Richard Mellon-Scaife’s personal outlet for conservative bile took Katharine Graham’s death as one last opportunity for a few low blows. Apparently they reached into their extremely shallow bag of tricks and decided that the Vince Foster gambit was appropriate, as they imply (none too subtly) that Graham shot her husband, who committed suicide in 1963.

Clay Shirky beseeches OEMs to pre-install the JVM on their computers, since Microsoft is dropping the JVM from Windows XP. Contrast this move with Apple’s pervasively hooking Mac OS X in with the JVM, and providing a Java interface for their OS calls. Java, for good or ill, has achieved pretty massive popularity since it was introduced. It’s obvious that Microsoft’s refusal to embrace Java is nothing more than an anti-competitive move. (Sun is partly to blame here as well, since they’ve made it tough for Microsoft to embrace Java as well, and generally crowed about being at war with Microsoft for years now.)

dotemacs is the site I’ve been looking for forever.

A reader sent in some details on the death of the protester at the G8 summit in Genoa. It was definitely a situation that had gotten out of hand, and the vandals who were attacking the police vehicle were as much to blame for the fatality as the person who did the shooting. I would say the same thing to “anarchists” that I would to the authorities – violence isn’t the answer.

I don’t usually link to stuff I find at Slashdot (under the assumption that everyone but me reads it regularly), but I couldn’t pass up this interview with Dave Lebling, one of the founders of Infocom. What amazed me most was the platform limitations they ran into with their early games. It’s a no brainer to think of the massive 3D stuff we have in modern games taxing the platforms on which they run, but it stuns me to think back on the time when something like Zork had to coded with performance in mind.

I’m only still catching up on the 500+ emails I received while I was out of town. One of the big tech news events I missed was the onslaught of the Code Red worms, which managed to nail thousands of sites, including Microsoft’s own Windows Update site. Bruce Schneier’s take on Code Red is clearly written and informative, as usual.