You know your life is becoming truly pedestrian when one of your greatest immediate concerns is that TruGreen Chemlawn overfertilized your yard and killed a couple of big patches of grass.

You know what, Ken Layne is also publishing some sort of bloggish thing on his Web site these days. Now that all the reputable journalists are doing it, I don’t know if it’s safe for nimrods such as myself any more. (Closer examination reveals that Layne has been blogging for about a year, which pretty much exposes me as being completely out of touch.)

Several computers at Netscape have been infected by Code Red. I imagine they’re either Windows servers that people turned on and didn’t secure, leaving a crackable IIS installation on by default, or servers set up for testing something or another.

Ken Layne strikes back! His latest OJR column savages the perpetually downtrodden Salon, as only he can. Personally, I think he’s too hard on Salon, which has a lot more quality material than he gives it credit for. It’s the kind of column, though, that people working at Salon should read and take stock of, because I imagine that Layne is saying what a lot of other people in the media are thinking: “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich.”

The Industry Standard is ceasing publication. They’re going to keep the online version going in hopes of finding a buyer. How long ago was it that the mag was too heavy to pick up due to all the ads?

Rogers sent me a link to this press release announcing a For Dummies … slot machine. I thought all slot machines were for dummies.

A long time ago, I had a serious Be fetish. I wanted a BeBox. I thought the BeOS was the coolest operating system ever. I was sure that Be was going to change the world of personal computing, with a zippy, clean OS and pervasive support for multiprocessor boxes that would allow us to build computers with tons of really cheap processors and achieve absurd performance. Needless to say, Be hasn’t done all that well, and their story comes to a close with the sale of all of their intellectual property to Palm for a lousy $11 million. The company itself will cease to exist.

Yesterday on NPR I heard the story of Vanessa Leggett, a Houston writer who is currently imprisoned for contempt of court because she won’t turn over the notes for a book she’s writing to the U.S. Attorney in a racketeering case (that stems from a murder case that the government lost). Her case is interesting because the Justice Department refused to grant her first amendment rights as a “journalist” because she hasn’t been published by a major corporate media outlet (her book on the murder has not yet been completed). Originally they argued that she hadn’t been published at all, but it turns out she had edited a publication for the Justice Department itself. Needless to say, independent journalists have many reasons to fear what happened to Ms. Leggett if the court refuses to agree that she is not owed the same rights that a reporter for the New York Times or Newsweek is granted. (You can also listen to the NPR story using RealAudio.)

O’ReillyNet has posted the transcript from the Open Source vs. Shared Source panel at the Open Source Conference.

Wired News has a Reuters story on increasing use of Linux in the digital effects industry. Since those guys are mainly looking for raw computing power, and their software runs on some UNIX-variant most of the time anyway, it makes sense to go the cheapest route possible. Linux and commodity hardware are as good a choice as any from that perspective.