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It figures Apple would release a new iPod only a few months after I got mine. The main feature that appeals to me are the iPod Mini controls, which are much nicer than the old style iPod controls. I’ve never run the battery all the way down on my iPod (while listening), and I haven’t filled up its hard drive yet. And hey, I’m not as bad off as Karl Lagerfeld, who now owns 40 dated iPods and a custom made bag to hold them. ...

Joel Spolsky observes that Microsoft bought out the company that makes the best search add-on for Outlook not to improve searching in Outlook, but rather to improve MSN’s search engine. They’re killing the search add-on that everybody seemed to love effective immediately. So, Joel has updated, and Anil mentions that the searching component in Lookout was actually Jakarta Lucene, an open source text search component. So who knows why Microsoft bought Lookout? ...

Miguel de Icaza said something in an InfoWorld interview that kind of blew me away. I have to go off and think about it, in terms of the Web, my career, and so forth. What he said is, “Avalon is the next ActiveX.” He then goes on to talk about the ways it improves upon ActiveX. If it really takes off, that’s bad news for those of us who don’t earn our salaries programming to Microsoft APIs. ...

Eric Sink has a good article on MSDN about how to hire developers. I agree with most of his recommendations. The one about looking for people with degrees from good computer science programs stings a bit, since I don’t have that, but I suspect that it’s good advice. To me, his last piece of advice on hiring is the one that marks my hiring strategy – look for people who have a passion for developing software. When I interview people, that’s the biggest thing I look for. I want to work with people who are writing software because they can’t really imagine doing anything else for a living. ...

The New York Times issues a mea culpa today on its editorial page: During the run-up to the war, The Times ran dozens of editorials on Iraq, and our insistence that any invasion be backed by "broad international support" became a kind of mantra. It was the administration's failure to get that kind of consensus that ultimately led us to oppose the war. But we agreed with the president on one critical point: that Saddam Hussein was concealing a large weapons program that could pose a threat to the United States or its allies. We repeatedly urged the United Nations Security Council to join with Mr. Bush and force Iraq to disarm. ...

According to the Slate Red and Blue quiz, which purports to determine whether you’re more culturally predisposed to being “red” or “blue.” Unsurprisingly, I find myself in the red category. I’ve lived in red states just about all my life (Texas and North Carolina mostly). I guess I’m a self-hating red stater or something.

I wasn’t surprised to read this morning that Microsoft had acquired Lookout, a company that produced a well regarded search extension for Outlook. As my Gmail volume increases, I find myself relying more and more on the search facility to find old mail, and missing that facility when I read my mail in Thunderbird. Thunderbird has decent search features, but they’re not as easily accessible as they are in Gmail. I’m absolutely terrible about organizing my mail (I have over 1500 messages in my in regular in box, not including the 200+ threads in my Gmail in box), so the idea of just tossing all my mail into a big bucket and searching it using full text search is unbelievably appealing. Obviously Microsoft recognized that, given their acquisition. Hopefully Thunderbird can be enhanced to provide similar functionality. ...

Adrian Holovaty posted about registration for online news sites today, basically pointing out that forcing users to register to see articles but not providing any other value to them via the registration process is pointless. I used to register for the big sites (like the New York Times), but at some point I just decided I wasn’t going to do it any more. As newspapers added registration to their sites, I just quit reading them. Now, of course, I just rely on BugMeNot. Their Mozilla extension makes it particularly easy to get a username and password for just about any news site that requires free registration. I don’t use BugMeNot out of some protectiveness over my personal information, which I know is already completely compromised, but rather out of laziness. I just got fed up with typing in my name, address, and so forth. ...

JK Galbraith: A cloud over civlisation