monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

This snippet from Le Sabot Post-Moderne explained for me why many people in Russia, Ukraine, and other post-soviet states continue to support, even elect, strongman (read near-dictatorial) leaders like Putin and Yanukovych:

There is a large segment of the population who thinks Ukraine took a wrong turn with Independence and the death of Communism. They may not want the hammers & sickles back, but they do want a strong man at the top who will set things straight — a Putin. This goes double for those who have “lost” during the post-Soviet period — pensioners, miners, factory workers, the military and security forces, and many government bureaucrats and workers. These are people who were raised to desire order at all cost, and they see the present period as chaotic and scary. Yanukovych, for all his faults, radiates a brutish strength and promises order, however bleak.

[Emphasis mine]

A random idea I had the other day: create a distributed client system like SETI, where the processing time is being donated to third world or developing countries where processing power is hard to get. I don’t know what the data sets would be, nor how it would all be setup, but it’s an idea.

Le Sabot Post-Moderne - Yanukovych — Left, Right or Nowhere?:

“Politico-economic tribalism captures the clan-based spoils system of Ukraine. When you hear about the oligarchs, you’re probably imagining a few marquee names like Pinchuk or Akhmetov. But the system is more complex than that. For example, Kuchma’s group, the Dnepropetrovsk Clan, contains about 200 businessmen. The purpose of government is to bring home spoils for your tribe, through legislation, subsidies, and sweetheart privatization deals.”

[Emphasis mine]

Hm. Could almost be written about our own government.

Hello out there! Sorry for the lack of updates lately - a deadline at work is fast approaching, and I’ve been putting me energies there, as well as our adoption. But, so as to not leave all you folks in interweb-land in the dark, some highlights:

• It looks like we’re going to make our Dec 22 deadline at work. Yay.
• A co-worker and I are going to a one-day course taught by Edward Tufte in late January. I am very excited about this. As well as getting to sit at the feet of the master, attendees also get his 3 books, the PowerPoint white paper, and a poster. Yum!
• About 2 months ago I started getting rather nasty, debilitating headaches. Not often, but with increasing frequency. Yesterday I finally got checked out by a doctor, who confirmed the migraine-like pathology and gave me some Imitrex samples, and a promise to prescribe the triptan of my choice (the other candidate right now is Zomig).
• I’ve started using my del.icio.us bookmarks as a quick-blog. Check it out or subscribe if you want. Recent topics have included css and ukraine.

As |Jodi| says in her own wonderful way:

Hoop-jumping at its most spectacular.

You can’t use DHTML to change the contents of <table> or <tr> elements in IE6.

MSDN says this: “However, because of the specific structure required by tables, the innerText and innerHTML properties of the table and tr objects are read-only.”

Of course, the Safari and Mozilla/Firefox engineers seem to have been able to make the “structure required by tables” work for them, as my javascript works just fine there.