Microsoft has released a new revision of Internet Explorer 5 to fix some bugs — but they’re not telling anyone that it’s a new release.

First it was Computer Literacy Bookstore changing its name to fatbrain.com. Then Deja News changed its name to the more generalized deja.com. Salon Magazine eschewed its publishing roots and paid the big bucks for salon.com. Now, The Mining Company has hopped onto the .com bandwagon and changed its name to about.com. Enough already!

The next time you find yourself complaining about how cryptic the documentation that ships with Perl is, think about the fact that it could have been written by the person who produced this paper.

Netscape Communicator 4.6 has been posted to Netscape’s FTP servers, and the inevitable backlash has already begun in the public Mozilla newsgroups. People are unhappy that Netscape is doing any work at all on the existing codebase when the developers could be working on Mozilla. It’s amazing how myopic some of the people in the Open Source community are. Why do people think that version 2.0.37 of the Linux kernel was released even though 2.2 was almost out the door? You have to support your existing software while you create new versions if you want to keep your users happy at all. I imagine that there will be plenty of people who stick with version 4.x of the Netscape browser long after Mozilla has been released (and it’s going to be quite some time until Mozilla is released anyway). By the way, international users will be happy to know that the major change between 4.5 and 4.6 is that 56 bit encryption is supported instead of 40 bit now.

SGI is adding features from Irix to Linux. Just the other day, I saw a pointer to some job openings at SGI for Linux programmers. It seems like SGI is looking for a hedge on their Windows NT bet.

I somehow missed this last week. You know how you get those stupid email messages that spread like wildfire as people forward them to everyone they know after they receive them? The stupid ones about Neiman-Marcus cookie recipes, and sending postcards to a dying kid, and hundreds of jokes that were old when email was invented? How would you like for a private email that you sent to someone to become an Internet cultural artifact along those lines?

Think the Internet stocks aren’t headed for a crash? Compare the market caps of AMR (American Airlines’ parent company), Delta Airlines, and Priceline, an online broker for plane tickets. Priceline is “worth” almost as much as both American and Delta put together. Thanks to Jeff Price for this tidbit of info.

In the wee hours of the morning, I did something very strange. I created HTML using a WYSIWYG editor (Netscape Composer). I needed to create an outline of the table of contents for my book, and instead of hand coding it, I just typed it into Netscape Composer. Creating HTML using something other than a raw text editor or a program that I wrote myself is very strange to me, but I suppose I could learn to like it for small tasks.

Justin Boots has a web site, unfortunately, it’s not very good (it doesn’t have pictures of the boots at all). Much more interesting is the Lucchese site. Coincidentally, they make much better boots than Justin. Lucchese even has the full text of the book A Lifetime With Boots online.

Want to develop games for the Playstation II? You’d better learn Linux.