I’m looking at ways to represent a hierarchical data structure (a la dmoz or Yahoo) in a relational database. I have some ideas, but I’m always looking for more.

If you install Internet Explorer 5.0 (not 5.0.1) on a Windows 2000 system, you’re screwed.

Guess what? Gnutella has already popped up on the Internet in a couple of places. As the reader who sent me these links said, you can’t stuff the genie back into the bottle.

More proof that the Internet industry has completely jumped the tracks: Netpliance’s IPO went from lukewarm to hot when hackers figured out how to replace the embedded OS in the $100 iOpener with Linux, thus routing around Netpliance’s main revenue stream (monthly ISP charges). There was no buzz about the company until people figured out how to rip them off. In the meantime, they continue to sell iOpeners to people at a loss with no means of making that loss up. On the other hand, they might really be able to start making money if they would add a hard drive to the iOpener themselves and sell the boxes preinstalled with Linux at a small profit.

Cynical.

I’m going to release all of the source code behind this Web site as soon as I can make it more generic and clean up a few things. I’ve already created a project at SourceForge for it, and hopefully I’ll have a release of the code up there in the next week or so. Once it’s all neatly packaged, it should give people a great head start in rolling their own Web logs if they’re proficient in PHP3 and Perl. The code will be released under the BSD license.

Looks like I was wise not to link to the Gnutella site the other day. AOL (the owner of Nullsoft) put the kabosh on the project as soon as they found out about it. Does this remind anyone of the release and un-release of an instant messaging specification by Mozilla awhile back?

Apple had a big presence at the Game Developer’s Conference, indicating that they really are serious about making a dent in the games market. For the longest time, Apple didn’t get how crucial games are to the platform at all. Their new attitude toward games shows that maybe they really do understand how crucial they are to home users.

Google has used the Netscape Open Directory to add categorized listings to their site. Their implementation has a cool added feature — ranking of the sites based on the number of incoming links.

FreeBSD 4.0 is released. As soon as Walnut Creek CDROM burns the CDs, I’m all over it.