Short Takes

Fellow Daynoter Dave Markowitz has a nice
essay on the Assault Weapons Ban or go to this site here if you want
more information.

Personally, I don’t think taking away the freedom to own
whichever firearm I want has made the world one bit safer so I
don’t care if this sunsets. In fact, I wouldn’t loose any sleep
if the Patriot Act also left the building.

I’ve also finally gotten around to remembering that Dr.
Keyboard has put up a passel of posts for
your dining enjoyment.

Taxing Times

For those two people out there who are interested in
government accounting comes
this article from the National Review that tries to explain
why out national debt is actually tens of trillions of dollars
more than the Administration is willing to say it is.

It’s called cash accounting and massively distorts the true
economic consequences of increasing spending while reducing
revenues. Whichever accounting system is used, the debts will
still come due. In fact, some of the debts are already here and
is mounting.

But I guess it’s not something that is important to most
people (until your taxes go up).

MT to WP to MT

First up, version 3.11 of MovableType (hereinafter MT) is
out. It fixes a bunch of installation bugs and other things
found in version 3.1. Unfortunately, as of yesterday, the
instructions don’t say how to install the upgrade over a 3.1
installation.

Having now used both WordPress (hereinafter WP) and MT, I
think I can do a short comparison. WP’s install is much more
robust and easier to do. This is not surprising given rival MT
has a business designed to do the installations. Hence, MT has
an economic incentive to make the install as difficult as
possible so you will pay them to do it for you. WP has no such
incentive so their install runs smoothly.

Once installed, WP appears to be less polished then MT. WP
apparently assumes you will do all your writing in their
GUI. Hence,
as a feature, their interface automatically inserts line
breaks. Unfortunately, if you use another editor to prepare
your posts, and then copy the results into WP, it will insert
line breaks where it chooses. Even if that is in the middle of
a tag. Inserting a <br> tag within another tag disables
the tag. This is not a Good Thing. MT has an option to disable
this function but, as far as I can see, WP does not.

In addition, plugins written for WP are still in the early
stages of development (as is WP itself). So, you should not be
surprised if changes in WP break certain plugins or if the
plugins themselves don’t work. For example, a port of
MT-Blacklist (an anti-comment spam plugin) for WP doesn’t work.
Another plugin, one to automatically close comments after a
certain number of days, actually closes the database to all
changes (making it impossible to login or out of WP nor to add
any new comments at all).

I assume these kinds of problems will be corrected and that
WP will become more polished and usable. Until then, I’ll
continue to use MT.

Aloha!