crazed monkey

Dive Into Mark: In brief: All hail the Benevolent Goat Masters!

I put in my two cents about supporting the title attribute to allow authors to specify tooltips for everything (but especially images, links, and form elements). This is such a fundamental usability feature, I didn’t realize how much it mattered to me until I tried Safari and didn’t get them.

I didn’t realise that all HTML elements could contain a title attribute. From now on, titles for everything! I try to provide titles for all my image and link elements, where appropriate, but now I will try providing titles in even more places, such as code blocks, and possibly weblog entries and quotes. I’m drunk with the possibilities!

Posted on February 11th, 2003 in meta, site - No Comments »

I’m going to reverse a little and spout off on the French, Russian and German opposition to a war on Iraq. Frankly, the media is giving me the impression that those countries are against the war on purely altruistic principles. It doesn’t take much scratching below the surface to see that this is not true, and that French, Russian and German opposition is (gasp!) grounded in pure self-interest.

Russia has long-standing economic interests in Iraq. In 1972, Moscow and Baghdad signed a treaty of friendship that paved the way for large-scale Soviet arms sales to Iraq, as well as for the employment of thousands of Soviet experts in that country. As a result, Iraq owes Russia about $8-billion. Russia was one of Iraq’s largest trading partners before sanctions were imposed. Given that, Russia is not likely to quickly concede to a war effort, despite U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s evidence of a link between Chechnya and al-Qaeda.

France has the closest trade links with Iraq of any country in Europe. Some 5% of French oil imports still come from Iraq. France has also supplied military and nuclear technology to Iraq in the past. Of course, many Western countries can boast supporting Iraq’s military at one point or another.

Germany, as well as France, is against a war on Iraq because, and this is a shocker, a vast majority of its citizens oppose the war. Who would have thought that a nation’s leaders could represent the will of its people? (Canadian politicians should take note when deciding whether to side with or against the United States.) Oddly enough, that was all I could find on Germany’s opposition to the war. French ties to Iraq were easy to find, given the tendency of the American media towards France-bashing. Update: Germany was the hub of Iraq’s military purchases in the 1980s, (via Alec Saunders .LOG).

Lastly, a little perspective on the Iraqi threat:

Having confronted the giants of the past, who could have imagined the United States, the biggest military power in history, worried silly over some two-bit tyrant who might have a canister or two of poison gas hidden somewhere or who, years from now, might get a pint-sized nuclear weapon.

…

Mr. Powell made no reference to the fact that, while Washington has become paranoid about chemical and biological weapons, (a) the United States rejected an international biological weapons pact two years ago, (b) Mr. Hussein had bio-chem weapons available in the gulf war but didn’t use them, (c) when he did use such weapons in the 1980s, the U.S., then a semi-supporter of Mr. Hussein, gave him the old wink wink, and (d) for all the fear that Washington is trying to generate over these weapons, the death toll in modern times is greater from the flu bug and soccer hooliganism.

What a large post about nothing special.

Posted on February 11th, 2003 in politics - No Comments »

The Globe & Mail: Dude, yer gettin’ arrested. Here’s something light before I enter into another barrage of political meandering:

Dude! The actor who gained fame and a cult following as the slacker Steven in commercials for Dell computers was arrested buying a small bag of marijuana, police said.

Posted on February 10th, 2003 in culture - No Comments »

It’s as if I have a “Get Your War On radar”. After conceding to an impulse to check the Get Your War On pages, I find out that there’s a new page of strips out.

Sadly, this is one of the less funny Get Your War On pages, probably because Office White Man is no longer talking with Office Black Man, but instead is conversing with Ethnically Ambiguous Office Woman. (Do these people even have names?) Office White Man and Office Black Man had chemistry, bouncing zingers off each other as if they were playing radioactive hacky sack. I cannot say the same thing about the two characters in this week’s strip, however. Then again, it’s hard to top the comic frustrations of recent world events. Newspaper headlines these days are in a comic strip all their own.

Posted on February 10th, 2003 in politics - No Comments »

Let us suppose for a moment that all the claims laid out in Colin Powell’s brief to the UN Security Council are true. (If you haven’t read the speech, do so now.) This includes Iraqi possession of “weapons of mass destruction” and forbidden arms, as well as links between Iraq and al-Qaida, a claim on which both the FBI and the CIA disagree. Let us also assume that Iraq has already passed on biological agents and delivery vehicles to al-Qaida and related terrorist organisations.

With these assumptions in mind, how many innocent people do you think Iraq and al-Qaida could kill? It is safe to say that any attack from Iraq would mean the swift downfall of that country. Any terrorist attacks using biological weapons would have to be coordinated as security would be heightened after the first such attack. Just over three thousand people died in the September 11th terrorist attacks. How many for our hypothetical biological attack? Twenty-five thousand? One hundred thousand? Those numbers seem high and would probably greatly outnumber all anthrax or sarin-related deaths, wartime or otherwise. (Consult A History Of Bio-chemical Weapons for more information.) Let us say that one hundred thousand innocent people die in direct cause of attacks using Iraqi weaponry before the threat is contained.

Now suppose that the US attacks Iraq with its barrage of 3,000 missiles. How many innocent Iraqis would die? Some estimates run to half a million Iraqi deaths, over 80,000 of which could be civilian. No doubt that Iraq, now threatened, would unleash whatever weapons it might have on nearby countries and cause thousands more innocent deaths. Not to mention the possibility that a war against Iraq would double as a recruitment campaign for terrorism against the developed world, and result in yet thousands more civilian deaths.

Given these two scenarios, one more likely than the other, which one results in a win for the world? Are thousands of innocent people in the Western world somehow more valuable than the same number of innocents in Iraq? Why would the possibility of thousands of deaths be sufficient reason to cause thousands of other deaths?

Posted on February 8th, 2003 in politics - No Comments »