISBN: 0380815931
Pages: 151
Keywords: sociology, business
Reading period: October 2006—February 5, 2007

This is a rather strange, rambling essay about the state of the computer industry, historical accidents, and Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux, favoring Linux. Written in 1999, it has not aged well. Stephenson has a fascination with the command line and a disdain for GUIs.

By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them.

I agree with that statement, but not with his overall thrust (and I'm a Linux user and an inveterate command-line dinosaur). Good UI design is hard and we need new and better metaphors, but command-line interfaces should not be foisted on the average user.

In last week's newsletter from the Irish Heritage Club, I read about a survey of Irish-born residents of Washington state.

SEATTLE-NEWS@IRISHCLUB.ORG, FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 2007, PART-1

IRISH SURVEY - Irish-born residents of Washington State are being asked to complete a 32-question survey in connection with a PhD. research project sponsored by Seattle's Irish Immigration Support Group. The goal is to take a snapshot of Irish-born people living in the Seattle area who left Ireland in the 1900s, mostly those who left Ireland after WW-II. If you or someone you know is willing to participate, please contact Melissa at 206-229-8512 or melissae@irishclub.org.

I filled it out and emailed it back to her; it was fairly painless. I just spent some time with Melissa in an (optional) follow-on interview.

As she says in the survey:

If you look at the history, traditions and stories about the Irish in America, much of it comes from the east coast and the post-Famine era. The condensed version is that people left Ireland to get away from the oppression of the British, the lack of economic opportunities, and to work to send money to their families in Ireland. Once in the US, Irish immigrants faced discrimination based on their religion, their birth place, and a rash of stereotypes about the Irish as lazy, drunkards and brawlers. They worked hard, earned success and managed to make a place for themselves and their children in the US.

She wants to find out what's true for the first-generation Irish immigrants who are living in the Northwest today. The traditional take is still partially true, especially for the older generation who arrived in the 1940s or 1950s. It's far less true for many of the more recent immigrants, such as myself, who were part of the great Irish brain drain, now greatly slowed by the Celtic Tiger.

About 15 years ago on the soc.culture.celtic newsgroup, someone asserted that 80% of those born in the 1930s emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s. I found that incredible and asked him for some proof. He pointed me towards Lee's Ireland 1912-1985, where indeed I found that statement. The 1940s and 1950s were extremely difficult for Ireland, but losing 80% of your young people is truly horrific. Some fraction may have returned later, but most were gone forever.

Melissa is still looking for people to complete the survey. Tell her I sent you.

Inspired by Drinking Liberally, I've founded my own little progressive movie club. It will meet at my house on the first Wednesday of every month. We show a progressive film, followed by a discussion. Typically, these will be political documentaries, but you can also expect to see non-political documentaries, fiction, and even the occasional right-wing piece for contrast.

The first film will be shown this coming Wednesday. Here's the announcement that I just sent out:

We'll show ONE of the following movies on Wednesday, February 7th. Those who show up will make the choice.

• Jesus Camp. A growing number of Evangelical Christians believe there is a revival underway in America that requires Christian youth to assume leadership roles in advocating the causes of their religious movement. Jesus Camp follows a group of young children to Pastor Becky Fisher's "Kids on Fire Summer Camp" where the kids are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God's army and are schooled in how to take back America for Christ.

or

• Black Gold. Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.

Come at 7:30pm and socialize. The movie will start at 8:00 sharp. If you like, bring a snack or drink to share.

Send me email if you want more information.

I got a reply from Maria Cantwell's office, regarding the email that I sent about Attacking Iran. Clearly no brain cells were used in sending out this form response.

Dear Mr. Reilly,

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns for the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

As you may know, international nuclear inspectors continue to monitor whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Such a program would be in contravention to the nuclear non-proliferation agreement that Iran has signed. In November 2004, the countries of Britain, France, and Germany negotiated an agreement with Iran, in which Iran agreed to cancel its nuclear programs. Unfortunately, Iran has recently backed away from its commitments. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported that Iran is accelerating its nuclear fuel enrichment activities and has failed to comply with international nuclear inspectors. Specifically, Iran began resuming uranium conversion in August 2005 and then announced its intentions to begin research on enriching uranium in February 2006.

On March 29, 2006, the United Nations Security Council issued a Presidential Statement on Iran 's nuclear programs requesting that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment programs within 30 days and cooperate with the IAEA. Iran failed to comply with this Presidential Statement.

On May 31, 2006 the Bush Administration decided to change course and join diplomatic talks with Iran, along with the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. I believe that the United States must engage in real diplomacy and work with Russia, China, and other countries to deal with Iran. We cannot permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons.

During the debate on the Defense Authorization bill, Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) introduced an amendment calling on Iran to suspend its enrichment program and to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The amendment was agreed to, with my support, in a vote of 99 to 0.

Please be assured that I will continue to press for progress towards a verifiable diplomatic solution.

Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. Finally, you may be interested in signing up for my weekly update for Washington state residents. Every Monday, I provide a brief outline about my work in the Senate and issues of importance to Washington State. If you are interested in subscribing to this update, please visit my website at http://cantwell.senate.gov. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance.

Sincerely, Maria Cantwell United States Senator

For future correspondence with my office, please visit my website at http://cantwell.senate.gov/contact/index.html

I hate phoning politicians' offices, but clearly email isn't achieving much.

My laptop scared the crap out of me last night. I came home to find it in a completely unresponsive state: it would not wake up. The hard disk LED was a solid green. I power cycled it and it refused to boot.

It did, however, boot from a Kubuntu Edgy CD, but it did not recognize the hard disk. In desperation, I booted into the BIOS and played with the disk-related menus. That fixed the problem, but I don't know what went wrong, and my faith is shaken in the reliability of this system.

I bought the laptop just over three years ago, shortly before I quit Microsoft, as a replacement for the work laptop that I had been using. It's served me well. I have a reasonably beefy desktop system of the same age, but I almost always use the laptop instead. It's a Compaq Presario X1012QV, with a 1.3GHz Centrino, a WXGA screen, 35GB hard disk, and 1280MB RAM. It had 512MB RAM originally, but I replaced one of the 256MB sticks with a 1GB stick last year, making it more pleasant to use.

For several months now, I've been planning to buy a new Vista-ready laptop this spring, with a Core 2 Duo, ~100GB disk, and 2+GB RAM. I want a 64-bit CPU so that I can occasionally run Win64; e.g., to update the Win64 port of Vim. I'm severely tempted by Apple and expect to end up with some kind of Mac laptop — my first ever Mac. I was hoping to hold out until Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) comes out sometime this spring, but the latest rumors say that it's "edging the very limit of the definition of 'Spring' — i.e. mid-June". If the Presario craps out on me again, I'll replace it in short order.

Whether I go with Mac or stick with a PC, I'll continue to run multiple OSes. Kubuntu Linux has been my primary operating system since last June, and I think it's unlikely that Vista will replace it. OSX may well do so.

Title: Lake of Sorrows
Author: Erin Hart
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0743247965
Pages: 329
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 29 January-3rd February, 2007

This is the second mystery featuring Nora Gavin, an American forensic pathologist living in Ireland. The body of a ritually murdered Iron Age man is found preserved in a bog, and Gavin is called in to examine the body. Shortly thereafter, another similarly murdered body is found in the bog, but this one is wearing a wristwatch.

Hart writes lean, clear prose, with believable characters, and a not-completely improbable plot. Her Irish characters sound and act like Irish people, rather than refugees from a Lucky Charms outtake.

My main complaint with this book and its predecessor, Haunted Ground, is that all of the characters are damaged, limping through life, struggling with depression or anger. There's something wrong with a cheerful mystery, but these are a bit grim. This book ends on a positive note, however.