April 16, 2003

I take it all back

/ current events / 2 Comments

Every word of it. Every skeptical, accusatory thing I said about the war in Iraq. Because it turns out that, yes, Iraq was harboring terrorists. Well, one terrorist. Abu Abbas. Remember him? I thought not. He hijacked the Achille Lauro and killed one of its passengers. In 1985.

This is not to trivialize the crime, but we didn’t invade a country, kill and maim thousands of civilians, allow over 100 of our own troops to die, and spend $75 billion and counting to round up this guy. Oh yeah…I remember hearing something about weapons of mass destruction a few weeks ago. Did they find any of those? Nope.

Macintouch gets with the program, sort of

/ net stuff

Macintouch, the best Mac news site, is finally publishing an RSS feed. Excerpts only, which is fair: they need to get people to come to the site, since they’re advertising-supported.

A bigger problem is that Macintouch never had permalinks for individual stories, and yet an RSS feed requires a permalink, or something like it. The solution Macintouch is using appears to be very ad-hoc: there are indeed anchor tags for individual stories, but they don’t seem intended to scale: they read like <a name="itools7">. This is adequate for one day’s worth of news, but not for providing a permanent ID. I’m guessing that Macintouch has been running on a homebrewed content-management system that wasn’t designed with permalinks in mind; now Ric Ford is locked in, and retrofitting newfangled contraptions like permalinks is turning out to be hard.