Just after Christmas, my wife was looking through the more than 300 photos on our digital camera that we had taken between Halloween and Christmas. Our four year old daughter had snapped about 30 photographs the day before and the camera memory was getting full. The battery was getting low too and the camera wasn’t responding well to the controls. My wife mentioned that she still hadn’t downloaded many of the pictures from the camera to her computer and that she better do it just in case something were to go wrong and we were to lose them.

She was struggling with the uncooperative controls, when all of a sudden she cried out “Oh NO! I think I just accidentally deleted all the photos!”

“What?” I responded. “How did you do that?!”

She didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but she was right. There wasn’t a single picture on the camera. All the pictures of Christmas Day, the pictures of the snowman I built with the kids before Christmas, the pictures of our family Christmas party, even the pictures from Thanksgiving—ALL GONE! She was devastated.

I panicked for a only a brief moment, but then the computer geek part of my brain clicked on.

“I think I can recover them,” I told her.

Many people more qualified than I have commented on why the war in Iraq has been such a hard slog. I know honest people who believe that the war was at best a terrible mistake and at worst an evil conspiracy. However, I do not believe that the war was a mistake. I still think it was the right course of action. I was in favor of the war before it began and I had no illusions at that time that it would be easy, short, or wildly successful.

Aside from the debate over the motivation and justification for the war, there has been plenty of criticism about how the war has been conducted. Certainly there have been plenty of mistakes and bad decisions. However, realistically there is no such thing as a strategy or plan that can guarantee victory from the outset. Enemies are not automatons whose reactions can be perfectly calculated, anticipated, and prepared for. They are intelligent, creative people who are unexpectedly inventive and cleaver.

Winning a war is in some ways like writing a computer program. No matter how well you think you know the parameters from the outset, it is an ongoing iterative process of constant adjustment, learning, refactoring, rethinking—and it usually takes longer than you expect.

I apologize for two tech related posts in a row, but this was just too good to not share.

I was reading an interesting article on a usability design method they call “Paper Prototyping” and the first comment on the article was pure geek gold. In order to truly appreciate it let me give you the context first.

Paper Prototyping is a inexpensive, low-tech method of brainstorming, or of testing the usability of proposed designs for a software interface. Basically, you print out the various aspects of the proposed user interface on paper or cards. You cut out individual elements of the interface design with a pair of scissors if necessary. Then you sit down with the end user and you take the place of the computer.

This article is about a technical aspect of computer programming and since I know that many of my readers are not computer programmers, and of those that are, many do not program in PHP, you may safely ignore it unless it interests you.

As I’ve been working on a light-weight data access layer for PHP5.1+ that I hope to release as open source in the near future, I have discovered an annoying design flaw in PHP.

Support for a more object-oriented approach to programming has been greatly improved since the introduction of PHP5. PHP also offers some magic methods that can be used to simulate properties and methods without having to actually declare them individually. These are great for implementing on the fly methods and properties.

But these magic “overloading” methods don’t function exactly as expected when it comes to inherited child classes.

You probably heard about the the six Sunni Arabs who were dragged from Friday prayers and burned to death last week. It was all over the news as some of the mainstream news sources decided to start calling the conflict in Iraq a “Civil War.” But now, it is looking less and less like an actual event, and more like a fabrication.

This week, bloggers are exposing another huge scandal of the mainstream press. It turns out that The Associated Press has been reporting news from Iraq based on individuals pretending to be Iraqi police officers.

Some of the most exciting developments in technology are those that break down barriers to entry into areas that have been previously monopolized by a select few.

If you are like me, at one time or another you have considered trying your hand at Screenwriting. Sometimes this desire is inspired by viewing a particularly awe inspiring film. Other times it is provoked by seeing an unbelievably horrible one.

But, like many fields, the barriers to entry into the field of Screenwriting for the uninitiated have felt prohibitive.

When version 1.5 of the wonderful Firefox web browser was released last November, I linked to some of the extensions that I have found most useful.

When the Firefox 1.5.0.1 upgrade was released in February, I found that the spell check extension, Spellbound, was no longer compatible!

If you develop for the web, there is a new extension for Firefox that you simply must get:

Firebug combines the functionality of the DOM inspector with the Error console and command-line JavaScript interpretor and then packs it with some great additional features.

Considering all of the recent talk about the Patriot Act, I thought I resurrect a slightly modified version of an article I wrote some time ago, which I think helps explain my own position on the Patriot Act.

Take out a $20 bill and take a good look at the picture of President Andrew Jackson on the obverse side. Let’s review a little of the history of this controversial president, and then I’ll tell you what it can teach us about how to remedy our bloated and burdensome government.

Today Google announced an exciting new tool for Firefox users called Blogger Web Comments . This fantastic little extension for the firefox browser automatically searches Google’s blog search service for posts that link to whatever page you are currently viewing. Then it displays a notification window in the bottom right hand corner of the browser window that shows the most recent blog posts that link to the page. If you click on any of the listed posts, it opens them in a new browser tab.

Mozilla has released version 1.5 of the award winning Firefox Browser. I have been using the beta and release candidate versions of Firefox 1.5 for a couple of months now and it has been great!