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As promised, Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin filibustered the extension to the PATRIOT Act today, and perhaps surprisingly, a cloture vote failed. That means that the bill goes back to the drawing board for revisions to satisfy Feingold and his allies. What I find more interesting, though, is that Senator Feingold has been blogging about [...]

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J. Alex Halderman at Freedom to Tinker has a helpful guide to creating your own copy protected audio CDs. You can be just like Sony only without the rootkit or public humiliation.

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Nature, the leading scientific journal did a study comparing the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia articles to those in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and found that Wikipedia is not substantially worse. Most of the problems people have with Wikipedia concern controversial topics that are in the news right now, and those are the hardest to [...]

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Given the announcement that people are going to be able to write their own search engines that utilize Alexa’s index and Google has announced an API for creating widgets for Google Homepage, how long must we wait for an application that will enable us to search Alexa’s index from Google?

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Biodiesel is great, right? Cooking oil that was going to be thrown away anyway gets converted to fuel that can be used in lieu of petrochemicals. When demand rises you turn surplus corn and soybean crops into biodiesel. Unfortunately, palm oil (often produced on plantations where rain forests once stood) is a cheaper source [...]

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As much as I love using Ruby on Rails, I still find it a bit rough around the edges. For one thing, the documentation leaves much to be desired. As I’ve said before, Agile Web Development with Rails is a great computer book, but Rails is far too large to be fully documented in [...]

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The US Postal Service is much maligned for poor customer service, inefficiency, and being a bloated government bureaucracy. They’re big, they touch everyone’s lives, and the sometimes screw up, so they’re an easy target for ridicule. I have to say that there’s one thing I generally like about the postal service though, and that’s low [...]

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Ruby on Rails 1.0 is out. Perfect timing for me at work being that we’re deep in the throes of implementing a Ruby on Rails application. We are finding deployment a bit scary, but I imagine that with the rapid uptake Rails is enjoying, it will be as easily deployed as PHP within the next [...]

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Jon Carroll’s column yesterday captures my feelings on capital punishment perfectly.

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In a bit of a change of pace from the usual content here, I’m posting a job listing. I’m looking for a UI designer/Web developer to design the interface for a brand new content management system implemented using Ruby on Rails. This person will also contribute to the design of the public Web site where [...]

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