Good Agile, Bad Agile [Stevey’s Blog Rants]

Although this arti­cle is meant as a dis­cus­sion of a cor­po­rate buzz­word called “agile pro­gram­ming,” the really inter­est­ing part is the descrip­tion of what it’s like to work at Google. It’s hard to imag­ine work­ing for such a place–all the com­pa­nies I’ve worked for use what the calls the “whip-cycle of development.”

Here’s a photo taken ear­lier this month at Run­yon Canyon.

Radley Balko has some infor­ma­tion about the infor­mant whose infor­ma­tion led to the raid in which Cory Maye killed one of his attack­ers while defend­ing his fam­ily, only to end up on death row because it was the cops who attacked him.

The good news about this case is that enough light has been shed on the case to get him off death row. That’s a start!

Bovard on the Sen­ate tor­ture deal. JIM BOVARD ON THE RIGHT-TO-TORTURE DEAL and America’s new sta­tus as a banana repub­lic (or Medieval fiefdom).

This is lat­est sign that our elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Wash­ing­ton believe that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment deserves absolute power over every­one in the world. For­mer Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell warned recently that Bush’s efforts to gut the Geneva Con­ven­tions would cause the world to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

But more impor­tant, the Senate-White House tor­ture deal should cause Amer­i­cans to doubt the moral basis of their entire government.

Every time I think the U.S. gov­ern­ment has reached a new moral low, the Bushe­viks sur­prise me and sink even lower. Oh, the irony of the fact that Bush got elected because of his supe­rior “moral val­ues.” Supe­rior to whose, I won­der? Vlad Tepes’s? [Wolfes­blog]

I’ve noticed that for a while now Bushe­viks have been defend­ing the Feds’ lat­est attroc­i­ties by say­ing that he’s not as bad as Sad­dam, or not as bad as Stalin. Although the Sad­dam com­par­i­son has fallen by the way­side, pre­sum­ably because it’s become so obvi­ous that he’s actu­ally worse than Saddam.

Bush: More taxes than ever. Hold the presses: The Bush admin­is­tra­tion is col­lect­ing more taxes than ever before. Cor­po­rate taxes, that is. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion says so.

Isn’t this the admin­is­tra­tion that likes to talk about cut­ting taxes? Not today. Today, the White House and Trea­sury Depart­ment alike are tout­ing a record haul of taxes from the cor­po­rate sec­tor – $71.8 bil­lion in the quar­terly col­lec­tion of cor­po­rate taxes that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment made Fri­day. [Chicago Tri­bune]

Appro­pri­ately, today is Inter­na­tional Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Here’s an inter­est­ing news item from Lumi­nous Land­scape:

Hart­blei is a Ukrain­ian com­pany that makes some weird and won­der­ful lenses. Their lat­est offer­ings are three tilt / shift lenses called Super­Ro­ta­tors, a 40mm Carl Zeiss Dis­ta­gon f/4 T*, 80mm Carl Zeiss Pla­nar T* f/2.8 and a 120 mm Carl Zeiss Makro-Planar T* f/4. Yes, you read that right – Zeiss! Hart­blei is now using Carl Zeiss glass and for­mu­la­tions for these lenses along with their own mechan­i­cal assemblies.

These three lenses will be avail­able in mounts for Canon and Nikon cam­eras, and because they are based on medium for­mat designs, are able to cover full frame 35mm film and dig­i­tal. (My review of the medium for­mat Hart­blei 45mm f/3.5 Super-Rotator from a few years ago may be of inter­est with regard to these lens’ unique construction).

This is par­tic­u­larly good news for Nikon own­ers (such as myself), as Nikon’s offer­ings are sub­stan­tially less capa­ble (and very hard to find). If the 40mm lens for the Nikon mount comes out for a price that’s not com­pletely unrea­son­able, I’ll prob­a­bly buy one.

Leica M8 Hands-on Pre­view, Sep­tem­ber 2006. This new rangefinder dig­i­tal cam­era has the clas­sic design, build and func­tion of the M series but uti­lizes a com­pletely dig­i­tal imag­ing sys­tem. The M8 has a spe­cially designed ten megapixel CCD sen­sor which being slightly smaller than a film neg­a­tive intro­duces a 1.33x field of view crop. This ratio con­ve­niently con­verts sev­eral stan­dard M lenses to sort-of equiv­a­lent steps (so 21 mm to approx. 28 mm, 28 mm to approx. 35 mm).

The M8 is not an adapted M7, it is a totally new cam­era with a new body (albeit one that bears all the usual M trade­marks), a new viewfinder and a new sen­sor. Nor is it nec­es­sar­ily the end of the line for M film cam­eras; Leica is leav­ing that door open, for the moment at least. [Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Review]

From the pre­view it seems that Leica has done a very good job of design­ing a dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent to their film cam­eras. It’s very expen­sive, which is to be expected for a Leica prod­uct. I won­der how the non-full frame sen­sor will affect sales, since it’s in the same price range as Canon’s full-frame DSLRs. The crop­ping fac­tor might also be a prob­lem for peope who already have Leica lenses. Leica lenses are very expen­sive com­pared to SLR lenses–if your nor­mal lens has sud­denly become a short tele­photo, buy­ing a 35mm lens to be your new nor­mal lens will set you back over $2,000!

From what I’ve read on the Inter­net, though, it appears that dig­i­tal cam­era pur­chases are often dri­ven by tech­no­log­i­cal fetishism more than any prac­ti­cal con­cern, so per­haps this won’t mat­ter. And in any case, Leica is very pop­u­lar with rich col­lec­tors who don’t actu­ally use their cameras–that’s part of the rea­son why they’re so expensive.

The 9/11 Con­spir­acy Nuts. You trip over one fun­da­men­tal idiocy of the 9/11 con­spir­acy nuts — – the ones who say Bush and Cheney mas­ter­minded the attacks on the World Trade Cen­ter and the Pen­ta­gon — in the first para­graph of the open­ing page of the book by one of their high priests, David Ray Grif­fin, The New Pearl Har­bor. “In many respects,” Grif­fin writes, “the strongest evi­dence pro­vided by crit­ics of the offi­cial account involves the events of 9/11 itself… In light of stan­dard pro­ce­dures for deal­ing with hijacked air­planes… not one of these planes should have reached its tar­get, let alone all three of them.”

The oper­a­tive word here is “should”. One char­ac­ter­is­tic of the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit pre­pos­ter­ous belief in Amer­i­can effi­ciency, thus many of them start with the racist premise that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capa­ble of the mis­sion. They believe that mil­i­tary sys­tems work the way Pen­ta­gon press flacks and aero­space sales­men say they should work.

[…]

It’s the same pat­tern with the 9/11 nuts, who prof­fer what they demurely call “dis­turb­ing ques­tions”, though they dis­dain all answers but their own. They seize on coin­ci­dences and force them into sequences they deem to be log­i­cal and sig­nif­i­cant. Like mad Inquisi­tors, they pounce on imag­ined clues in doc­u­ments and pho­tos, tor­tur­ing the data –- as the old joke goes about econ­o­mists — till the data con­fess. Their treat­ment of eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony and foren­sic evi­dence is whim­si­cal. Appar­ent anom­alies that seem to nour­ish their the­o­ries are bran­dished excit­edly; tes­ti­mony that under­mines their the­o­ries – like wit­nesses of a large plane hit­ting the Pen­ta­gon — is con­temp­tu­ously brushed aside.

[…]

Nat­u­rally, there are con­spir­a­cies. I think there is strong evi­dence that FDR did have knowl­edge that a Japan­ese naval force in the north Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Har­bor. Roo­sevelt thought it would be a rel­a­tively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to get the US into the war. [Coun­ter­Punch]

The irony is that FDR’s record of deceit, manip­u­la­tion, and dan­gling the lives of Amer­i­can sailors as bait for Ger­man and Japan­ese war­ships has grad­u­ally come out thanks to the efforts of peo­ple who have over the decades slowly dug it out. Today, even Roo­sevelt apol­o­gists admit that he was respon­si­ble for drag­ging the US into World War Two (although of course they think that’s a good thing). But if the 9/11 nutjobs had been around back then, any seri­ous attempt to find out what hap­pened would have been derailed by fren­zied claims that the Japan­ese never bombed Pearl Har­bor at all; that it had really been the US Navy car­ri­ers that were then at sea that had made the attack.

Menezes police offi­cer pro­moted. One of the senior offi­cers in charge on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police is to be promoted.

Com­man­der Cres­sida Dick is to become a deputy assis­tant com­mis­sioner, the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Author­ity (MPA) announced on Tues­day. [BBC News]

So the penalty for mur­der­ing an inno­cent man by mis­take and then lying to cover up it up is a pro­mo­tion. Appar­ently the British cops are fol­low­ing the exam­ple of Amer­i­can cops in more ways than just their eager­ness to kill the peo­ple they’re sup­posed to be protecting.

There is one big dif­fer­ence from how this would have been addressed in the US: the BBC story iden­ti­fies Com­man­der Dick by name and includes a photo of her. Appar­ently the British cops aren’t wor­ried that some con­cerned cit­i­zen might get some jus­tice for poor Mr. Menezes.

Please tell me this…. I’m ask­ing because I sin­cerely want to know. Myself and other writ­ers on this site have pointed out that the Con­sti­tu­tion does not any­where men­tion immi­grants or immi­gra­tion. By the stan­dards of the 10^th Amend­ment, this means that immi­gra­tion and… [LewRockwell.com Blog]

Actu­ally the con­sti­tu­tion does give Con­gress the power “To estab­lish an uni­form Rule of Nat­u­ral­iza­tion,” but the author is cor­rect that the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment has no (legal) power to con­trol immi­gra­tion beyond that. Under the Con­sti­tu­tion, the States have the power to decide their own immi­gra­tion poli­cies (or bet­ter yet, lack thereof). Of course, legal­ity and the Con­sti­tu­tion are totally mean­ing­less in the Evil Empire.