I found a cool JavaScript trick to prevent double form submissions on the Netcraft What’s that site running? page today. It uses a tiny bit of JavaScript to change the label on the form’s submit button from Examine to Wait when a user clicks on it.

Gamasutra has an excellent article about the nature of software developers that mirrors my findings in the world of software engineering.

Here’s an article that explains how to capture a book’s sales ranking from Amazon.com using Visual Basic 6. It also has an explanation of how the sales ranking system at Amazon.com works. Why use VB for those types of jobs when Perl is available?

Food for thought: Bruce Sterling’s The Manifesto of January 3, 2000.

A coworker forwarded me this analysis of Linux market share. According to the author, Linux is already 80% of the way toward dominance of the desktop market! We can dream, can’t we?

Speaking of the Interesting People mailing list, there was a great message posted to it today (written by Andreas Bogk) describing the reasons behind the DVD lawsuit in wonderful detail. The executive summary: the DVD copy protection folks are suing not because DeCSS allows people to copy DVDs, they could already do that, but because it allows anyone to build a DVD player without a license to do so.

Looking for some early entries for your summer reading list? Why not start with the American Scientist’s list of 100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science. It’s a list I’ll be referring back to when I find that I have some free time.

David Farber (of Interesting People fame) has been appointed chief technologist at the FCC. David Farber is a really clueful guy, and I hope he’s able to make a strong positive impact while he’s working with the FCC. Congratulations, Dr. Farber. (The link is to a New York Times article by John Markoff, there’s also an official announcement.)