Palm OS 3.5 is finally available for Palm handhelds other than the ones that it comes on by default. Unfortunately, the upgrade costs $19.95. I’ll probably go ahead and spring for it for my Palm IIIx just because I like to have the latest software.

Are you interested in working on an open source project for the good of the environment? EcoAccess is looking for interns this Spring to help them build tools for environmental research and education using Python and Zope.

Here’s a good example of the pro-business defanging of pro-consumer legislation. The federal government is passing a new law greatly increasing the privacy standard for medical records, but the employers and insurance companies will be able to require patients to waive those privacy rights in order to be eligible for their health plan. So what’s the point of the rules in the first place?

The USDA has finally issued its standard labelling organic food. Thanks to bunches of comments sent in by citizens (including my wife and I), the USDA scrapped an earlier, very lax version of the regulations that would have allowed things no right-thinking person would refer to as organic be labelled as such. Nice work. I also credit Sara Moulton of the FoodTV Network for urging people to write the USDA complaining about the bad version of the regulations on her cooking show.

I can’t remember if I linked to Mark Levine’s Q&A about the Supreme Court decision in Gore v. Bush, but I had problems with the earlier versions due to some errors of fact that I noticed. Apparently thousands of other people did, too, and let the author know about it. Anyway, here’s the updated version. Absent any consideration of the ultimate result of the Supreme Court’s decision, I think that the reasoning they used to render it was tortured and out of keeping with the law. I think that Levine’s essay raises some valid points, but I also think it’s a bit too severe — I don’t believe that the Supreme Court Justices are as nefarious as he portrays them to be.

Hey, guess who got a mention in Salon today? If you’re visiting via the Salon link, I hope you’ll stick around.

The saga of formerly high flying Internet consultancies crashing to earth continues. What happens when your earnings are lower than expected? You become a ripe target for shareholder lawsuits. Have shareholder lawsuits ever helped a company’s shareholders? Maybe they should be called “former shareholder lawsuits.” Both lawsuits were filed over the same statements by the company’s executives.

Dan Gillmor’s latest column excoriates venture capitalists and other dot com insiders for foisting weak companies with poor prospects onto the public markets in order to make lots of fast bucks. He’s right of course, but everybody knows it was all a big scam now. Where was this column a few years ago when the heavy duty con jobs were being run? If you’re not in this industry, I have some bad news for you. Everybody on the inside knew that a huge majority of the dot coms were nothing more than a bad joke. Back on May 16, 1999, I noted that Priceline.com had a higher market almost equal to American Airlines and Delta put together, and saw that as a sign of impending collapse. Now that Priceline is trading at about 2 bucks a share, things are back where they belong.

Bob Stein at VisiBone sent me some really cool swag last week — a mouse pad and reference card with the browser-safe palette, and an HTML/CSS reference card. If you’re a Web designer by trade, I highly recommend his tools, they’ll make your job an awful lot easier. (And I’m not just saying that because he sent them to me.) The best feature is the list of character entities on his HTML reference card. I know all of the HTML tags backward and forward, but I can never remember the special characters when I need them. The surface of the mouse is very nice for mousing as well, which is a big plus.

Dubya is a Mac user. It really is the computer for the rest of us!