I love the random crap you can find on the Web. Who would have guessed that Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is a real place?

Thanks to everyone who sent information about how Internet email works. I’m including an explanation in the upcoming revision of my CGI book, but I may write something up here since I couldn’t find a brief but useful explanation on the Internet, and everyone was so helpful.

I imagine some people think my home page looks better like this.

I found a link to this article from the Merc at Slashdot. It discusses the new policy at Apple prohibiting the listing of individual credits on Apple products (unlike many companies, at Apple, many products listed their individual contributors). There were two items of interest in the story. One was the theory that paranoia about outside recruiting could have prompted this move. I think this is likely — at one place I used to work, we were prohibited from providing our job titles in our voice mail greetings in order to thwart outside recruiters. The second is that easter eggs are discussed as though including them in software is a practice largely associated with Apple. Most software has easter eggs, and in fact, Microsoft engineers are the master of the easter egg. The easter eggs in Microsoft Excel are downright amazing.

A common practice at Microsoft is to upgrade your operating system every time you install one of their applications (hey, when you own both markets you can do that). For example, when you install Internet Explorer 5 under Windows NT, it replaces the task scheduler with a new one. Unfortunately, there’s a big old security hole in the newer task scheduler that can be used to obtain Administrator access. The real problem here is that no reasonable user would expect that installing a Web browser would replace other, completely unrelated, components of the operating system. What a security nightmare. Get some discipline, Microsoft.

The Risks Digest is one of the coolest institutions on the Internet (if you’re a geek, anyway). I generally only read it when someone links to it, but I really ought to read it every day. It’s great.

You probably already know this, but somebody paid 7.5 million bucks for the domain name business.com. Whatever.

One of the best things about writing computer books is the opportunity to interact with my readers. For example, a reader whose name I won’t disclose sent me this message today. Positive reinforcement like that makes all the time spent away from my wife seem worthwhile. (For the record, I sent the reader a helpful response, and he apologized for his use of foul language.)

Like many people, I imagine, I’m a bit bemused by the massive protests in Seattle opposing the WTO. Mother Jones has an obviously slanted article listing the top ten reasons why the WTO should be dismantled, which provides some insight into the thinking of the protestors. For people like myself in need of even more basic education, Mother Jones provides another article explaining what, exactly, the WTO is. I will point out one thing from the explanatory article on the WTO that really irks me: the article refers to 537,000 manufacturing jobs being lost thanks to NAFTA, but nowhere mentions how many jobs in other industries were created by the agreement. Isn’t the United States currently enjoying the lowest unemployment rates in decades these days?

I made an interesting observation today. I accumulate papers on my desk until I spill some sugared beverage on them. Then, everything that got tainted is thrown out. That’s my system of organization. Looking at my desk right now, I see that I really need to spill some Coke.