Eric Sink has posted an explanation of why a lone programmer would use source code control. I think the most important reason is that if you’re a software developer who’s used to source code control, you feel very, very strange without it. Just editing files that aren’t backed up in a version control system would just freak me out at this point.

Red Hat has canned their regular boxed Linux distribution in order to push their customers to purchase subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There will no doubt be howls of outrage, but it’s a strategy that makes sense. Despite the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux costs more than regular old Red Hat Linux, it’s still pretty cheap compared to most enterprise products, and it will now be aimed straight at business customers who want to make sure the packages included with their distribution are stable and tested. Regular users who want to stick with Red Hat will be using Fedora, which will be better for them anyway since it will be updated frequently. The old Red Hat Linux distribution didn’t serve either master really well — it was too volatile for the enterprise and didn’t evolve fast enough for individual users. Now Fedora will serve as the test bed for stuff that Red Hat will carefully adopt for their enterprise distribution. Good strategy, I think.

The infamous memo from a former Fox News producer from Romenesko’s letters section the other day has kindled a mini-deluge of coverage of the news network (which I confess to having ever watched for more than 20 seconds straight):

• Salon interviewed Charlie Reina, the guy who wrote the original letter. (Salon does a great job of assigning these sorts of extremely timely interviews as stories break in the online world.)
• Jay Rosen: PressThink: The Other Bias at Fox News: Volume.
• Jay Rosen: The Fox News Daily Memo: Is the Fix In?.

I’ll keep my eyes open for other Fox News coverage.

Last year, the first time Mississippi judge Charles Pickering was nominated to a spot on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, I opposed his nomination strongly, based on what I’d read. His nomination wound up dying thanks to a Democratic filibuster, and Bush has nominated him to the same court again. After reading more about the case, I suspect that my initial judgement of Pickering was too hasty. This Nat Hentoff column has details.

A company called Netcraft keeps track of all of the public Web servers it can find (about 45 million domain names currently). One thing they do is track statistics for Web server software. When people talk about the fact that the majority of Web servers run Apache, it’s the Netcraft statistics that they were talking about. A month or so ago (maybe longer), Microsoft’s Web server software (Internet Information Software) posted a huge gain in the rankings, and there was some speculation that Linux and Apache were losing ground to Microsoft. For some people (and I’ll include myself in this group), angst ensued.

As it turns out, nearly all of these large shifts occur due to changes in the platforms used by companies that park lots of domains. When your register a domain, a name server has to be provided. If you don’t have your hosting service set up for the domain yet, most registrars will park a domain for you until you migrate it to your own hosting provider, putting up a default page of some kind (often bristling with annoying ads). Many people buy domains on a speculative basis or on a whim and don’t do anything with them (I have 3 or 4 that are just parked right now). If a registrar changes the hosting platform for their parked domains, it can cause a big shift in the overall Web server statistics. Those kinds changes account for nearly all the tectonic shifts over the past few years. In their most recent report (linked above), Netcraft reports that Microsoft has spent the past couple of years actively lobbying these registrars to use their products to host parked domains in order to skew the statistics in their favor. Over the past month, two really large services have dumped Microsoft, thus explaining Microsoft’s latest fall in market share.

I read a couple of interesting comments this morning on Paul Bremer’s decision to impose a flat tax in Iraq. Juan Cole explains that the tax rate isn’t nearly as important an issue as oil revenue, and mentions that as military occupiers we’re not within our rights in making these sorts of decisions anyway. Josh Marshall notices that using occupied countries (or colonies) as labs for the pet projects of imperialists has long been a common practice.

Regardless of my personal opinion of the various candidates, polls currently seem to indicate that Wesley Clark seems to have the best chance of beating Bush of all of the current Democratic candidates for the Presidency. Professional poll-watcher Ruy Texeira takes on the question of how Clark can win the nomination here and here. (He also covers the poll results that illustrate just how much more likely it is that Clark can win than any other Democrat.)

Update: here’s the reason why electability is important.

You’d think that releasing a version of the help files for Firebird in Macedonian is an event that would pass without controversy. Not so. Apparently the fact that Macedonia is referred to as Macedonia and Macedonians refer to their language as such puts a burr under the saddle of certain Greek nationalists.

The New Yorker ran an interview with Sy Hersh to accompany his article, The Stovepipe, that covered the misuse of our intelligence services by the Bush administration that’s very enlightening.