It’s interesting to look at the software development jobs available at Amazon.com to see how the big boys build their sites. At Amazon.com, they’re looking for C and C++ programmers who write Unix software. None of the lightweight stuff for them. eBay also writes all of the stuff for their site in C++, but as ISAPI modules. They went with IIS because when they first started out, it was cheaper to go with NT than Unix (never mind that Yahoo! was running on FreeBSD at that time).

There’s a port of ASP to Apache that uses Perl as the scripting language. I wonder if this is gaining much momentum. I guess if it works well, it would be preferable to PHP for Perl programmers, but how many Web scripting environments do we need?

I found the MP3s from the South Park Christmas episode, “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics.” The songs are hilarious, if you’re not easily offended. They’re apparently ripped from the CD, not the episode, so they’re not bleeped either.

Somebody is auctioning off a copy of my CGI book on Amazon.com. There are even bids!

sendmail.net has an interview with Michael Tiemann from Cygnus Solutions about their big merger with Red Hat and what it bodes for the future.

Phil Agre forwarded to his indispensible Red Rock Eater mailing list some eyewitness accounts from people who were present at the protests in Seattle. As usual, Dr. Agre’s own essay at the beginning is more interesting than the stuff that he republishes afterward, and he manages to capture the ironic contrast between the way things seem and the way they really are very well.

Qualcomm is going to give away Eudora to people who are willing to view ads while they read their email. This is an interesting reaction to the Web-based email that seems to be taking over the world. I imagine most might start out looking at the ads, but would eventually cough up some money to license the full version and get rid of them.

I’m not sure what prompted the current level of attention to unique IDs embedded in color photocopies, but Privacy Forum Digest has a fairly lengthy exposition on the topic. If you just want to know whether hidden identifiers are placed in all color copies, the answer is yes.

Dan Gillmor’s journal has an entry today on a new IBM technology called weblets, which are downloadable Java classes that somehow utilize the DOM to provide functionality in a browser window. To me, they sound like they provide the capability to create JavaScript-like functionality in Java. In other words, you can write Java classes that aren’t restricted to being embedded within a page like an applet. Since DOM support is required, they only work with MSIE 5, and Mozilla (which will probably be released someday).

Salon is running a story I can get behind today, a look at the three worst dot com IPOs in the offing. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel. But hey, I give them credit for their ability to narrow it down to three. The thing that has me so enchanted with the Internet “industry” is that so many idiots with bad ideas have made money that any idiot with a bad idea now thinks they can make millions.