This is a brilliant idea: Yahoo is donating 2 million dollars worth of banner ads to tolerance.org. The ads will run when people access hate groups hosted by Yahoo Groups, or when they search for terms that seem to indicate that the user is intolerant.

The update beat goes on despite the fact that my domain name has been turned off due to my own negligence. I paid to have the name renewed yesterday, but Network Solutions hasn’t turned it back on yet. I’ll be transferring the domain to PairNIC asap.

There’s something bad going on with DNS today that’s preventing some people from getting to my site. My apologies. I can’t get to it myself from work, but I managed to update the site using Lynx from my remote shell account. (It turns out that the reason my site was down is that I let the registration expire. Dumb.)

The deal between Borders and Amazon.com provides further evidence that the times are changing in the world of ecommerce. Amazon.com is taking over the online operations for Borders. This deal makes less sense to me than, say, the Toys R Us, deal, because Amazon.com is already the dominant seller of books online. Why would someone buy books through Borders Online powered by Amazon.com instead of through Amazon.com? Will the prices be different between the two? The upside for Amazon, I would imagine, is that they’ll profit from every book they sell on behalf of Borders. I’m sure that isn’t the case with the all the books they sell through their own store.

Tell me I’m not dreaming: Judicial Watch is suing Tom DeLay for his campaign finance practices. I love this on so many levels.

Math is hard!

Cactus is a tool for unit testing Java servlets and JSPs that extends JUnit. I dream of someday working on a project where I actually write unit tests for all my code, but I haven’t been on one yet. That’s probably my fault.

Perennial spotlight hog Jesse Jackson has generously offered to travel to China and negotiate for the return of the 24 U.S. personnel being held by the Chinese government. However, Timothy Noah seems to think that this is a job for the master of the seemingly sincere apology, Bill Clinton.

I finally got Black & White from Amazon.com yesterday. The game is totally amazing to play. I don’t know how long it will hold my attention, but I dreamt about the game last night, and I never dream about games, or movies, or TV shows, or anything else like that. All this despite the fact that I have a deficient PC and didn’t get to see the game in its full visual glory. I never played Populous, or Dungeon Keeper, or any of the game’s other forebearers, so it’s all new to me. I have, however, played many, many other games, and I know it’s not like any of them. The game is worth checking out for this reason alone.

Here’s the problem with hobbyist sites: when they become too popular, bad things happen. Usually, they get turned off for consuming too much bandwidth, or for bringing down their servers due to resource starvation. Then the guy who runs the site has to turn into a business person instead of a hobbyist in order to pay for upgrades, and the sites wind up dying. That sucks. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a solution to this problem.