I really want to boycott RIAA, but judging from this list, doing so is pretty complicated. I bought four CDs this week, all used via half.com. Sucks for the artists but it’s one way to be sure you’re not paying anybody’s RIAA dues.

I’m always amazed when people who live and work on barrier islands are shocked at the damage that hurricanes do. Barrier islands are just big piles of sand that ordinarily migrate up and down the coast with changes in weather and currents, and yet we brilliant human being insist upon building things on them and doing our best to make them stay in one place. I know people love to live on the beach, but the price of that is periodic utter destruction.

This is why a widely used system for digitally signing email messages should be in place by now.

I have a whole new respect for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq now that I know that they’ve accompished all that they have without the benefit of useful phone service. Who decided that letting WorldCom give cellular service a whirl in Iraq was a good idea? (I’d love to see the $4,000 phones they’re using, too.)

Germany Will Share the Burden in Iraq is the headline from an op-ed by German chancellor Gerhard Schroder in today’s New York Times. I’ve been wondering who was going to be the greater leader and bridge the gap between the coalition that invaded Iraq and the countries that didn’t accept the premise for doing so, and it looks like Schroder wins.

Phil Carter also comments on the development.

They’re called “gimme caps” not “trucker caps.” I’d also like to note that they’re best worn without irony.

Update: here’s a description of the fad, for those of you who didn’t know this was a fad.

The hunt for a WMD describes efforts by a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor to follow up on a lead on what was allegedly a cylinder of nerve gas in Iraq.

Apache Maven Simplifies the Java Build Process: an introduction to Maven. I’ve tried Maven before but gave up for some reason. Maybe I should try it again.

The other day someone asked me why I used the word “lede” instead of “lead” to talk about the opening paragraph in a news story. Actually, I believe they told me I had spelled it wrong. Anyway, the reason I did it was that I see all the journalism types spell it that way, and I was following the trend. I just learned that there is a reason they do so, and it actually makes sense. The Today’s Papers glossary defines “lead” as “The news story deemed most important by the newspaper. In most papers, the lead appears on the front page at the top of the right-hand column.” The other lead is spelled “lede” to avoid confusion.

Update: A reader sent in this even better explanation of how terms like “lede” came to be:

There is another, slightly older reason that lede is as it is. In the days when text was typed out (and then often had written amendments scrawled all over it) and then sent to typesetters to actually produce the paper, it was necessary make a distinction between written copy to be set and the instructions relating to it. The easiest way to do this was to miss-spell the instructions. Hence, lede, hed (for headline), col, graf (for paragraph) and the lovely TK for any fact that still needed to be checked. TK is in fact a double example of this as, according to some, its an abbreviation of “to kome” i.e. that the text will definitely be changed at least once. It then turned into TK, which does the same job.

We still use these in the electronic era. These days they have the advantage that they will be flagged by the spell check, provided nobody has been foolish enough to add them to the custom dictionary.

The JBoss Group has hired Gavin King, the main developer on the Hibernate project, and Hibernate has become a JBoss project. That’s good news. My only question is whether that means that all the Hibernate docs are going to be removed from the Web site.