Pretexts Are Easy

25 Apr 2005

You should read this ABC article on “Operation Northwoods” if you have ever thought that any government can be trusted. Basically, it boils down to a plan by the US military to attack the US and blame it on Cuba so that there would be public support for an invasion of Cuba. And Operation Northwoods was not the only “pretext” plan. The most disturbing part is that it took 40 years for the story to come out.

We need a much more transparent government. Until that happens, just remember this story the next time you are told that a war is necessary and wonder it if really is.

Fixed a mis-spelling (thanks, Cliff).

19 Apr 2005 • Software Development

mod_rewrite is cool.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I recently upgraded by blogging software to WordPress. WordPress uses mod_rewrite to support it’s pretty URL system. This works by defining a set rewrite rules base on regular expressions. For example, every time you call http://pezra.barelyenough.org/blog/2005/04/the-importance-of-a-rare-name/ apache internally rewrites the URL as /blog/index.php?year=2005&monthnum=04&name=the-importance-of-a-rare-name. This is not a redirect, the browser thinks it is pointed the pretty URL apache actually uses index.php instead. This behavior is nice, but it lead me to something even better.

I realized today that the perma-links generated by my previous blogging software were now 404s. mod_rewrite to the rescue, I just added a new rule so that the URLs blogger.com generated are now are rewritten to call WordPress instead. That means that if anyone linked to the existing posts, those links are not broken any more. And it only cost one line in a config file. Now, that is sweet.

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The Importance of a Rare Name

19 Apr 2005 • Personal • Software Development

My wife is pregnant with our second child, so I have been thinking about names quite a bit lately. We try really hard to come up with names that are usual. (Popular baby names is a good resource if you are engaged in this pursuit.) Our primary reason for this search is convenience — we would prefer that our child never be know as “blah W”. However, it recently occurred to me that there are additional benefits to having a rare name.

As a recent entrant into blogging I have, on occasion, engaged in a bit of ego surfing. For me, however, it is not particularly ego inflating. This is partly because Peter Williams is a fairly common name (and partly because I am not that smart). It is uncommon enough that I have never meet another one in person, but it is common enough that Google has no idea who I am. Google will probably never know who I am because there are quite a few other very interesting Peter Williams’ out there. When I look at my blog roll I see a lot of uncommon names. It seems that there might be a correlation between being an A-list blogger and having an uncommon name. In an age where most of our information is mediated by search engines, an unusual name seems to be a valuable asset.

I fear that whatever name we chose for our children it will not be rare enough. Williams is just too common. I wonder if this might lead to a cultural shift in which children given all their names, rather than inheriting a family name. If the benefits of an unusual name included demonstrable social and economic benefits I think many parents would be quick to dump the family name. On the other hand, it could be that the emotional attachment people have to their family name is too great for it to be easily discarded. And at this point it is not clear, to me at least, that an unusual name actually has significant economic benefit. I think it is too early to tell if this shift will happen — I think it might take a generation or more such a fundamental change to take place — but if it did it would be an terribly intriguing.

For what is worth, I can say that my wife and I have no intention of giving our children a last names other than Williams.