Gimme a Kaa!

Kaa is a weblogging tool written in pure Python.

via Daily Python-URL

This is a very impressive tool. I installed it (a breeze, if you've got ActiveState's ActivePython 2.2 on your machine -- requires Tkinter), played with it, looked at the code, and added a new feature (shortcuts, ala Radio), all in the span of a couple of hours.

This is very interesting. It has similar features to CityDesk (client-side UI), Radio (client side generation), Blogger (ftp your files to a server), and Movable Type (open-source, macros, and multiple blogs). Best of all, it's written in Python, so I can hack it pretty easily. Pretty impressive.

It definitely wants some refactoring, which Hans Nowak knows and is working on. I'd like to see the program split into separate front- and back-end functions. This would allow us to bolt a new front-end on without much trouble. I'd love to see it work through the web. Shouldn't be hard to do.

One wonderful thing about open source software is that you can steal from others. When I was at Microsoft, we had to scratch our heads, wrack our brains, and talk with our customers to figure out what feature to add next. With things like Radio, Movable Type, Blogger, or Kaa, you're impressed that it works at all, and there are no end of new features to add!

1:34:18 PM  comment []    

Victor David Hanson: The Strangest of Times

Here at home everything is also in flux. Louis Farrakhan feels affinity with Patrick Buchanan; Right-wingers sound like revolutionaries; and Left-wingers appear cautious advocates of the autocratic status-quo abroad. Isolationists are having a problem with the crater in New York and wondering how pulling in our horns is going to make us safe in a post-9/11 world. Sober Cold War realists are becoming aware there is no longer any nuclear, aggressive Soviet Union that demands support for strongmen as the lesser of two evils. Multiculturalists find it perplexing that fundamentalists like al Qaeda and the Taliban are not merely "different" but quite evil and far worse than we. Leftists are hard-pressed to find a recent American intervention that didn't take out Right-wing thugs. Internationalists privately concede that U.N. resolutions are about as moral and binding as those of a faculty senate, and that Libya is more likely to be applauded as a model of human rights than is the United States. Multilateralists are waking up that what German officials say is not very nice and that Europeans shrug about anti-Semitism while they sell strategic materials to fascists in Iraq who plot to use that expertise to send gas against the Jews of Israel.

Meanwhile, an embattled United States goes it alone as its critics, here and abroad, are confused whether they should remain mute, hector, or applaud when the world's hyperpower continues to use its vast power to rid the world of some of its most abhorrent regimes.

12:59:30 PM  comment []    

USS Clueless: The Vatican Opposes War

But none of those things are what really inspired me to write. It was this: "War doesn't resolve problems. Besides being bloody, it's useless."

Where in the hell did this piece of conventional wisdom come from, anyway? In one form or another I've been hearing it my entire life, and it always pops up during times of international crisis. "Violence never settled anything." "War doesn't actually resolve problems." How can anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of history make a claim like this?

The reality is that there are few ways more effective at "settling anything" and "resolving problems" (at least, certain kinds of problems) than war. It's an extremely effective tool, actually. The reason we don't resort to it more often is because it is appallingly expensive in blood and treasure, and horribly risky (you can lose). But the reason that war is the last resort in international relations when diplomacy fails is because war can settle things even when diplomacy does not.

12:35:12 PM  comment []    

Enthusiasm

Yep.  

12:35:01 AM  comment []