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Today, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee voted 11 to 1 to give the District its first full voting seat in the House of Representatives. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) cast the lone “no” vote. Dave Weigel at the Washington Independent explains McCain’s opposition — and hypocrisy:

McCain was the only one of them who voted nay, and he gave two reasons. The first was that the proposed compromise that would give D.C. voting rights while giving Utah a fourth seat in Congress was unfair to other fast-growing states. The second was that McCain didn’t want to pass a bill that constitutional scholars are still tussling over “and then have the Supreme Court decide whether or not it’s constitutional.”

This is a problem. What would happen if — a totally random example here — a senator introduced a campaign finance law that, according to many constitutional scholars and the president of the United States, violated the First Amendment? What if the Supreme Court had to decide whether or not the law was constitutional? That would be crazy.

It’s unclear when the bill will go to the Senate for a full vote; a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said they “will try and get it to the floor as quickly as we can.”

David Burnett recommends an eWeek article on the leading contenders to make an iPhone out of an iPod Touch. Of course your newly phone-capable iTouch needs no activation and no binding carrier contract, just Wi-Fi. One of the companies working in this space, JaJah, is bundling the software with back-end services such as billing, so that carriers — or anyone really — can offer free-calling iTouch phones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Urban Garlic writes "The community surrounding Samsonia Way in Pittsburgh were ready when the Google StreetView car arrived, and staged a 21st-century public art project. Also celebrated in this Washington Post article, and Kelso's Corner, which also has a collection of public art in StreetView."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pickens writes "MacArthur fellow Carl Safina, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University, has an interesting essay in the NYTimes that says that equating evolution with Charles Darwin opened the door for creationism by ignoring 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution — Gregor Mendel's patterns of heredity, the discovery of DNA, developmental biology, studies documenting evolution in nature, and evolution's role in medicine and disease. Darwinism implies an ideology adhering to one man's dictates, like Marxism, says Safina. He adds that nobody talks about Newtonism or Einsteinism, and that by making Darwin 'into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching.' By turning Darwin into an 'ism,' scientists created the opening for creationism, with the 'isms' implying equivalence. 'By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one theory,' writes Safina. '"Darwinism" implies that biological scientists "believe in" Darwin's "theory." It's as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, public-workers union AFSCME launched a massive advertising campaign targeting neo-Hooverite conservatives who are trying to block President Obama’s recovery and reinvestment plan. One target is Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), whom the union faults for declaring he was proud that his party was “just saying no” to Obama. A Cantor spokesman responded by sending around a profanity-laced video portraying AFSCME as mob goons. The video uses the F-word six times in one minute and ends with the tagline: “AFSCME: We’re the f*cking union that works for you.” Watch it:

Cantor claimed the video was a “joke,” though AFSCME didn’t think it was very funny.

Yet it’s not just unions who could be offended by the video; Cantor himself has railed against obscenity, voting for the Broadcast Deceny Enforcement Act that allowed fines of up to $500,000 on broadcasters for airing any “obscene, indecent, or profane” material. Speaking on the House floor in support of the bill, Cantor condemned “offensive television” that will “damage our society” and “cannot be tolerated“:

CANTOR: The use of obscenity…should not and cannot be tolerated. As a parent, I share the concerns of many regarding the level of offensive television and radio programs that are transmitted into our homes. The recent violations that have occurred disgusted not only me, but damage our society.

He added that “we will not be satisfied until those responsible” for disseminating obscenity “have been reprimanded.” The heads of Americans United for Change, the AFL-CIO, and AFSCME have already reprimanded Cantor. You can tell Cantor what you think about his obscenity-laced video by leaving a message for him on his Facebook wall or on Twitter.

Of the GOP members opposing the recovery package, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) seem among the most willing to ignore the economic toll being inflicted on their constituents. In pressuring his caucus to unanimously oppose the plan, Boehner claimed the package would not create jobs. Voinovich feigned interest in compromising on the legislation, only to drop out of negotiations halfway through. Yesterday, he voted against the package. Meanwhile, economic conditions in Ohio continue to deteriorate:

As local news reports explain, automakers and other businesses are downsizing and relocating to save costs, while cities across the state are cutting their budgets and laying off employees. Ohio’s other Senator, Sherrod Brown (D), who voted in favor of the bill, explained how the plan will help Ohio residents: “It’s going to help with Medicaid, it’s going to help…with extension of unemployment benefits, and it will help with weatherization to put more people to work. And it will create jobs.”

In recent days, conservatives have been trying to block the economic recovery package by arguing that government spending will wreck the American economy. As an example, they point to FDR and the Great Depression. Earlier this month, for instance, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) inaccurately argued that the New Deal “exacerbated the Great Depression.” In a new interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Rep. Steve Austria (R-OH) joined in:

“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” Austria said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”

The Columbus Dispatch then notes, “Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.” As Dean Baker has explained, “Roosevelt’s New Deal Agenda lowered the unemployment rate from 25 percent in 1933 to 10 percent in 1937.” The economy turned bad again when the “Blue Dogs of the Roosevelt era won sway and got Roosevelt to cut spending and raise taxes.”

A lot of people run drupal with lighttpd, a light and fast webserver, which uses FastCGI to support PHP. As lighttpd doesn't read .htaccess files, some extra config is required to get drupal's clean urls working right.

I'm doing so already for a while now, finally I found the best way to do clean urls with lighttpd. I started with some url-rewriting regexes, which isn't ideal as there are problems with some special paths or dots. I've improved the regexes a bit, but still there were problems.

Another common way is to use a lua-script. The big advantage of this script is that one can do the url rewriting based on the condition whether there is a file for the requested path - so no regex magic is required. Thus there also no problems with dots.
The disadvantage of that approach is it's inflexibility. When you want to install multiple drupal instances in several different sub directories or use a script to generate settings for all your drupal instances, it's odd that the lua variant needs one script per drupal prefix, because you have to set the prefix in the lua script!

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CongressDaily reports the key elements of the tentative compromise:

House and Senate leaders have struck a tentative deal on a stimulus package with a top-line figure of $789.5 billion, Democratic aides said this morning. The overall mix of funding and tax provisions remains to be hashed out. One disappointment for President Obama is likely to be a scaled-back “Making Work Pay” tax credit of $400 for individuals and $800 for married couples, which falls short of his goal of $500 and $1,000. But those figures would still meet Obama’s goal of providing a tax credit to 95 percent of working families. Conferees are scheduled to meet at 3 p.m. today, although that will largely be a formality. Democratic aides said House Speaker Pelosi intends to bring the bill to the floor Thursday, followed by Senate passage Friday.

Unless you are doing it wrong.

And sadly I`m seeing more and more people doing it wrong.
To a lot of people Open Source means that they have a piece of software that does almost what they want and which they can modify to their best wishes and use internally.

So they fork locally,, they don't redistribute their code , but they aren't contributing their changes back upstream, chances are these changes wouldn't be accepted upstream anyhow as they are really customizing the code for their specific cases. At first sight this doesn't look so bad , at second sight ..

When weeks or months later the upstream project releases an urgent security fix, the local fork has deviated soo much that it can't upgrade anymore and stays with an insecure version.
Often it's worse.. a feature that could have been accepted upstream has been implemented slightly different in the local fork, the result being that newer features depending on the first one also can't be integrated anymore

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Last week's first round of the code sprint focused on improving multilingual support in Drupal core ended on a high point: a major improvement to the UI for administering string translations was committed, thanks to great work by Roger López, Jakub Suchy, and Stella Power and some careful review by Angie Byron. Several others pitched into additional issues.

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The Huffington Post reports that bailed-out financial firms Morgan Stanley and Citigroup’s Smith Barney — which will soon merge — plan to reward their financial advisers with “very generous” cash bonuses. During an internal conference call last week, advisers were warned not to call the awards bonuses because it would cause a PR headache:

“There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus,” said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. “It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration.”

Gorman said that the payments would be “based on performance numbers from 2008 instead of 2009,” which “virtually guarantees an increase in the size of the awards.” On the call, Gorman said that the advisers should be “clapping” at the “very generous and thoughtful” announcement. Listen to the audio here.

After a few Drupal 6 projects where I had to create themes from scratch, including my recently released Woodpig theme for Ventanazul I've learned a lot and decided to gather some tips I'm sure will help you, my fellow Drupalist, when turning your next design into a functional Drupal managed site. Sounds good? Let's dive into the powerful Drupal 6 theme API.
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Get the documentation right

There are a lot of changes in the Drupal 6 theming API and even being quite familiar with Drupal 5 theming I had to invest a considerable amount of time to get all the new ideas; hence, the theme guide for Drupal 6 should be your first stop.

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Slashdot.org was unreachable for about 75 minutes this evening. Here is the post-mortem from Sourceforge's chief network engineer. "What we had was indeed a DoS, however it was not externally originating. At 8:55 PM EST I received a call saying things were horked, at the same time I had also noticed things were not happy. After fighting with our external management servers to login I finally was able to get in and start looking at traffic. What I saw was a massive amount of traffic going across the core switches; by massive I mean 40 Gbit/sec. After further investigation, I was able to eliminate anything outside our network as the cause, as the incoming ports from Savvis showed very little traffic. So I started poking around on the internal switch ports. While I was doing that I kept having timeouts and problems with the core switches. After looking at the logs on each of the core switches they were complaining about being out of CPU, the error message was actually something to do with multicast. As a precautionary measure I rebooted each core just to make sure it wasn't anything silly. After the cores came back online they instantly went back to 100% fabric CPU usage and started shedding connections again. So slowly I started going through all the switch ports on the cores, trying to isolate where the traffic was originating. The problem was all the cabinet switches were showing 10 Gbit/sec of traffic, making it very hard to isolate. Through the process of elimination I was finally able to isolate the problem down to a pair of switches... After shutting the downlink ports to those switches off, the network recovered and everything came back. I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something — I just don't know what yet. Luckily we don't have any machines deployed on [that row in that cabinet] yet so no machines are offline. The network came back up around 10:10 PM EST."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tonight is this month's Boulder Meetup for the Denver/Boulder Drupal User Group (DBUG). Share your Drupal achievements, discoveries, questions and even frustrations with your local open source community/colleagues.

Pizza and socializing start at 6:30 p.m. Discussion and presentations start at 7. We have some module insights to share, but the agenda is open. We'll figure out what to cover/discuss depending upon the interests of attendees.

Hope to see you here!

House and Senate conferees met for more than nine hours of closed-door negotiations yesterday to reconcile their differing versions of the economic stimulus bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he hoped an agreement could be reached by today, but declined to detail the progress made.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush is reporting that the Senate may yield on including a $15,000 home-buyer’s credit in the stimulus:

The key here, House Dems say, was Obama’s Monday press conference in which he signaled his strong intention to back Pelosi on a handful of key spending initiatives, especially $21 billion in school construction and technology grants, $10.3 billion in COBRA insurance and $8.6 billion in new Medicaid coverage for the unemployed…House Democratic staffers see several areas of potential accommodation with the Senate, including alterations to the mixture of tax cuts and spending that could result in scaling back a $15,000 homebuyer tax credit, a favorite of the Senate GOP.

First Read reported that $15 billion in school construction could be added to the bill, in lieu of the credit. This would be a fantastic swap, and Congress should make sure it happens.

As the Wonk Room has explained, the home-buyer’s credit is poorly targeted, more useful to wealthier households, and won’t actually help the housing market. Kash Mansori at Econbrowser wrote that “all the house purchase tax credit will do is to modestly increase the number of houses sold each month… with no noticeable impact on house prices.” A panacea for our economic woes, it is decidedly not.

School construction, meanwhile, can provide significant stimulus, quickly. As the Center for American Progress’s Michael Ettlinger explained:

[T]he American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that spending $127 billion to $268 billion is needed to bring school facilities to a good condition. The projects these funds would pay for are among the infrastructure investments that can be brought up to speed very quickly. The construction sector, which would benefit most from this funding, has enormous idle capacity and more idle workers than any other industry.

The Senate’s “compromise” bill, as it stands now, would create about half a million fewer jobs than the House bill, despite costing $20 billion more. The rumored amendments would begin to address that disparity.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room, which is following the latest developments on the economic recovery package.

In an e-mail to supporters yesterday, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) wrote, “The dust is settling on the ‘bipartisan’ stimulus bill and one thing is clear: It is anti-religious.” To support his claim, Huckabee “pointed to a provision in both the House and Senate versions banning higher education funds in the bill from being used on a ‘school or department of divinity.’” But as Steve Benen explains, “Huckabee is bearing false witness“:

[T]his myth has been making the rounds in right-wing circles for about a week. Originally, the American Center for Law and Justice, a right-wing legal group formed by TV preacher Pat Robertson, said the stimulus bill includes a provision that would prohibit “religious groups and organizations from using” buildings on college campuses. […]

[T]he standard language in the bill simply blocks spending for on-campus buildings that are used primarily for religion (like a chapel, for example). This same language has been part of education spending bills for 46 years. It’s just the law, and it’s never been controversial.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he was ordering a review of the ban on media photographs of flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers returning to Dover Air Force base. “[T]he more honor we can accord these fallen heroes, the better,” Gates said yesterday. “I think that looking at it again makes all kinds of sense,” he said, adding that he was “pretty open to whatever the results of this review may be.”

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said yesterday that he is “definitely running for reelection in 2010 and has begun using criticism of the $838 billion federal economic stimulus plan as a platform to raise money.” “The economic challenges currently confronting our nation are immense and unfortunately, the Democrats in Congress propose addressing these challenges through increased spending,” McCain wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is facing criticism after disclosing sensitive information on Twitter about his delegation’s recent trip to Iraq. The Pentagon is now “reviewing its communications with lawmakers traveling to war zones following a senior member’s disclosures about a delegation trip to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

U.S Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Scooter Libby and brought charges against Rod Blagojevich, “will be staying in his job in the Obama administration, even though he was appointed to the position by President George W. Bush.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) recommended that Attorney General Eric Holder keep Fitzgerald.

Gov. Jon Huntsman (R-UT) backs a proposal that would give same-sex couples the right to civil unions in the state. “Huntsman is the most popular governor in state history and is increasingly speaking out on moderate issues such as global warming that make many conservatives in the state cringe. For Huntsman, there is little political risk because he has pledged not to seek a third term.”

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While in France for the Drupal.org redesign code sprint in Paris, it was pointed out by a number of people that Slate.fr, the French version of the popular culture magazine Slate, is using Drupal. Slate is owned by the The Washington Post Company.