Jon Carroll wrote a great rant about Who Moved My Cheese? yesterday. My only brush with that insipid little book was that Spencer Johnson (the author) was a client of my former employer — we were building his Web site. Unfortunately, I wasn’t on the project myself, so I’m without dirt on the good doctor. All you really need to know about this book is that it’s ninety-something pages along, printed in large type and copiously illustrated. It costs $19.95. That, my friends, is a scam.

XML.com has a good review on how various popular relational databases store XML. The methods used currently are a real freak show, I imagine they’ll improve with time.

Now that the entire dot com economy has exploded into small unrecognizable pieces, tempers are wearing thin.

So after last night’s South Park, I was wondering what mee krob is. Fortunately, a quick search revealed that it’s a fried noodle dish. I didn’t remember it even though I eat Thai food pretty often.

Who knew that Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was a libertarian. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said he’s for scrapping taxes on corporations and shifting the entire tax burden to individuals. He’s also in favor of eliminating Social Security, Medicare, and pretty much any federal spending other than on national defense. Don’t take my word for it (or FAIR’s), check out the interview yourself at the Financial Times Web site.

I heard about a new Emacs toy today: xslt-process. It’s a minor mode that makes it easy to deal with XSLT style sheets within Emacs. I’m just about to start mucking around with XSLT for a project at work, so the announcement of version 2.0 was well timed for me.

Timothy Noah at Slate wonders how Karl Rove managed to get away with taking a meeting with Intel to discuss some merger issues that would directly affect his stock portfolio. My theory is that the Dubya White House is so deeply in bed with corporate interests that people can’t even figure out where to start when criticizing them. It’s like criticizing lead for being dense.

Microsoft unveiled a service for sharing source code from within Visual Studio at their TechEd conference. Developers can contribute code to the repository or browse the code in the repository directly from Visual Studio. Microsoft was careful to point out that it’s not “open source,” because, you know, they don’t like open source.

OK, Bill Gates doesn’t understand the GPL (or is deliberately lying about it), and CNet doesn’t understand much of anything. Bill Gates, like his Microsoft cronies, criticizes the GPL for its “Pac-Man like nature,” when in fact all it does is prevent people from leveraging the freely contributed work of others for their own material gain. How can that possibly be dangerous? If you don’t like the GPL, don’t contribute code to projects licensed under the GPL. It’s not hard. As far as CNet goes, apparently the writer of the article and his editors don’t understand what a “kernel” is, despite the fact that their content management system provided a link to the definition of the word.

Lou Gerstner is being knighted for his work in our benighted industry. Whatever.