“Revenge First. World Peace Second.” So reads the only clever graffitti I see on my commute.
There are some parts of the world—like Palestine, Ireland, and half of Africa—where revenge is a way of life. A perceived initial wrong is revenged with violence. The violence of the revenge is revenged with violence, and the cycle begins. Everybody involved has had wrong done to them, and so everyone involved feels justified having their revenge.
Assuming we all participate, the results of revenge would definitely be world peace—the kind of peace that is only interrupted by the scuffle of cockroach feet.
Getting even is instinctive for the majority of humanity. Why is that some nations and races can restrain themselves, even in the face of being deeply wronged? I’m thinking here of Australian aborigines, South Africa after Apartheid and how post-Holocaust Jews didn’t arbitrarily round up German citizens and execute them.
I think the difference is character: it requires more character to forgive than it takes to stand up for your rights.
Today I’m looking at retro-web. The Symantec brand content filter has decided that stylesheets are potentially evil, and won’t allow them in. If I type in the URL of a stylesheet document, Symantec gives me this message—
Error: Internal proxy error: Unable to scan file due to disk full or other disk device error
I suppose blocking CSS in these circumstances makes sense—IE allows Javascript to be embedded in stylesheets—but I wonder why the proxy is still serving web pages.
Surprisingly, the web is usable without stylesheets. Ugly, but usable. It could be a lot worse.
I’ve settled on using SQLite as the database for my blog/mini-CMS. The blog is going to be running complex queries over all the data on a regular basis, and SQLite seems up to the task.
Other bonuses for SQLite include:
Since it only impacts the code at a few points, going with SQLite is a safe decision. If it turns out that SQLite isn’t up to the task it will be simple to replace it with another RDBMS—or even something else.