Word is that Sun vice president Rich Green quit in disgust after the deal that Sun announced with Microsoft last week. I can’t wait until the day when I have enough money in the bank to quit a job in disgust. I’ve toiled for my entire career in a near constant state of disgust about this or that and never had the financial freedom to tell my bosses to take this job and shove it. It’s disappointing.

Playfair is an application that strips the DRM out of files purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Get it fast before somebody hammers them with a lawsuit under the DMCA and Apple patches iTunes to disable the application.

John Anderson at genehack.org made a great catch when digging through a stack of old Wired magazines. Tim Bray: Why I Hate the Web. I had similar feelings about the Web when I first encountered it, in 1994.

Here’s an excerpt from an article describing Fallujah that I saw linked to somewhere:

Deeply conservative and anti-American, Fallujah has a population of some 200,000, all of whom are members of Islam’s mainstream Sunni Muslim sect. Some subscribe to radical interpretations of Islam, finding behavior by American troops like raiding homes and detaining men in front of wives and children as deeply offensive.

It’s the kind of basic brain paralysis observed in this paragraph that keeps people from understanding the challenges we face in Iraq. Does one really have to subscribe to a “radical interpretation of Islam” to be offended and angered by living in a world where your home can be raided in the middle of the night by foreign soldiers and you can be hauled off to jail without actually having to be accused of anything?

On March 28, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq closed down a newspaper run by a radical Shiite group because it incited violence. Shutting down the paper seems to have incited a lot more violence than the paper ever did before it was shut down. One of the lessons from the New Yorker biography of Ayman al Zawahiri was that the radicals in the Islamic Brotherhood turned to violence when the Egyptian government denied them the opportunity for peaceful political expression. The government curried their favor when it was needed, but then never followed through when the immediate need had passed. I wonder if the Sadrists in Iraq are feeling gamed in the same way. The thought of a popular uprising among Shiites is too depressing to really contemplate.

In other news, here’s why you might not see many major media reports of the uprising.

Somehow I missed this survey of Word documents from microsoft.com and the revisions that were not expunged before they were published.

This program saved my life tonight: phpCodeBeautifier. It’s amazing how much more readable properly indented code is.

William Saletan points out that George W Bush creates the flip-floppers he later attacks.

Today people are beginning to kvetch about the privacy implications of Gmail. The concerns hinge on a number of issues:

• Google will be able to correlate what people search for with their email identity if they use Gmail. You give up some anonymity when Google can map your search requests to your email address.
• Google will be doing content inspection on your email to serve you ads related to what’s in your email.
• Google is just too damn big these days. Both of the items above also apply to Yahoo, but nobody uses Yahoo for search these days so I guess Yahoo seems like less of a threat.

To me, the content inspection problem is not a big one, unless you don’t trust Google. I think the issue is more creepiness than violation. If you send your wife an email asking her what she wants to do for your anniversary, and up pop ads for local restaurants, trips to the Bahamas, or 1-800-Flowers, then that would be a bit odd. At the same time, ISPs that run spam filters are clearly doing content inspection on your email, and when you use webmail, your email is always in somebody else’s hands. I use IMAP so my ISP has sole custody of my email. If they wanted to grep for things or whatever, I certainly couldn’t stop them. This concern seems overblown to me.

The idea of making your search requests less anonymous is a bit more worrisome.

I’ve been playing with Eclipse 3.0M8 for the past couple of days, and I’m amazed at the number of improvements that have been rolled in since M7. The new GUI is great, and the overall it and finish of the application is impressive. Unfortunately, on my most recent progress, I decided to use Subversion rather than CVS for version control, and the Subclipse plug-in isn’t ready for M8 yet. (It also hasn’t been updated for Subversion 1.0 yet, but the current version works fine with my Subversion 1.0 repository.) I also use MyEclipse for J2EE stuff, and that’s not ready for M8, either, but there’s a new release planned for next week. I guess I could just wait for all of this stuff to be released for real, but that’s no fun.