So the other day my wife calls me on the phone and tells me our hub is unplugged and that she can’t print. I tell her to just grab the unplugged cable off the floor that fits and plug it into the hub. Unfortunately, there were three things that I did not know. The first is that the power supply for an IBM ThinkPad has the same connector as the power supply for a NetGear hub. The second is that I had the power supply for an IBM ThinkPad from my old job plugged into the wall for when I brought my laptop home. The third is that ThinkPad power supplies provide a lot more power than hub power supplies (although I could have guessed this one). Anyway, after a bad incident involving heat, I had to order a new hub from buy.com yesterday.

frontwheeldrive has an interview with Dominic Giampaolo that in part covers his thoughts on the world of open source software, and the difficulties of building a profitable company around it. His concerns about how to they can make money echo my own. (I had never seen frontwheeldrive.com before, it’s very nice. I found it through Wes Felter’s Hack the Planet.)

I’m sure glad I don’t live in Miami. Since Elian was taken into custody by Federal Marshalls, the city manager of Miami was fired by the mayor because he wouldn’t fire the police chief, and then the police chief resigned anyway. The mayor wanted to fire the police chief for not letting him know about the government’s plans to sieze Elian so that he could do something to stop it, I assume.

When will they ever learn? The AP sent the old cease and desist letter to the guy who posted the Elian Wassup! video on his Web site. Inevitably, bunches of people then mirrored the movie on their own Web sites in defiance of the letter.

An alpha CGI.pm 3.01 is available. I wonder what’s changed since version 2. Clearly I have to download it and find out.

Yesterday I read former Autodesk CEO John Walker’s famous call to arms, Information Letter 14. It was written in spring of 1991, and predicted the near future of the PC industry at that time amazingly well. His argument in favor of integrating AutoCAD with Windows is particularly interesting in light of the current controversy over the Mozilla UI. Mozilla is the same on every platform, and consequently doesn’t look like the native applications on any of those platforms. AutoCAD was in the same boat, and I agree with Walker that integration is very important. The nightmare scenario is pretty humorous as well, given Microsoft’s activities over the past 9 years.

Network Solutions sent me an unsolicited email today, an issue of “The Dot Com News.” Man I hate those guys.

Philip Greenspun compares Zope with the ACS.

Why is it that Congress has such a huge freaking problem with the First Amendment? It’s not like it’s confusing or hard to understand.

Steven Champeon on Web security: XSS, Trust, and Barney.