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The other day someone asked me why I used the word “lede” instead of “lead” to talk about the opening paragraph in a news story. Actually, I believe they told me I had spelled it wrong. Anyway, the reason I did it was that I see all the journalism types spell it that way, and I was following the trend. I just learned that there is a reason they do so, and it actually makes sense. The Today’s Papers glossary defines “lead” as “The news story deemed most important by the newspaper. In most papers, the lead appears on the front page at the top of the right-hand column.” The other lead is spelled “lede” to avoid confusion. Update: A reader sent in this even better explanation of how terms like “lede” came to be: ...

The JBoss Group has hired Gavin King, the main developer on the Hibernate project, and Hibernate has become a JBoss project. That’s good news. My only question is whether that means that all the Hibernate docs are going to be removed from the Web site.

The Sunday Washington Post had an op-ed piece by a Palestinian describing first hand what their existence is like.

Remeber when AOL “bought” Time Warner? Now AOL Time Warner is dropping AOL from its name.

Looks like the maintainers of BIND (the software that provides DNS services for most name servers) are going to route around the Verisign DNS hack that was introduced this week.

Somehow I missed that part 2 of Slate’s Guide to the Patriot Act was published the other day.

Timothy Noah has an update on the Valerie Plame scandal. Ambassador Wilson has stated in no uncertain terms that it was Karl Rove that outed his wife as an undercover CIA agent to Robert Novak. He has since backtracked from the assertion, but given the way he stated it at the time, I believe that’s who he thinks did it. One wonders why there hasn’t been a more thorough investigation into this outright lawlessness. ...

Kevin Drum: An Interview With Paul Krugman

Tim Bray offers a first hand account of the process of filing for software patents.

Zug was one of the first things I saw on the Web that made me laugh really, really hard. Those prank emails from “Baked Ham” at aol.com were great at the time. Until I saw a link at Boing Boing today, I didn’t know that he was up to the same old pranks. In this case, he has the transcript of a prank call to the RIAA.