Mike Cohen

Byrne on Bush & Iraq

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Best quote ever on Iraq (via David Byrne):

Nothing much could be worse for Iraq than the US presence. Their superstructure has been destroyed, and left unrepaired. There is civil war. Their own oil isn’t bringing in money for them. So how could it be worse if we leave? It can’t, really. Some folks are saying we broke it we should fix it. Tell that to someone who comes into your house and smashes all the furniture. That’s not the repairperson I would call. You might want to sue them, or kill them, or have them thrown in jail, but you don’t want them in your house ever again.

Media Event Prediction

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I expect Apple to release an iPhone software update with tomorrow’s media event in London. Most likely, a firmware update will be needed to support international carriers, so Apple will probably take that opportunity to enable the WiFi Music Store and other features such as iPod Touch style home button operation in the same update.

Backward Compatibility

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As a developer, my least favorite thing is having to maintain backward compatibility with older systems. It keeps me from being able to use the latest features and I often have to have some code duplicated to do things differently depending on the OS version.

For example I’m using the new, preferred method with launchd to run items when the system is booted. Unfortunately that only works in OS X 10.4 or later, so I just had to add some extra code to maintain compatibility with 10.3 using an old fashioned StartupItem. Of course this also makes QA testing a lot more difficult, since we have more different systems to test with.

Thankfully we’re dropping support for 10.2, which makes it a little easier.

MediaTemple

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When I was having trouble with DreamHost a few days ago, I signed up for a Grid Server account at Media Temple to try it out. After trying it, I decided to close my Media Temple account and stay with DreamHost.

I created a mirror of this site (which you can still see here until the end of the month), and I didn’t find it to be any faster than DreamHost. I also find that DreamHost’s control panel is a lot nicer.

I also prefer how DreamHost handles multiple domains. With DreamHost, I can create completely separate FTP/SSH accounts for each domain. Media Temple, on the other hand, uses a primary domain with other domains added as alternate domains, unless you purchase another IP address at extra cost. All of the domains appear in a domain subdirectory in a single FTP account, so there’s less separation between domains.

Things go wrong

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Today has been a day when everything went wrong. To start things off, my car battery died yet again, even though I left it only one day without using my car. Once again I’ll bring it to my Toyota dealer and see that I get a new battery. The last two times they tried to tell me there was nothing wrong with the battery. Running down 8 times has to have done some permanent damage to the battery.

Later, Dreamhost had some problems with their web server, which is why all of my sites have been down for several hours. I’ve signed up for an account at MediaTemple and will be starting to move at least one site over there to see how well it works.

To top it off, my new MacBook Pro is having disk problems. I’m now backing it up and getting ready to reformat the drive. Hopefully it won’t have to be replaced.

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9/11

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Scoble reminds us of the events that happened on this day six years ago, 9/11/2001.

I had slept late that day, since I was laid off from Teaching Network the previous Friday, along with more than half of the company. I awoke when FedEx knocked on my door, delivering my CodeWarrior upgrade. I turned on the TV and was glued to the screen for the rest of the day. I spent much of the day calling & emailing my friends in New York to make sure everyone was OK.

Here’s what I wrote on that day:

What happened on this day was by far the worst thing I’ve seen in my life.

I’ve been through a major earthquake, and while it was scary, it was only a local disaster and didn’t come anywhere close to the destruction caused by this attack.

I was born after Pearl Harbor, so I don’t really know how people felt at the time, but I’m pretty sure this will go down in history as being much worse. Pearl Harbor was a military target and less than 3000 people died. This attack was on a civilian target in the largest city in the US and another attack was on one of our government’s offices. Over 50,000 people worked in the WTC and I’m sure the death toll will be many times higher than Pearl Harbor.

I can’t believe the WTC is gone. I’ve been in those buildings many times and I’m familiar with that area. New York’s skyline is permanently changed and tens of thousands of people are out of work. Many children lost their lives and even more lost their families.

I grew up during the 60s & 70s at the height of the Cold War, and when I turned on the TV and saw the WTC on fire I immediately flashed back to that time and thought “the Russians bombed us”. It was so much easier during that time. We knew exactly who our enemies were. It was like a Western with good guys & bad guys – “Us” & “Them”. Now it isn’t so easy. We don’t know who our enemies are and there isn’t one big “Evil Empire” any more. There are hundreds or thousands of terrorist groups all over the world and we can’t possibly wipe them all out. Even if we do, there’ll be so much resentment that more will spring up. There will be more attacks in retalliation and we’ll be targets of terrorists all over the world.