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(Obligatory disclosure: My business is providing technical services for advocacy organizations in DC. My practice isn't Drupal-oriented, but obviously I have a financial interest in trends in that sector, so you may wish to discount my opinions accordingly.)

The answer is that it has critical mass in the advocacy/e-government sector. It isn't so much anything about Drupal per se that makes it the default choice; it's that in this line of business it's what everybody else uses. So you get lots of projects that start with the assumption that they're going to be using Drupal, without ever really evaluating how appropriate Drupal is versus competing alternatives. It's just What You Use. Partly this comes from having lots of tech people around who are familiar with it, so they reach for it first, and partly it comes from managers whose knowledge of Drupal begins and ends with having heard the name attached to other projects they're familiar with.

The result, of course, is that lots of projects end up trying to wrestle Drupal into strange configurations it was never meant to be in. You can kind of see that in this blog post from the Sunlight Foundation, an open-government think tank. It's called "Content Management Systems just don't work," but the title is a bit misleading, because what it's really about is content management systems (a.k.a. Drupal) not working when pressed into service for tasks other than content management. Drupal's a fine CMS; the problem comes in when people try to make it act like a framework, or a database platform, or a RAD tool, which it isn't.

The more interesting question isn't why people choose Drupal, it's how Drupal achieved critical mass in the DC technosphere in the first place. It's a long story, but the short version is that it goes back to the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Dean was the first candidate to really raise serious money online, and his tech team had built lots of their tools on top of Drupal. (Here's an early example of Dean Drupal buzz.) When the 2004 campaign was over, every political candidate wanted a bit of that Howard Dean Internet fundraising magic for himself, so there was a brisk demand for ex-Dean staffers to write articles and speak at conferences, explaining how they did what they had done. These staffers were naturally asked what tools they had used, they said "Drupal," and the result was hordes of magazine-readers and conference-goers coming away with the impression that Drupal was Internet Success In A Box. Which completely missed the point of the Deaniacs' message, but it led to more Drupal usage in advocacy & e-politics projects, which led to more visibility for Drupal, which led to more usage, which led to more visibility, and so forth.

Sometimes the remakes are worthwhile.

Indeed! I don't normally flack my own writing here, but I made the same point back around the release of the Star Trek reboot. Remaking something can be a powerful way to re-interpret it, to put a new spin on it for a new age.

For PHP work, Eclipse with the PHP Development Tools (PDT) package is quite nice. Though from what I hear Netbeans may be a bit ahead for PHP these days -- the latest version has complete PHP support built in.

I found stock Ubuntu Intrepid with a few tweaks to be easier to set up and more pain-free than any of the "easy/tuned" distros are. Once I had everything working (including wireless), I wrote up a HOWTO explaining how to go from bare metal to a fully working system so that others wouldn't have to go digging through a dozen forums to find the info. Check it out, might be all you need to get up and going.

Lots of comments from people saying that Google can't or shouldn't be censoring their imagery. In case you weren't aware, they already are.

Here's a Google Earth KMZ file that will show you the US Naval Observatory, in Washington, DC. Zoom in on it and you'll notice that all the territory within a set radius of the observatory has been pixellated out of the otherwise clear image.

Why? Because the Vice President lives at the Naval Observatory.

There are other obscured sites in DC and other places too; I'll leave finding them as an exercise for the reader. But the point is that they are already hiding some sensitive locations from users, so it's not unreasonable for people to ask what the criteria are, or why military bases shouldn't be included.

There have been plenty of terrorist incidents since 9/11 outside America but i guess being American its a bit of a stretch to expect you to know anything about the rest of the world.

Hey, I'm an American and I actually created an interactive Flash map of all the terror attacks attributed to al Qaeda since we invaded Iraq to make the same point as you're making. Not all Americans are out of touch :-)

You can see the map here:

• Are We Safer Now?

If I missed any, let me know, contact information is on the page.

Have you actually tried Yahoo lately?

I've been finding that Yahoo's engine is as good at returning relevant results as Google, at least for my searches. In fact, in some cases it is even better at putting the most relevant hit in the first position than Google is.

Of course, YMMV. But if you're still going off impressions of Yahoo Search you formed back in 1997, you might want to give their new-and-improved engine a spin sometime...

The summary makes it sound like Intuit is the only one doing this. When you RTFA, however, you find out that H&R Block's online product does the same thing:

But if you're one of the millions who this year have used the electronic services of Intuit's TurboTax or H&R Block, you may not know that a stealthy technology commonly known as Web bugs was used to track your comings and goings on the Internet.

Both Intuit and Block, which offer electronic filing for free through the IRS' Free File program, use hidden Web bugs throughout the tax-preparation process to monitor taxpayers' online behavior.

Why single out Intuit for bashing in the summary and leave Block un-named?

(Full disclosure: I was a happy customer of Block's tax-filing products for six years until I tried their Web tax software for the first time this year. It's borked in ways a lot more comprehensive than this. I wrote it up on my blog if you care about such things...)

Based on the interface I saw in the preview version, it might be better if they concentrated on not sucking first.

The "Netscape Browser Preview" had the most God-awful UI I've seen in a desktop app in a long, long time. It was like they went out of their way to avoid learning the big lesson from the success of Firefox (which was keep it simple, stupid), preferring instead to chrome it up six ways to Sunday.

They even pushed the menu bar over to the right side of the screen -- in complete defiance of the way every other app does it. Who goes to look for "File", "Edit", etc. over there? Nobody. So there's years of muscle memory that you have to un-learn to be productive with the thing.

Their ActiveX "solution" sounds similar. Why go to all the trouble of keeping blacklists, etc. when there is a much simpler and easier for users to understand solution at hand -- just leave ActiveX out of the default install altogether, and offer it as a plugin. Users who need ActiveX for vertical apps are also likely to have sysadmins handy to keep their network secure, so installing a plugin is no big deal. Everybody else, why do they need ActiveX? The only ActiveX control I've seen in mainstream use in years is FilePlanet's download manager, and they offer standard downloads for the ActiveX-challenged, too, so you could ditch ActiveX without too much pain there as well.

Somebody put a silver bullet in the zombie corpse of Netscape already before it embarrasses its legacy any further...

I don't see how this explanation washes, quite frankly.

Trippi ended up making a little over $100,000 for his work on the Dean campaign. But he would have made that money whether he had worked his ass off as campaign manager or not. His firm had already been hired to do the media, and as a partner, he would have gotten 1/3 of the 7% commission no matter what.

Isn't the conflict of interest in such an arrangement obvious? You don't need to speculate about "kickbacks" or "embezzlement" -- all you need to do is think about whether it's a good idea for the head media buyer for a campaign to be buying TV services from, essentially, himself.

Is he going to have any incentive to negotiate for the best rates? Is he going to push back if the media consultants come to him with ads of sub-par quality? Is he going to be able to objectively evaluate how much of the media buy should be TV (as opposed to, say, direct mail, or print advertising, or grassroots organizing), when he gets a cut of every dollar that goes into TV and nothing from the dollars that go everywhere else?

You don't have to be a genius to see the conflicts of interest. So why run the risk? When Trippi came on board as the campaign manager, why didn't he sever the relationship with Trippi, McMahon, & Squier and find a new TV firm, just to ensure the appearance of integrity? (You can be the campaign manager, or the media consultant -- pick one.) And if he wouldn't do that, why didn't he have adult supervision there to notice that before he burned through $40 million dollars?

I wrote about this when Trippi's arrangement was first disclosed, and I have yet to hear an explanation from him that puts these concerns to rest for me.

Look, I was a Deaniac. I put my $100 into Trippi's $100 Revolution. But I did so on the assumption that my money was being managed in a responsible manner. And having the guy in charge use his own company for the media buys just doesn't strike me as very responsible.

(Oh, and TMS's ads sucked, too. But that's a story for another day...)

If cheap-o consumer routers getting 0wned thanks to pathetic Wi-Fi security seems bad, consider this: at least one vendor of e-voting systems depends on WEP as the only security measure between their voting machines and the ballot-counting system.

Yes, that's right -- ballots are passed wirelessly, and only protected via standard 802.11 WEP. How long until someone tries to 0wn a polling place? Or, worse, just sniffs the ballots out of the air and dumps them to a log file (so much for the secret ballot), say?

I wrote the article linked to above when the systems were being evaluated in Fairfax County, Virginia -- a wealthy and populous suburb of Washington, DC -- but they've since been approved by the county board of elections and used in two elections to date. Who knows how many other local governments have bought into similar systems?

Not only are they wireless -- the only security measure they have in place is the long-cracked standard 802.11b Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).

Wardrivers, start your engines!

I live in Northern Virginia, just next door to where they tried out the WINVote machines, and like a lot of people I wrote about why they were a bad idea before the election. Unfortunately the Fairfax County government wasn't paying attention to any of us, and now they're finding out what happens when you put blind faith in computers...