The new Salon layout is a total mess. The biggest problem is that there are a lot fewer links to individual stories on the home page, so I have to go to the individual section page to see a list of stories. Putting a little summary of what’s in each section of the site is just dumb, a list of headlines (with links preferably) would be much, much better. In other words, what they used to have is much better than what they have now. I certainly hope that this redesign wasn’t driven by a need to get people to view more pages per visit in order to get more ad dollars. When a site makes it more inconvenient to view the content I want to see, they’ll get less clicks from me, not more.

Perl.com has a story about teaching COBOL programmers how to program in Perl. It’s interesting. (I took two semesters of COBOL in college, that wasn’t interesting.)

It looks like the Gartner Group is now singing the praises of open source software. Will miracles never cease?

Microsoft really seems to be grasping at straws in their ongoing quest not to get broken up by the government. Wired News reports that they will soon argue that they shouldn’t be broken up because the government said they shouldn’t be broken up in 1995. Umm, OK. (For the record, I’m against breaking up Microsoft.)

The fisherman who was holding Elian Gonzalez in the now infamous picture everyone has already seen is suing everybody he can think of for violating his constitutional rights. Give me a break. Guess who’s providing legal representation? None other than Judicial Watch, one of the groups that was part of the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” to impeach Clinton.

This months issue of XML.com focuses on how portals use XML.

Not all security products are really secure. A warning for people using BlackICE Defender.

Scott Rosenberg’s take on this week’s spectacular failures, DEN and Boo.com, summarized in three words: managed by idiots. My fundamental problem with the Internet industry today is that a huge percentage of the “dot coms” are companies based on stupid ideas that are executing on those stupid ideas very poorly. I’m heartened by the failure of boo.com, DEN, and other miserable money burning machines like these because it rekindles my belief that there’s some hope that the wheat will someday be separated from the chaff in this misbegotten industry.

There’s a new, nastier version of the ILOVEYOU virus floating around. If I were you, I’d just go ahead and uninstall Outlook. If you don’t, then don’t open attachments unless you’re absolutely sure you know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, drag them into Notepad before you open them.

For some reason, the site www.mudcats.com points directly to amazon.com. Stranger yet, amazon.com doesn’t own that domain name. The site I was really looking for is www.gomudcats.com.