Surprise — the NYTimes has endorsed Obama. It’s a three-page summary of the case for the Senator from Illinois, but this is my favorite graf about McCain:

Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.

It’s amazing to think how far Obama has come since this time last year, when the pundits all basically predicted that he would be merely a talented politician sharpening his claws for a later fight. I’ll be waiting with scarcely contained excitement for November 4th.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this election ends up signaling the practical end of public financing for presidential elections:

“This is uncharted territory,” said Kenneth M. Goldstein, the director of the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin. “We’ve certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But we’ve never seen in a presidential race one side having such a lopsided advantage.”

I’m sure they’ll still have it, but after this, who would take it? Then again what GOP candidate can you think of other than John McCain who ever would’ve taken it in the first place?

Hearing Schneier say this is oddly comforting to me:

While I like the science of quantum cryptography — my undergraduate degree was in physics — I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system.

I guess I’d basically been thinking that quantum crypto would kick off a privacy battle that would make the controversy over Diffie-Hellman look tame.

But I have to ask — does it make me into a conspiracy theorist to think the stuff about quantum computing is just optimism?

Pretty serious stuff, but years away from being practical. I think the best quantum computer today can factor the number 15.

I have a hard time believing that the boys at the NSA don’t have something like this that they just haven’t told anyone about. But maybe that’s just me buying into the mystique of the USA’s premiere spook agency.

If you manage a decently high-traffic site, you will have run into the problem of needing to force your users’ browsers to reload your CSS files when you’ve made updates to them. I solve this by appending a query string to the end of the stylesheet’s href, so that this

Becomes this:

This forces the browser to reload the stylesheet because it sees that href and thinks that it’s an asset it doesn’t have cached. When it asks the server for it, the server has nothing it can do with the query, so the query is ignored and the stylesheet is served again.

I got tired of throwing random stuff on the end of the URLs though, so yesterday I wrote a Ruby script to do this for me, throwing a date/time stamp on the end of the href. The real one is customized for my particular site’s setup, but I’ve put the basics below so you can see how I handled it. I’m assuming that you’ve got an ID declared on the link element you want to mess with. Mine is called default-stylesheet.

Checkout the Gist of the script

I have a script like this on my webserver and I run it whenever I do major updates. The real one is augmented to allow you to pass arguments to act on staging or production. There are a million ways to set it up, but the basics above will be present in almost any approach.

Nasty

"What's going on on public lands is a crisis at every level," said Forest Service agent Ron Pugh. "These are America's most precious resources, and they are being devastated by an unprecedented commercial enterprise conducted by armed foreign nationals. It is a huge mess."