Archive for March, 2008

A few weeks after my previous Clinton/Obama post, here’s an Op-Ed post from the New York Times in many ways reiterating what Hart (and many others) are saying:  The Long Defeat - New York Times

Maybe—just maybe—Hillary can win. This article suggests her advisers are giving her a 5% chance. But if not, what is she doing for the party?

Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans.

I kept up with election news daily for a while, but this has been a long campaign. By this point I’ve done my research and made up my mind. The occasional shock piece has emerged, but mostly it has been pundits speculating and repetition repetition repetition.
McCain has had the luxury of changing his stride and focus on his general election messages while the Democrats continue to wallow in turmoil.

What a crazy year this has been for American politics.

The Huffington Post is sporting a nice little blog entry by Gary Hart—check it out here: Breaking the Final Rule.

It’s interesting reading the perspective of someone in the system characterize Hillary as being too power hungry for our good. It makes a lot of sense: this is a mighty close race, and in the event that Obama gets the nomination, where does that leave the Dems? McCain and his crew will tear apart whoever is nominated—that you can be sure of. And the Democratic nominee will go after McCain. That’s how it works.

But to have these types of attacks within a party—especially when Obama is narrowly leading the delegate count—is dirty boxing. It’s worse than that. As Hart says, it’s an all-or-nothing tactic, and if Hillary doesn’t win the nomination guess who gets the “nothing”.

Hillary aired an ad that questioned Obama’s ability to govern, invoking fear that When Bad Things Happen It Better Be Her Answering The Phone. Obama’s response to the ad is elegant and well said (as usual). His argument is rooted in the fact that he spoke against the Iraq invasion—something that’s turned out to be the type of call Hillary is proposing will happen at 3am.

You can see the ad and Obama’s response below.

Hillary’s “Red Phone” Ad

Obama’s Response

Well looky there: ReadWriteWeb just posted an article about Microsoft’s release of IE8: Internet Explorer 8 Has Arrived. It will apparently sport some fancy new features, but most importantly it will (as a default) be standards compliant. After years of CSS hacks and fixes (and then using IE’s control statements to offer alternative stylesheets instead of hacks), this is good news.

I haven’t been a regular windows user in 5 years or so, but from a developer perspective this is very interesting. We went from cursing Netscape back in the day to loathing Internet Explorer and loving Firefox. IE made a nice leap with 7, offering tabs and other contemporary features it sorely lacked. It also seemed to play nice(r) with CSS compared to previous iterations.

But how many people will upgrade? Will there be a healthy roll-out via Windows Updates? The last thing I want to do is add yet another browser to my Must Test list. I guess looking at the logs and analytics will be the truest test.

Of course, there’s no version for the Mac. That doesn’t bother me so much—I think I’ll stick with Firefox for the time being.

What are other people doing to insure browser compliance these days?