I was going to comment on the terrorism futures market, but instead I’ll just point you to Scott Rosenberg’s comments. Every time I read an article about this idea, I can’t help but think of Enron.

The Mozilla Foundation has released Firebird 0.6.1 and Thunderbird 0.1. I’ve been using Firebird 0.6 and some random Thunderbird un-numbered milestone release for my browsing and email needs for weeks and have no significant complaints.

The nice thing about the last of your friends at work being laid off is that you finally get a chance to reintroduce yourself to online music broadcasting services.

It’s times like these for which Hunter S Thompson is prescribed.

I’ve linked to Phil Carter’s weblog, Intel Dump, a couple of times, but I want to go ahead and recommend it in a general sense. Carter is a law student at UCLA and prior to that was an Army officer. His observations on the military are always illuminating, and he does a great job of ferreting out the best reporting on the war in Iraq. I put him in the “go ahead and read everything they write” category. One downside is that there’s no RSS feed so I have to remember to visit every couple of days or so.

Tim Bray on the Web:

In my life’s experience, the Web has constituted one of the really important steps forward, a blow against the forces of entropy and stupidity.

I already knew this (via Whump).

By the way, this link is provided specifically to goad my weekend guest. You know who you are.

At home I have a desktop computer that I use mainly for games. Well, one specific game anyway. For everything else, I use my laptop at home (a Pentium III 850 with 256 megs of RAM) or my laptop from work (a Pentium III 900 with 512 megs of RAM). The game PC has 512 megs of DDR RAM and an Athlon XP 1800 (which is like 1500mhz or thereabouts). Anyway, recently I’ve needed to do some Java development at home, and the home laptop just doesn’t have enough RAM to run Eclipse the way I’d like it to be run. What I’ve discovered, though, is that my desktop PC, for standard development tasks, is astoundingly faster than my work laptop for just about everything.

It has a better video card, a faster processor, faster RAM, a bigger, faster hard drive and on and on and on. I could replace the whole thing for about five or six hundred bucks, and tack on a good 17″ LCD for another $400 or so. I realize that we’re in the midst of the laptop revolution, but the bang for the buck you get from desktops is just absurd. When I see Ant scripts that take 30 seconds to run on my work laptop run in 8 seconds on my dirt cheap self-assembled desktop PC, I wonder if we haven’t taken this portable thing a bit too far.

Dave Johnson has post today on unit testing for web apps. That’s the next step for me. I’ve been heavily into JUnit for testing APIs lately, and I want to branch into writing tests for the web front ends as well on my next project.

Joe Gregorio has started his own company, conveniently called BitWorking, Inc. He’d like you to know that they specialize in custom system development.