An rc3.org reader has come through and recommended an excellent newsreader that I hadn’t heard of. Windows users will definitely want to check out Gravity from MicroPlanet. Great, great product.

I need a Usenet news reader for my computer running Windows 98. I’ve been using Netscape Communicator, and it’s OK, but not great. I hate Agent and its free sibling. I loved ya-newswatcher on the Mac. Any recommendations are appreciated. (If anyone can make me as happy as Laurel Krahn made me by recommending Calypso to read mail, I’ll be much obliged.)

Lest we forget: “Reply-To” Munging Considered Harmful.

Unsurprisingly, the fight between etoy and etoys.com isn’t over yet.

When I was interested in learning Lisp, I found the GNU produced online book Programming in Emacs Lisp to be very useful.

John Jacobs Anderson has replaced WindowMaker (my Unix window manager of choice) with Sawmill and likes it. The cool thing about Sawmill is that it’s configured using a Lisp-based scripting language.

Well, it didn’t take long to figure out how to make dynamic content look like static content with mod_rewrite. Here are the results.

Another big story I missed while I was out in the hinterlands is the nasty spat between Yahoo! and Real over server licensing costs (with Microsoft dragged in to make this a love triangle). A great example of business showing its ugly side.

I found out today that pair.com has mod_rewrite installed on its Web servers, so I’m going to try to create some stupid mod_rewrite tricks for this Web site. My theory is that with mod_rewrite and PHP3, you can create the equivalent of the Vignette URL scheme without the 6 figure investment. Cool, huh?

Unforeseen Y2K-related problem: hard drive grunge. People are recommending that systems be rebooted after midnight tomorrow night to verify that various system components are still working. Unfortunately, hard drives on systems that have been up and running for a very long time can sieze up when they’re stopped, due to grunge buildup. I wonder if that’s why so many hard drives fail when servers are moved from one location to another? When pair.com moved, the hard drives on tons of their servers failed.