Salon Premium has a thoughtful article on Total Information Awareness that offers arguments both for and against the massive data warehouse of everything everybody does. I’m still against it. I said immediately after 9/11 that the failure to prevent the attacks was an IT problem, but I don’t think that the Poindexter solution is the answer.

Russell Beattie has an interesting entry about subject matter for his weblog. What to post and what not to post is a tough decision, I think. You’ll find that I never mention my employer here, the reason for that is I never want to run into a problem where I’ve said something about my employer or their products that they don’t particulary like and have to answer for it to my manager (or his boss). I also try to avoid mentioning competing products as well, but I fail on that front occasionally, much to my chagrin. Other than that, subject matter is pretty much no holds barred, with the exception that I know my immediate family members read this stuff at least some of the time, and I try to avoid saying things that they would find too jarring. The fact that my mother could be reading this at any time leads me to think a bit about the language I use.

The other means I have for keeping things compartmentalized is that I’m not “Rafe the guy with the blog” in the non-virtual world. I don’t really talk about the site at work, nor do I discuss it offline with friends and family, unless asked about it specifically. In fact, when I meet people in the physical world and they mention that they know me from this site, it kind of freaks me out. And the really weird thing is that I almost never write about personal stuff here, I can’t imagine disclosing the intimate details of my personal life online and having to meet people for real who had read them. Needless to say, I’ll probably never write a memoir. I guess for me intimacy is more a two way street. I have great sympathy for people who are famous and who have to deal with complete strangers every day who’ve read sordid detail of their lives on the gossip pages.

To illustrate how the new Total Information Awareness program is going to work, SF Weekly’s Matt Smith suggests that people give John Poindexter (the crook who’s heading up the program) a call at home and report any information he might need about people directly. John Gilmore goes one step further and suggests that people use Poindexter’s personal information to demonstrate exactly what sort of information might be gathered by the TIA program and stored in the big data warehouse in the sky. At Cryptome, the low hanging fruit have already been plucked.

For future reference: bikeshed discussions defined. This is such a useful metaphor that I will try utmost never to forget it. Indeed, I can’t wait to get the opportunity at a meeting to say, “Can we drop this bikeshed discussion?” Of course nobody there will know what the hell I’m talking about, but I don’t care.

You know, various conservative webloggers take joy in skewering the New York Times on a daily basis. Josh Marshall commented brilliantly on this phenomenon the other day, criticizing weblog triumphalism. It’s a hell of a lot easier to publish a blog and throw rocks at specific mistakes (or more often, the alleged political agenda of the writers) from the Times than it is to publish a daily paper that covers as much of what’s going on in the world as is feasible. That said, long time readers will know that I detest News.com. I realize that they cover the whole computer industry and that they have ridiculously short deadlines, but I just can’t resist mocking them for their obvious errors and poor writing. I generally become most upset when I go there looking for real information and find some poorly written piece of crap that contains as much nonsense as actual fact. For example, I read that Mozilla 1.2 had to be pulled due to a JavaScript error, and there’s a News.com story on the problem. The article doesn’t really explain the problem, says that tabbed browsing is a 1.2 feature, associates dynamic HTML mainly with advertisements, and exhibits a level of general cluelessness that’s downright depressing. The sad thing is, I didn’t expect any better.

One thing I’m learning about IntelliJ IDEA is that its users have a slavish devotion to it. If you’re a Java developer, chances are if you use it for a week or so, you’ll become one of those slavishly devoted users yourself. Anyway, I saw a link somewhere to 25 Reasons I Love Using IntelliJ Idea. Naturally, not only does the list explain part of what’s great about IDEA, it also contains useful tips for IntelliJ IDEA users.

John Gruber has been writing a lot about the Mac OS X Finder over at Daring Fireball lately. I haven’t been a full time Mac user in several years, and after reading his posts, I’m less enthusiastic than I was before about someday going back. More importantly, I’m less enthusiastic about buying my wife a Mac sometime soon. She loves the Mac, and hates using my desktop PC at home that runs Windows. I’m not sure how much happier she’d be with the Mac OS X, either, though. When she had her own Mac, she had all of her folders organized just so, as did most of the Mac users that I knew. The fact that Mac OS X no longer persists the size, shape, and internal organization of your folders destroys the thing that she likes best about the Mac, if I had to guess.

I intended to write something eloquent and moving here for World AIDS Day, but as you can see, I didn’t. However, I did read a great little essay at stonefishspine that you should read.