Last week, the news media was all abuzz with news that President Bush apologized for the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American troops.

Did I miss something? I must have blinked and missed it. When I heard Bush's actual words on the news that night, I did NOT hear the part where he publicly apologized for anything.

Reporter: “President Bush, what did you say to King Abdullah?”

Bush: “I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families. I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.”

Now, I am a computer science major and not an English major, but Bush's apology isn't really a blanket, unqualified apology, is it? It's a heavily-qualified indirect apology, and a pretty weak one at that.

Now, he did say the word “sorry” twice, and that's what the news media is concentrating on. It was a brilliant move by Bush's PR people -- find a way for Bush to say the actual worry “sorry” (twice!) without giving his opponents a bad sound-bite to include in election campaign ads. Let's look at the two sentences above in more detail to see what it is I'm talking about.

First, let's address the last half of that apology. “I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.” OK, when you think about it for a second, that whole sentence means nothing. That's like saying “I'm sorry you feel that way.” That's not apologizing for the actions, or apologizing for being wrong, or taking any sort of responsibility for anything. “I'm sorry people don't understand.” That statement means nothing -- political double-speak.

And the first half of the apology is no better. “I told him I was sorry for the humiliation...”. Oddly, President Bush was not apologizing to the Iraqis or to the American people. He did not give a direct apology, such as “To the Iraqi people, I am sorry for what my country has done to you.” Bush basically apologized to ONE PERSON -- the King of Jordan, who really has nothing to do with this at all. Why apologize to the King of Jordan? And of all the things that the military report said that was wrong (such as torture, murder, rape, sodomy, electrocution, etc.), he picked the easiest thing to apologize for - humiliation. All in all, he barely met the minimum criteria for any level of apology.

When it comes right down to it, we all know this was not a scandal until there were pictures. The Bush administration is really, really sorry that there were pictures. “Darn, we just tip-toed over the line there by abusing those prisoners. If only we hadn't photographed them.” Hey, you didn't just tip-toe over the line there. You blew right past the line. The line is just a tiny spec along the horizon to you.

It's fairly clear that: a) as much torture as we have seen in pictures so far, the actual number of occurances of abuse must have been many, many times greater. Whenever I see a single bad picture, I think “What about the stuff that there are no pictures of?”. For every prisoner that was abused on camera, there had to be 100 that were abused without cameras.

And b) some of those pictures show abuse taking place out in the open, where everyone inside the prison can see. That means the abusers were not a bit worried about being caught by their superiors, which means they thought what they were doing was allowed. Everyone who worked at the prison must have been in on it! If not directly, then seeing it or hearing it and doing nothing. It's hard to believe that, not once during all of this abuse over 2 or 3 months, someone in a position of authority (the warden) didn't walk along and catch this going on?

Let's be honest here, people. This type of torture and abuse had to have been encouraged by top military officers at the prison. I do believe, however, that Bush and Rumsfeld and most people at the Pentagon did not know about what was happening that these prisons.

And perhaps the second worst thing here, besides the actual abuse, is the cowardly actions by the administration since October 2003, when they apparently first received these pictures. There's the abuse, and then there's the attempt to hide the abuse from the public. They really tried to sweep this scandal under the rug.

I'm gald to see that there are at least a few more people who noticed this lack of an apology, even if the news media missed it.

One of the dreams shared by almost everyone worldwide is the dream of becoming rich. The book store is filled with texts by so-called financial gurus. Game shows (and now most reality shows) promise the chance to win vast sums of cash.

But what does it really mean to be rich? Well, you could define it with a dollar amount. You could say $1,000,000 is rich. But that's not necessarily true in reality. For instance, $1,000,000 might not last very long if you live in downtown Manhattan -- you could burn through that in less than 2 years if you're not careful. And $1,000,000 may last more than a lifetime in Thailand -- even though you live like a king. So in reality, being rich is relative to the amount of money you spend.

When many people talk about being rich, what they are really talking about is being able to afford to retire. Being rich is (often) just a means to an end. Yes, there are some people who dream about owning a mansion, driving a Ferrari, and having a billion dollars just for the sake of being able to call yourself a Billionaire. But for most people, the money (or possessions they can buy) are not as important as the modest desires -- to stop working, to travel, to spend every day golfing, etc.

So ultimately, you can retire with $100,000 in savings if you can afford to live on only a $600 a month. Some people can. Do you think more people would be happier and healthier if they realized they could retire 10 years earlier than planned?

So I was playing with .NET and XML today, and ran into a strange problem. I was loading in an XML document, and the SelectNodes method was never returning any results. Here is my VB.NET code:

Dim xmldoc As New System.Xml.XmlDocument
xmldoc.Load("C:\Accounts.xml")

Dim xmlroot As System.Xml.XmlNodeList
xmlroot = xmldoc.SelectNodes("account")

I expected this to work and it didn't. xmlroot.Count returned 0. I searched the web for a few examples, and they seemed to confirm I was using SelectNodes correctly. All other examples I could find used it that way.

Now taking a look at the XML created (I used VS .NET 2003 to create the XML), nothing looked odd to me:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<accounts xmlns="http://tempuri.org/Accounts.xsd">
  <account acctno="1">
    <name>Acct 1</name>
      <weight>10</weight>
      <value>0.00</value>
  </account>
  ... etc ...
</accounts>

When poking around in the documentation for SelectNodes, I noticed there was an optional second parameter, XmlNamespaceManager. Could the fact that my XML document had a default namespace be messing with my code? So I tried the following:

Dim xmldoc As New System.Xml.XmlDocument
xmldoc.Load("C:\Accounts.xml")

Dim nsmgr As XmlNamespaceManager = New XmlNamespaceManager(xmldoc.NameTable)
nsmgr.AddNamespace("acct", "http://tempuri.org/Accounts.xsd")

Dim xmlroot As System.Xml.XmlNodeList
xmlroot = xmldoc.SelectNodes("//acct:account", nsmgr)

And, lo and behold, it worked. Most experienced .NET and XML developers probably already knew this, but it seems like odd behaviour to me. Anyways, I hope this tip helps someone out there.

Mark Cuban tells a few interesting stories about his early years in business. Worth a read for would-be entrepreneurs (like myself).

There are only a handful of people in this world whose hearts are presumed to be so pure that they are beyond reproach. The Dalai Lama is one. The Pope is another. And Mother Theresa was one before she died. And of course Ghandi too.

Yet here is an article that says that the Dalai Lama would have been better off leading a violent uprising against Tibet's occupiers (China) than the current peaceful protest method. It's an interesting theory.

When the U.S. first decided to invade Iraq, the stated reason was the flagrant violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to declare and destroy any weapons of mass destruction.

When the weapons were not found, the reason for war quickly became Iraq's association with known terrorists such as Al Qaeda.

When no association between Iraq and terrorism could be found, the reason for the war shifted to human rights. For six months, Bush used the phrase “the rape rooms and torture chambers of Iraq are now closed.”

Now that we learn that the rape rooms and torture chambers of Iraq remained open during the war (just under new management), what is the next reason for invading Iraq going to be? I can't wait to find out.

I recently completed a contract at a small financial company (let's call it OldCo). After a much-needed vacation, I then started a new contract at another small company (NewCo), which is in the marketing industry. The two companies couldn’t be more different in their approach to technology; it is like night and day. I sit here today basking in the warm sun, after almost a year of almost freezing to death in the dark.

It’s odd. You’d think the financial company would recognize the necessity of information technology more than a marketing firm. But the marketing firm has some extremely smart IT people on staff, and what they are doing here is amazing.

When I arrived at OldCo in mid 2003, I knew they had some major IT issues that needed some attention. At first, I looked at these problems as an interesting challenge that I could overcome with determination. By the end, I realized that an outsider’s determination would not be enough, and these problems will eventually be their undoing.

OldCo is a classic example of the way some family-run companies are run. The owners of OldCo trust noone but themselves. They are deeply involved in the day-to-day operations, and no decisions are made without their approval. In fact, if you were to draw an org chart, it would be extremely flat – everyone reports to the owners.

This works well for a 5-person company, but becomes a bit more difficult to manage for a 50-person one. In order for this organization structure to work, a company has to be extremely good at communications and have efficient business processes in place. OldCo was lacking in both areas.

Working at OldCo taught me several important lessons. Some of them related to the specific project I was on. I learned the importance of identifying issues before they became problems. And I saw how important strong and clear leadership is to project success. 

The way the company itself operated also provided some important lessons for me. These have to do with understanding how important management support of IT is for a successful project, and how important a positive office environment is. Lack of either can negatively affect a project. Lack of both spells unavoidable doom.

When I arrived at NewCo this week, I could tell right away they have their act together. This company is about the same size as OldCo, but they are extremely efficient in their communications and have excellent business processes in place. The project I am working on has a strong foundation, and the office environment is very positive.

Only time will tell if NewCo will continue to be a great place to work when the pressures to deliver the project intensify. But it’s off to a great start.