War is the continuation of politics through other means.
      "On War" (1816-1830), Carl von Clausewitz.


The decision in principle of the security cabinet on August 9 to approve the IDF's recommendation for a ground offensive, subject to the diplomatic time-table, was a practically essential decision. It provided Israel with necessary diplomatic flexibility.
      Winograd Commission, January 2008.

Alice Miller in "The Drama of the Gifted Child" (1979), page 65:

  The grandiose man is never truly free, for
  (1) he is fully dependent on the admiration of the object and
  (2) his self value is dependent on the qualities, performance and achievements that can crumble in a moment.

The good: Joaquin Phoenix has developed into a top-notch star.
The sad: Robert Duvall is getting old. Why, why can't we stop time?
God damn: Eva Mendez. God damn it.
Puzzle #1: how come Marky Mark is doing "The Departed" again??
The action: car chase in the rain - excellent. Shootout in the cocaine distillery - not bad either.
Observation: Mark Wahlberg has became a litmus test for movie quality - he's only in flicks that are good. Just as Nicolas Cage, a better actor altogether, is only in movies that suck.
Observation #2: Oleg Taktarov also starred in "15 Minutes" as the unsuccessful-Russian-mafioso's-sidekick, making him top unsuccessful-Russian-mafioso's-sidekick of the 21th century by a landslide.
Directed and written: James Gray.
Puzzle #2: Moni Moshonov as a Russian drug lord? WTF?
Verdict: 7 out of 10.

Haaretz Photographer Uriel Sinai photographs the recent violence in Kenya. (Hebrew)

A few quick updates:
My company, Semingo, changed its name and from now on we're called Delver.

We'll be officially launching our product at the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA next week (January 28-30).
If you're there, make sure to drop by our booth (say Pasha sent you), and don't miss the demo. I promise we're one of the coolest products there.
If you want to be notified when our beta is open, sign up at delver.com.

Like written so many times before, HttpUtility.UrlEncode is extremely outdated and buggy.
It doesn't encode the single quote ('), there's an open bug marked "Closed (Won't Fix)". So don't wait for a patch.
It doesn't encode the plus sign (+) either.

So please use the AntiXss library whenever it's remotely important to get it right.
Needless to say, same goes for the other encoding methods of HttpUtility, like HtmlEncode.

This is not bad:
Live Search: How Many Calories In Pizza
It's good to see Live doing something besides catching up with Google.
Google and Yahoo don't have anything. Ask has something.