Somehow I just find it funny that someone whose music is too bad to steal would be fronting an anti-piracy campaign.

John Gruber’s interview with shareware author Maarten Hekkelman is interesting for many reasons. I was going to pull some specific quotes, but it’s probably worth reading end to end.

I just wanted to congratulate Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire Lite 1.0. I don’t use it because I don’t have a Mac, but judging from my log files, plenty of other people are. It was just released recently, and it has leapt to the top of the list of RSS aggregators that people are using to access the site.

Nick Denton makes a good point about the algorithm that generates the Google News home page: it discriminates against exclusives. In other words, it’s not yet perfect. Think about this, though, how can a human being keep up with exclusives anyway? I mean, I generally hit Today’s Papers at Slate every day, which points out the big stories (and exclusives) in five major US papers, but if the Times of London, or the South China Morning Post, or Times of India has an exclusive, chances are I miss it until it’s covered in the US papers anyway.

Google does a great job of showing which stories are getting a lot of coverage, and even better, how coverage differs based on locality. For example, yesterday one of the top entertainment stories was about the finalists for the Booker Prize (a big book award in the UK). The UK papers talked about an Irish novelist being the likely winner. Canadian papers tended to talk about some Canadian authors being on the short list. US papers failed to cover it at all. Iran’s president is trying to gain passage of a new law that would let him crack down on members of other branches of the government that violate the constitution — thus letting him get rid of members of the judiciary that are Islamic hardliners. Checking out Google’s list of stories on the topic, you can see how papers around the world are handling the story. It’s not that this is the first time we’ve seen news story aggregation, it’s that it’s so efficient. Google can programatically aggregate stories from many more sources and on many more topics than a service driven by humans could.

Researchers in Montana have trained bees to find land mines. The article fails to mention one of the key benefits of using bees instead of dogs or people to find mines — bees don’t weigh enough to set off the mines if they make a mistake.

In addition to saying some really stupid things about Jews, Dick Armey also had this to say:

Liberals are in my estimation just not bright people. They don’t think deeply; they don’t comprehend; they don’t understand. … They have a narrow educational base, as opposed to the hard scientists.

This from the man who is the poster child for the know-nothing wing of the Republican party.

I kicked in my $25 for Trillian Pro today. It’s worth the cash, and besides that, those guys have been doing good work for awhile now. One thing I noticed is that there’s an RSS plugin for Trillian Pro available that I haven’t yet messed with. It looks promising, though.

eWeek is reporting that IBM with Apple on a new 64 bit processor called the GPUL. Given that the performance disparity between the G4 and x86 processors growing, Apple needs a way out. A new processor from IBM makes more sense than moving Mac OS X to the x86 architecture, not only because such a port would be risky, but also because Apple moving to a commodity platform could threaten its relationship with Microsoft. The bottom line is that Apple needs Microsoft Office badly, and Internet Explorer as well, so Apple can’t afford to put Mac OS X up against Windows head to head.

Dave Johnson recaps the Triange JUG J2EE Container Shootout from last night. After reading his summary, I wish I had gone. As I’ve said before, I’m utterly mystified by J2EE, and furthermore, I’m a big fan of relational databases. I feel like I need to buy a good book on J2EE and actually take it for a spin, but I haven’t made the time to do so yet.

Reviews of the British report on the threat Iraq poses seem to be mixed. Certainly it doesn’t seem that there’s anything in there that we don’t already know. Iraq’s “culture minister” dismissed the report as part of a “Zionist campaign against Iraq.” One would hope that the Iraqi government could come up with a better rebuttal than that, the lamest of all excuses in the Middle East.