The last few days...

I haven't had a lot to say here the last few days. Mainly, I've been tired, between a busy week at work and a busy week of watching politics on TV.

Yes, yes, I'm quite happy with our new Democratic overlords. And I'm impressed with Senator Chafee for telling George Bush where to stuff his nomination of Ambassador Bolton. Lets hope that someone will stand up against adopting that hideous domestic surveillance bill that Bush also wants adopted before the end of the term, too. (So much for bipartisanism. Not that we expected Bush to actually be bipartisan....)

I was thinking about writing up comments on the candidates for the Arbitration Committee, but I don't really see the point. I've lost most of my respect for the Arbitration Committee, and don't really care who gets elected to it. Even if I ever do start editing again, I don't think that I'll have much need to interact with them. The current candidates, last I looked, ranged from lackluster to atrocious, with nobody in the entire lot that really inspired me to positive comment. I've since removed the RSS history feed for the page from my blogroll, and am officially paying no further attention to the topic. My single comment to voters: do not elect good writers to the ArbCom. Unless they use speed, or have no lives at all, they will not have time to be both good writers and good arbitrators. In most cases, someone who is a good writer is better off serving Wikipedia as a writer than as an arbitrator. And given the increasing lack of relevance of the Arbitration Committee, it seems like a double waste to put a quality writer on it.

The MediaWiki port moves slowly. Semirelatedly, I am looking at JavaCC, both as a possible tool for developing a markup parser and as a tool to assist in writing a generalized PHP to Java converter. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the JavaCC Eclipse plugin to work right yet. This is not critical, but it qualifies as annoying, and I don't like annoying.

Product endorsement: Sensaphone makes very nice infrastructure monitoring systems. We deployed one of these at work, and it is a very nice, easy to use system, and the monitoring devices are also very reasonably priced, as well.

Oh, and kudos to Liebert. I mentioned them a few days ago in my blog (without even linking them!), in my rant about Wikipedia's lack of an article about drycoolers. Apparently their marketing department pays attention to the blogosphere, noticed my post (in this truly insignificant blog), and forwarded it on to an engineer, who sent me some materials that included information about drycoolers. As this appears to be sales literature, I will gladly forward it on to anyone who wants to use it to improve Wikipedia's content about drycoolers, or about precision cooling generally (or even Wikipedia's nonexistent article about the Liebert Corporation). Anyway, good customer relations, there.