FeedDemon Beta 1.0b4 is out. By turning on the new “single key reading with spacebar” feature and remapping the keyboard shortcuts, I can read all my news channels using the spacebar, N, and G keys.

Update: it looks like the new beta deleted all the channels I had added myself under beta 3. Not good. Next time I’ll back up my subscriptions before updating.

Tim Bray has realized that you could create a massive version of linkedin.com using a clever email virus.

You would have thought it was obvious: French people who eat fat-laden diets stay thinner than Americans because they eat smaller portions than we do. My wife has been telling me for years that people in Europe just don’t eat as much as Americans, and that’s why they’re thinner. The food portions in nearly every American restaurant are absurd. Generally in fine restaurants, you get an appropriate portion of food, but at your typical Chili’s, Applebees, or TGI Fridays, the portions are monstrous. Similarly, it wasn’t that long ago that the amount of food served in a Happy Meal at McDonald’s was what they served to adults. Now, of course, it’s the triple cheese burger with a pound of fries and a bucket of soda. Most people will eat what’s put in front of them, regardless of nationality, and in America we’re experts at putting a heck of a lot of food in front of people.

Last week when the UN offices in Baghdad were bombed, I remember reading that the US was to blame because we hadn’t provided the same level of security for UN facilities that we provide for our own. TNR’s weblog dug up a bit of news with a quote from a UN official stating that the UN had actually declined higher security so as to be more available to the Iraqis.

TNR also has another item about a lawsuit against “all the Jews of the world” asking for compensation for treasure that was allegedly stolen when Jews escaped from slavery in Egypt around 6000 years ago. Clearly such a lawsuit is an absurdity on just about every level, but one interesting note is that were such a lawsuit to actually make it to trial (and I sure hope that it doesn’t), the defense attorneys for the Jews may be best served by arguing that the captivity never actually happened at all. The current state of the archaeological record seems to indicate that there was no Jewish captivity in Egypt, and that in fact the story was written by Jewish scholars during the Jewish captivity on Babylon in order to give them hope that they would escape that predicament. Such a defense, would, of course, upset apple carts of all kinds.

I didn’t want to have to be the one to say it, but hasn’t ESR become the Jesse Jackson of open source? (Evidence.)

Today I received a spam at a completely non-rc3.org related address with the subject “good blog” (it was for some kind of naked teen porn site or something). I guess the fact that spammers think that subject will encourage people to open an email means that we’ve officially arrived.

Matt Haughey: TiVo’s Apple problem. As far as it goes, I think that Tivo’s best bet is to license its software and service as broadly as possible. I love my Tivo(s), but I got a sinking feeling when I found out that I could get a PVR from Time-Warner Cable for 5 bucks a month that actually has two tuners. In the meantime I’m paying $13 a month for each of my Tivos, and even worse, I own them, so I can’t just send them back to the cable company and get a newer, better model when one comes out. One thing is for certain, once you’ve lived the PVR lifestyle, you can never go back. Eventually all cable companies will have a PVR offering of some kind, and Tivo needs to be aggressive in claiming a piece of that pie.

Whump provides a brief tutorial on creating RSS feeds for publications that are lacking using a few common tools Web page hackers have laying around. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I have never done such scraping myself. I just hit some Web sites the old fashioned way every day or so.

Lawrence Lessig comments succinctly on one of the more outrageous stories I’ve read recently. (I’m not sure why I didn’t link to it.) The subject is the WIPO’s decision to nix a proposed meeting on open source software thanks to heavy lobbying by the likes of Microsoft. If you’re judging companies by their actions rather than their words, then it’s becoming evident that open source is really starting to scare the hell out of the vested interests in the software industry.

I really want to stop posting SCO-related items, but I just can’t. Their latest allegation is that the backlash against them in the open source community is being orchestrated by IBM. Let’s be blunt here, if SCO thinks that Eric S Raymond needs to be prodded into going off about something related to open source, they really haven’t done their homework.