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Tuesday July 11, 2006

AJAX chat and IM applications reviewed

Software

AJAX magazine (part of PHP magazine) has a review of AJAX chat applications. Unfortunately none of the offerings are truly spectacular, so I have not been able to find cool, new ideas for my own AJAX chat yet. I'm more hopeful to find advanced features in IM clients such as Meebo and eBuddy, but perhaps I will have to come up with a few myself. This should not be too challenging considering my experience running a full-featured telnet chat room in the late nineties (a.k.a. a haven).

Scalability is still a major issue I need to think about. Ordinary AJAX applications can actually reduce server load because the same actions as usual carry less overhead (by not loading an entire page, styled and all). But a chat application needs to continuously query a server for new data available. While a thousand users editing a calendar will ultimately result in just a thousand queries storing the new entries, a thousand simultaneous chatters generate a thousand requests per second, continuously checking for new data while rapidly generating even more of their own.

(Note to self: I should use my journal as a bookmark system more often. Too often I can't remember why I bookmarked something, or I can't remember a URL simply because I don't intend to visit a site even though I like its concept and might want to make some remarks.)

Washington gets soft on illegality

Anglosphere

This entry could have been called something like "SCOTUS Lunacy" to keep a Simply American tradition, because the White House has just completely lost it. Near-amnesty for illegal immigrants was heralded before. Now it is time to get soft on illegal combatants as well:

The Pentagon outlined the new standards to the military in a 7 July memo.

The directive says all military detainees are entitled to humane treatment and to certain basic legal standards when they come to trial, as required by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Sure (and I've said this before), but what about article 4A of the third Geneva convention?

Art. 4. A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:

(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions: (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Illegal combatants fail those requirements. Whatever law or treaty applies to them, the Geneva Convention explicitly does not. President Bush has made a huge mistake by bowing to Supreme Court pressure. Stay the course my ass.

So tell me, are there any explicit instructions in the Constitution that anyone would like to see ignored?

Think of the children

Anglosphere

According to Human Rights Watch, the Taliban and other terrorists attack schools. Breslan was a single dramatic event, but in Afghanistan school children come face to face with terrorism on a regular basis:

Human Rights Watch documented more than 200 attacks on teachers, students and schools since January last year.

It says that recently, such attacks appear to have increased sharply, with more attacks on the education system in the first half of 2006 than in the whole of 2005.

Girl schools suffer the most attacks, which is not surprising considering the Taliban had banned education for girls under its rule.
So realise or remember who we're dealing with in this war: scumbags. People who attack school children to ensure the continuing suppression of women.

How could anyone not be most vigilant and most supportive of any crackdown on these people?

Next day: Thursday July 13, 2006 Previous day: Sunday July 9, 2006

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