The President's approval rating has fallen to 36%, its lowest ever, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll out today:

• Just 36 percent of the public approves of Bush’s job performance, his lowest-ever rating in AP-Ipsos polling. By contrast, the president’s job approval rating was 47 percent among likely voters just before Election Day 2004 and a whopping 64 percent among registered voters in October 2002.
• Only 40 percent of the public approves of Bush’s performance on foreign policy and the war on terror, another low-water mark for his presidency. That’s down 9 points from a year ago. Just before the 2002 election, 64 percent of registered voters backed Bush on terror and foreign policy.
• Just 35 percent of the public approves of Bush’s handling of Iraq, his lowest in AP-Ipsos polling.
• Just 30 percent of the public approves of the GOP-led Congress’ job performance, and Republicans seem to be shouldering the blame.

The MSNBC report includes a quote from a Republican pollster repeating the canard that it's not as bad as it seems because the Democrats don't have much of a plan. But we do have a plan. Our plan is to fix the enormous damage to our international reputation, our economy, and our political institutions that the GOP has perpetrated on us. It would appear that 64% of the public think that's plan enough.

We spent two hours yesterday debugging some code that kept firing early. It wasn't clear to anyone, including the people who wrote it, why this happened. We patched it with the C# equivalent of duck tape, but really, it still doesn't work right.

This incident shows how important it is to know what your code is supposed to do, and not to accept the code if it doesn't. Many tools exist to help—most notably, unit-testing tools like NUnit—but they have trouble with the specific problem that we encountered: events fired from black-box controls.

I will have more to say about this later.

Before nodding off to bed tonight, on a whim I searched Google for a funny story I remembered hearing on WFMT-Chicago's Midnight Special many years ago.

The New Year's Eve Midnight Special always ran long, and always played a bit called "Moose Turd Pie." Thanks to Google, I finally found out where it came from: U. Utah Phillips, who even has a link to the bit on his site.

This is what the Internet is all about.

The New York Sun is reporting that President Bush authorized leaking Plame's identity, at least implicitly, according to the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby:

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.

Whether or not this is true, it's interesting to watch the administration's in-fighting get to this level. One hopes the electorate remembers, and understands, in November.

Experts say the Enron executives' testimony is extremely risky for the pair.

They will have to overcome the obvious conclusion that they knew they were robbing hundreds of employees and thousands of investors before company collapsed. Stay tuned.

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay is not seeking re-election. This is the best political news I've heard in days.

I'm going to bed as happy as I can be back in Nashua.

I mentioned Friday that I've completely refactored the section of the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™—the Idea™—that handles quantitative functions. (I've also decided to make some SDK documentation available.) The actual design of the IMeasurable classes—Length, Speed and the like—bears more discussion.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has a new column today reminiscing about the hype of 1997 because it's back in vogue:

The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.

There is endless coverage of a few atypical stories in the trade press, mainstream media, and even on specialized Internet-focused websites. Once again, it's worth remembering: your site is different from the ones in big stories. Focus on fixing the basics to get a simple and communicative website. Simple steps don't get hyped, but they drive much more business value for the average site than the issues that everyone writes about.

He includes a sidebar about the fads of 1997 and how they're doing today.

Krugman weighs in (sub.req.) on the immigration debate roiling the GOP:

For now, at least, the immigration issue is mainly hurting the Republican Party, which is divided between those who want to expel immigrants and those who want to exploit them. The only thing the two factions seem to have in common is mean-spiritedness.

Nicely put.

Appyhay Aprilhay Oolsfay Aday!

(Evenhay ymay eatherway itesay ishay inhay hetay piritsay.)

In January, I wrote about framework classes I was working on, and how I wanted to simplify the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™. I followed up in February with a conundrum concerning how to model the problem. It turned out to be tricky, and time-consuming, and considering I wrote most of it at The Peddler's Daughter in Nashua, N.H., there was a lot of Smithwick's Ale[1] involved.

But today, at last, I've got a new demo.

The demo page has a lengthy explanation of how the new version works, and includes a bunch of source code showing how simple the stuff is to use and to extend. I still have a little polishing to do, but I'll probably be putting the full SDK documentation for the IDEA™ up on the Inner Drive website later this month.

I think this is some of the coolest stuff I've ever written.

[1] I would have linked to the official Diageo site, but it's so annoyingly badly written—it whisks you away to a page requiring your birthdate and it tries to cookie you—that on principle I won't have that as the primary link to this product.

One final quick hit for the morning: I completely forgot that yesterday was the 25th (25rd?) anniversary of President Reagan's attempted assassination. It's hard to grasp that it was that long ago.

I got a mailing from my undergrad alumni association exhorting me to go to the "23th Annual Dutch Festival." I last went to the 9rd one, or maybe the 10st, so I may just have to visit.

One of my fans sent me this Passover-themed link. Share and enjoy.