Posts

The Slacktivist reports that Levi’s doesn’t actually make jeans any more. I haven’t worn Levi’s in years because I don’t care for the fit, but I find that a bit sad anyway.

Apparently, dropping out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination gives you lots of time to write useful legislation. Bob Graham has introduced a bill that would make our election results more legitimate, requiring disclosure of technology used, a real audit trail, and mandatory recounts in randomly selected jurisdictions to verify that things are working. Now if we could get some of the other Senators that are running way behind to quit and work on writing laws, who knows what we could accomplish? (Link via Medley.) ...

FeedDemon 1.0 is ready. I’ve been using it as my aggregator for months. Now I’ll be paying for it.

What can you say about this? If accurate, holy crap.

For the past year or so, I’ve been reading about the current generation of phones with built in cameras, support for wireless Internet access, and all sorts of other nifty goodies. When it came time to upgrade my wireless service, I went to Cingular and picked up a Sony Ericsson T616 phone. I also signed up for GPRS service so I could check my email using my phone or whatever. Unfortunately, since I signed up, I’ve had nothing but problems. I’m dying to try out the GPRS service, but it took them nearly a week to get my account configured properly, and now that it’s set up, it looks like the GPRS coverage doesn’t include my home. So, while I wanted to write up a cool review of what it’s like to be on the wireless Internet, instead I’m whining about bad service. That’s always how it seems to go. One thing I can say is that the phone itself is very nice, I can only imagine how nice it would be if I could get news, sports, and weather regardless of where I happened to be. ...

I like Howard Dean, but some of his poll numbers really scare me. I think he’d be a fine President, but if he can’t beat Bush I want a different nominee.

Don Box wrote a post mentioning quotes from Richard Stevens’ home page that don’t make sense given that he passed away in 1999. It touches on an off and on obsession of mine, which is, what would happen to my Web site if I die. I’d hate to be killed in a car accident one day and just have this Web site stop being updated until pair.com turns it off for lack of payment. I’ve considered everything from giving a close friend the passwords to update the site if something bad happened to writing a piece of software that will scan the obituaries to make sure that I’m not in them, and will automatically update the site with a link to my obit were it to appear. I know it’s weird and morbid, but it is something I think about. Update: Greg Knauss emailed with the perfect simple solution – the weblog dead man’s switch. Basically you just set up a cron job that checks to see whether you haven’t posted for a certain amount of time (longer than you would ever go between posts, obviously). If the specified time limit has passed, it emails all the information necessary to update your Web page to a trusted third party who can verify your status and post an update on your whereabouts. Simple and effective! The only drawback is the discomfort of asking a friend to update your Web site if you die. ...

A common pattern involves someone making a statement that’s fairly profound, and then a flood of people adopting it, misinterpreting it (usually through oversimplification), and then misusing it to support arguments that the original person who made the statement never would have agreed with in the first place. That pattern fits for the old “worse is better” essay that is much loved among software developers. Jim Waldo has written a piece for Artima that revisits worse is better and clears up some misconceptions. Here’s the crux of his argument: ...

Obviously the big news of the day is Al Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean. Josh Marshall has posted lots of interesting analysis at Talking Points Memo. William Saletan has also posted some valid criticism of the meaning of endorsing a candidate at this point at Slate.

You’ve reached the lowest level of the Hinternet when your computer and network connection don’t even really belong to you any more. The New York Times reports today on how trojan horse programs are used to take over people’s computers and use them to relay spam, distribute porn, or do other things that the scumbags use to make money. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t discuss how these programs are distributed, although we can guess that it’s through unpatched computers, email viruses, and the slimiest of malware. ...