According to InformationWeek, Microsoft has managed to get two Massachusetts Democrats (William Galvin, the current Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, and state senator Marc Pacheco) to oppose the OpenDocument standard politically. The standard, now ratified, is scheduled to go into effect starting January 2007, but there is now a hearing scheduled for October 31, and Andy Updegrove, legal counsel to OASIS, apparently received a call from a reporter who claimed that Galvin "would not approve" the standard, despite the fact that he doesn't appear to have that authority.

Well, looks like it swung by close enough to take out the electricity. The battery will hold the server up for about 5 hours, but my personal machine will go down shortly. At least I finished editing a batch of pictures, even if they'll have to wait until tomorrow to upload.

The university newspaper, the Daily Reveille, was particularly atrocious today. The front page featured "Science vs. Spirit", with the subtitle "Katrina was God's cleansing for some, just weather for others".

Reuters reports that the Canadian search-and-rescue team was rescuing people in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, a full five days before the U.S. military got anyone in.

It's so hard not to take any one of a number of cheap shots after that headline.

To be fair, the U.S. military probably did the right thing by focusing their resources on New Orleans proper, considering the way that the place degenerated, but this does underscore just how badly undermanned the area is, putting lie to the claims that FEMA didn't need more help, and that there were enough National Guard units in the area that it didn't matter that half of them were off in Iraq.

Hat tip to Tennessee Guerilla Women.

A security problem in the version of Drupal I was running finally prompted me to spend the day upgrading the system to the new 4.6 series. The good things: the new trackback anti-spam system is working very well, so trackbacks have been re-enabled. The new image system is much less buggy than it used to be, and in particular, resizing properly happens only in one direction now. Access permissions specific to taxonomy terms are actually working now, so works of fiction are now only accessible to users who are logged in (at Lynne's long request). There's now a type of node for storing recipes, should that become of interest. Nodes can now accept arbitrary files as attachments. The image filter actually works now, making it easier to publish linked thumbnails.

The ethical lapse of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts in hearing arguments (and being the key vote on a question of extension of presidential power) in a case where not only was the executive branch involve, but George Bush himself was the defendant — while at the same time meeting with George Bush to discuss a potential appointment to the Supreme Court has made it into the news recently, with three other lawyers publically noting that this was a severe breach of ethics. Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) have also asked Roberts to answer why he did not recuse himself. The White House was quick to respond with their own ethicist, claiming that nothing improper had happened... except that they failed to mention that until very recently their ethicist, Ronald Rotunda, was a military advisor to the Department of Defense on military commissions – the exact subject of the case in controversy.

So they've hired a man with a conflict of interest to defend a man accused of failing to recuse himself when he had a conflict of interest. At least they're consistent.

Link credit to Think Progress.

Well, President Bush has managed to become a record-breaker today... for the largest number of vacation days ever taken by a United States President (336). He's managed this feat in little over four years, whereas the previous record of 335 days was set by Ronald Reagan throughout the course of his full eight years, and a good chunk of that included the time he spent recuperating after being shot.

I'm sure many people would like to know what the President thinks about this accomplishment, but he's unfortunately unavailable for comment — he's still on vacation, possibly with his eye set on another record: the thirty consecutive days of vacation taken by Richard Nixon.

Link credit to The Daily Pick.

The base URL for Resonant Information is now http://www.resonant.org:81 (shifting from port 80 to port 81, thanks to some idiocy at my workplace that is blocking access to ports on my own home system, despite the fact that I really do use information on it as a reference for work. I am hoping that this situation will be taken care of soon, and that not too many readers are behind restrictive firewalls or proxies that will freak out at this.

NASA's Deep Impact program was a great success, both for NASA and for science in general... but it seems to have had some drawbacks. A superstitious Russian loon by the name of Marina Bai is suing NASA for "moral sufferings", after earlier claims that the experiment would "deform her horoscope". All this, despite the fact that astrologers aren't known for using advanced optics, and the comet, Tempel 1, isn't even visible to the naked eye.

I took a number of photographs a little after midnight last night for the "Late Night" category challenge, and spent much of my time fighting with my tripod (a Velbon 50 that I've had for many years), trying to get the angle just right, or the stability, or trying to contort myself to see through a camera angled upwards on a tripod that's just too short unless it's fully extended... in which case you can kiss the vibration resistance goodbye.

Tonight, I have been doing the image editing of those photographs. The result is a sudden hole in my wallet, as I burned a thousand dollars on a new Gitzo tripod and Acratech head after tearing my hair out in frustration.