Risks Digest contributor and overall computer genius Martin Minow passed away earlier this week. He joined the Well this year, and was a great conversationalist on all sorts of topics as well as a charitable and kind soul. He will definitely be missed.

I’ve been messing around with various diff tools for Winodows lately, and I’m pretty pleased with WinMerge. It displays the two files being compared side by side rather than using diff-like notation, which I find somewhat difficult to deal with.

LinuxPlanet has a preview of Emacs 21.0, the much-needed modernization of Emacs. It looks very promising, I wonder when a beta will be released? If the Windows version lags far behind the Unix version, I’ll probably have to move to Linux as my desktop operating system at work.

Jonathan Shapiro posted some great thoughts on copyright to the FSB mailing list relating to the big copy protected hard drive story broken by The Register last week.

Here’s an interesting email message I got from Egghead.com over the holidays.

More consumer-hostile plans in the PC industry: plans are being made to copy-protect hard drives. I will never purchase such a drive.

Clay Shirky on micropayments.

A “toys for violent games” program initiated in Illinois was completely unsuccessful. No games were turned in at all. That’s funny.

Long-term readers will remember my problems getting my Palm IIIx to talk to my computer at work. I solved the problem by restricting the data transfer rate to 56kpbs. I also managed to get my Yahoo PIM stuff to synchronize with Outlook at work and the Palm using TrueSync (provided by Yahoo). Now the only thing I have to use Outlook for is to accept appointments. (I use Eudora at work to read email.)

The Economist is critical of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. They have the same worries that I do — which is that these two define “U.S. interests” far too narrowly. I’m not a fan of Madeleine “Cruise Missile” Albright, either. I’d like to see people who consider social justice for people around the world to be in America’s interest in those spots, but there’s no chance of that with a Republican administration.