Web Techniques has an article about building a CGI framework in Python.

I finally went to see the Iron Giant last night. The Iron Giant is the most underpromoted movie of the year, and the most underpromoted animated feature film ever. I heard that the movie was coming out several months ago, and was excited to see it because I read the book as a kid, but the it fell off the radar screen. Anyway, I’m really glad I saw it. If you have kids, definitely take them to see the movie. The message is very positive (without being annoying), and you’ll be entertained too.

The Red Herring has a lot of mean things to say about the Emachines IPO. Even though I think most Internet companies are fundamentally unsound investments, Emachines stands out as a particularly bad risk. The funniest thing in the article is that Emachines doesn’t have written warranty contracts with their suppliers.

Microsoft has lost another executive, this time to Amazon.com. In the meantime, Rick Belluzzo joins Microsoft after not quite finishing off SGI.

Salon has the real-life story of someone’s abuse of the Hotmail back door today. Pretty speedy commission of the story, don’t you think? Perhaps it was written by a Salon staffer.

I’ve written a lot of code in Cold Fusion lately, and I’ve discovered that a big problem is maintainability. Because of the way Cold Fusion code works, it’s difficult to write really structured, readable code. For example, there’s no easy facility for writing things like subroutines. As an alternative, I’m looking into Python, which has a reputation for making it easy to write maintainable code.

You can view the listing for Bill Clinton’s new house online.

The Weekly World News offers free email. Yes!

Scott Rosenberg takes on the Hotmail “security hole” in his column this week. I use the quotation marks because this isn’t a security hole in the traditional sense. A security hole exists when you write bad C code with buffer overflows that allow hackers to execute priveleged commands by sliding them onto the stack. In this case, the programmers at Microsoft created a back door into a service that provides 50 million users with email on purpose, and hoped that nobody figured out where it was. Not only was the back door there, but it was pathetically simple to walk in through. This security hole is a failure at a far more troubling level than a failure to adequately test your code. These guys failed at testing their basic assumptions.

I installed Red Hat 6.0 on a Compaq desktop today. The installation was an absolute no-brainer, I was up and running in no time. I also noticed that with this release, they’ve done a lot of good work in the general “Make the desktop look like a non-Unix geek would expect it to look” department. In other words, the font in the Netscape Location box isn’t all jaggy and strange, and the screen widgets look better than they used to. The next step is to get rid of Enlightenment and start using my beloved WindowMaker.