DanKohn.com

NYT writes on Mongolians Return to Baghdad, This Time as Peacekeepers:

In 1258, the Mongol general Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad, killing 800,000 people and ending its primacy as the largest city in the Arab world.
This month, the Mongolians returned to Iraq. Ferried into the country on American military transports, 180 Mongolian Army soldiers — all male, all volunteers — are guarding pipelines and working on construction projects under a Polish command.

Keep an eye out for those resourceful Mongols.

The NYT reports:

There is a pointed joke making the rounds of Palestinian politicians here. Mr. Arafat is riding in a car with Mr. Abbas, when he spots an obstacle. “Abu Mazen, there’s a tree in the road!” Mr. Arafat cries, using Mr. Abbas’s nickname. But the car continues on its way. Mr. Arafat’s warnings grow more frantic.
Finally, the car hits the tree, and as the two Palestinian leaders stumble from the wreckage, battered and bruised, Mr. Arafat turns to Mr. Abbas and says, “Abu Mazen, I told you there was a tree.”

Mr. Abbas replies, miserably, “But you were driving.”

It has suited the vision of the White House and Israel for the last four months to seek peace as though Mr. Abbas, not Mr. Arafat, was driving.
Unfortunately for the policy, it also suited the interests of Mr. Arafat, according to some Palestinian politicians and analysts. Doing so deflected the blame for Palestinian misery, as well as any failures of the peace effort, to Mr. Abbas.

Unfortunately, democracies (and psuedo ones such as the Palestinian Authority) get the leadership they deserve. Until some alternative Palestinian leader takes power who realizes that the most basic element of a modern state is a monopoly on the use of force (meaning that he has the courage to arrest the gunmen who want to destroy Israel), it is the Palestinian people who will continue to suffer the worst.

Like most people I know, I spend a huge percentage of my day in front of email. Because I’m in a corporate environment where scheduling and shared contacts are important, I use Outlook with Exchange. I have a very light laptop (Toshiba Portege 2000 at 2.1 pounds) with built-in Wi-Fi, and so I’m generally either working on it or suspending it temporarily by closing the lid.

Outlook XP couldn’t automatically move from connected to disconnected mode, so suspending the laptop would regularly hang the program requiring a Ctl-Alt-Del to kill Outlook. Outlook 2003 could move back and forth from connected mode, but required a PPTP VPN connection for connecting over Wi-Fi. (Besides needing a VPN from my home, we place our corporate Wi-Fi outside the firewall to avoid security issues and make it easier for visitors.) This meant that on opening the lid, I needed to wait several seconds for the Wi-Fi to get set up, and then click the VPN icon.

Well, thanks to Skymoon’s sysadmin Jim Murdoch, I now have Outlook 2003 (beta 2 technical refresh) running with Exchange Server 2003 (RC2), which supports RPC over HTTP. That means that Exchange’s proprietary Remote Procedure Calls get encapsulated to look like the regular back-and-forth of viewing and submitting a form to a secure web page. Not only does this obviate the requirement for the VPN, but it also enables me to use Outlook at several corporate offices which allow public Wi-Fi access but who’s firewalls block standard PPTP VPNs.

Of course, this is a horrible bastardization of Internet standards, since HTTP is supposed to only be for web pages and the firewalls were (possibly) intentionally configured to block VPN access. Anyway, I don’t care, as I want my mail to work, and doing it over HTTP should make it much more reliable. Those who believe in the “hard, crunchy outside with a soft, chewy center” firewall security model deserve what they have coming to them. (The quoted phrase comes from RFC 1636.)

The trick, in case you’re having problems with the same beta software, is that first, you need to install an obscure hotfix from Microsoft (thank goodness for Google groups which provided the pointer). Then, you need to know that you can check the status of the connection by right clicking the Outlook icon in the taskbar notification area while holding the control key and choose Connection status. Finally, the trick was to install the right certificate from the Exchange server to enable the SSL encryption to work under with HTTP. FYI, if your exchange server is yourserver.com, you can probably install the certificate from http://yourserver.com/certsrv. This was a standard Microsoft install experience.

Of course, I’m only back to what POP and IMAP have offered for a decade with regular Internet mail, but it’s still a huge improvement. Seconds after I open my laptop from anywhere with Wi-Fi connectivity, my new mail has downloaded (using RPC over HTTP over SSL over TCP/IP over Wi-Fi). It works quite well.

The Economist pulls off an unlikely analogy between the SCO Linux lawsuits and the Scopes Monkey Trials . How can you not love an article summary like: “Darl McBride, capitalist crusader against the commie horde of Linux users.” (Darl, cast in the fundamentalists role, is in fact a devout mormon.) Or a sentence like: “Microsoft and SCO vehemently deny that they are in league, but most open-sourcers assume that the evil Redmond giant is bankrolling a mercenary.”