I hear Chimera is an excellent pain management tool for would-be Mozilla users on Mac OS X.

Business 2.0 finally comes around to what I’ve been saying here for years, which is that Amazon is successful because of their great software. The article points out how well Amazon has done providing an e-commerce platform for other companies like Target, Toys R Us, and Borders. Those companies didn’t sign up with Amazon because they wanted to leverage Amazon’s brand, it’s because they wanted to use Amazon’s software and expertise. Check out Amazon’s listing of software development job openings, it’s pretty obvious that Amazon is a software company masquerading as a retailer.

There are reports today that India might grant Pakistan a two month grace period to dismantle the Kashmiri terrorist groups it normally supports, which things may once again be moving away from the brink. The tough talk on both sides continues, but it appears some negotiation is going on behind the scenes.

Donald Rumsfeld issued more dire redundancies earlier today.

alphaWorks has released Robocode, an implementation of the old programmer’s game Core Wars designed to help people learn Java.

New York Times: Digital Video Recorders Give Advertisers Pause

One question that has bugged me for awhile is why the strawberries at the grocery store (even at upscale grocers like Whole Foods) always suck, and why the strawberries that garnish desserts at decent restaurants are great. Recently, I figured it out. There’s a very very fine line between a strawberry that’s optimally ripe in terms of taste and texture and a strawberry that is a mushy little rotten thing. Grocery stores can’t afford to stock ripe strawberries because by the time they get from the field to the customer’s home, they’ll be rotten. So instead they sell strawberries that are picked before they are ripe, and are thus hard and sour, and just make me pine for ripe strawberries. The turnaround time between picking a strawberry and incorporating it into a restaurant dessert is much shorter, so in the restaurant trade they can afford to offer customers ripe strawberries. Now the question is whether I can find a local strawberry field where I can pick my own, optimally ripe strawberries.

Today there was an NPR segment that explained how chimps (RealAudio stream) are as technologically advanced as the contestants on the most recent season of Survivor. For those of you wise enough to avoid all of RealAudio’s products, National Geographic has an article on the tool-using chimps as well.

The Washington Post reports that Microsoft has been lobbying the military to stop using open source software. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working.

The current line from the pro-Bush camp seems to be that columnists and commentators who are criticizing the President’s entourage for the deluge of warnings about terrorism over the past week are just trying to set him up so that they can slam him when the next terrorist attack occurs. Maybe that is the motive of some of the President’s critics, but I think it’s reasonable to reject warnings that are made simply for the purpose of providing some sort of plausible political cover.

For example, the FBI director’s warnings were made not to give us information we can use to protect ourselves, but rather so that we can brace ourselves for what he knows is coming. Is that really necessary? I think we all realized that America is vulnerable to terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, if we didn’t know it already. Now that everyone from the Vice President on down has told us that we’re going to be attacked again, they can relax and say “It’s not like we didn’t warn you” the next time something awful happens. Is that really going to gain them anything?