Posts

Last week when the UN offices in Baghdad were bombed, I remember reading that the US was to blame because we hadn’t provided the same level of security for UN facilities that we provide for our own. TNR’s weblog dug up a bit of news with a quote from a UN official stating that the UN had actually declined higher security so as to be more available to the Iraqis. TNR also has another item about a lawsuit against “all the Jews of the world” asking for compensation for treasure that was allegedly stolen when Jews escaped from slavery in Egypt around 6000 years ago. Clearly such a lawsuit is an absurdity on just about every level, but one interesting note is that were such a lawsuit to actually make it to trial (and I sure hope that it doesn’t), the defense attorneys for the Jews may be best served by arguing that the captivity never actually happened at all. The current state of the archaeological record seems to indicate that there was no Jewish captivity in Egypt, and that in fact the story was written by Jewish scholars during the Jewish captivity on Babylon in order to give them hope that they would escape that predicament. Such a defense, would, of course, upset apple carts of all kinds. ...

Today I received a spam at a completely non-rc3.org related address with the subject “good blog” (it was for some kind of naked teen porn site or something). I guess the fact that spammers think that subject will encourage people to open an email means that we’ve officially arrived.

Matt Haughey: TiVo’s Apple problem. As far as it goes, I think that Tivo’s best bet is to license its software and service as broadly as possible. I love my Tivo(s), but I got a sinking feeling when I found out that I could get a PVR from Time-Warner Cable for 5 bucks a month that actually has two tuners. In the meantime I’m paying $13 a month for each of my Tivos, and even worse, I own them, so I can’t just send them back to the cable company and get a newer, better model when one comes out. One thing is for certain, once you’ve lived the PVR lifestyle, you can never go back. Eventually all cable companies will have a PVR offering of some kind, and Tivo needs to be aggressive in claiming a piece of that pie. ...

Whump provides a brief tutorial on creating RSS feeds for publications that are lacking using a few common tools Web page hackers have laying around. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I have never done such scraping myself. I just hit some Web sites the old fashioned way every day or so.

I really want to stop posting SCO-related items, but I just can’t. Their latest allegation is that the backlash against them in the open source community is being orchestrated by IBM. Let’s be blunt here, if SCO thinks that Eric S Raymond needs to be prodded into going off about something related to open source, they really haven’t done their homework.

Philip Brittan is one of Java.net’s bloggers and is doing his best to prove that the site really does feature voices independence from Sun. He’s currently run off a string of posts comparing and contrasting .NET and Java and does a good job of explaining where Java doesn’t stack up right now.

Eric Sink has some useful career advice for software developers (for anyone, really).

CNET has an interview with Ernie Ball (via Workbench), who switched his small private company away from Microsoft products to open source products in 2000 after he was raided by marshalls on behalf of the Business Software Alliance and then subjected to public humiliation by being featured in BSA “scared straight” ad campaigns.

Kevin Werbach wrote a piece yesterday pondering the death of email. It’s not dead, but it’s gone from being a useful tool to something you have to cope with. These days everybody has email, everybody expects you to check and respond to your email, and at the same time, your mailbox is constantly filled with utter dreck by spammers, legitimate companies that you made the mistake of disclosing your email address to, “jokes,” urban legends, and email viruses. So I’d say email is anything but dead. Everyone who works sitting at a desk is utterly dependent on it. These days, I use a two tiered approach to email filtering, and I read my email in two ways. On my hosting account, I have SpamAssassin installed. It’s not a perfect installation – for some reason it won’t process mailboxes for the Bayesian filter, it just hangs instead. But its rule based processing gets rid of nearly all my spam. I read my personal email using Mutt when I’m at work, and I see all the spam that gets by SA, which is pretty insignificant. At home, I’m running Thunderbird and using its built in Bayesian filter to weed out the spam that gets past SA. I have its filters trained well enough now that at home I don’t see any spam at all, and I have very few false positive problems as well, even for promotional emails that I actually want to get. My work email account uses Exchange and Outlook, but I never have problems with it because I simply don’t use it for anything but sending mail to coworkers. I rarely use it to sign up for things on the Web, I don’t use it to send email to friends, and I’d certainly never use it to post to a public mailing list or Usenet. This insures that the email address never gets published on the Internet and thus puts me on the road to getting spam that doesn’t pass through a spam filter. This is how I cope with email. The only serious improvement I’d like to make is fixing the Bayesian filtering in SpamAssassin, but to really get it working well, I’d need a key in Mutt that says “this is spam,” and I haven’t bothered to figure out how to set that up. ...

Today I curse my fate in never working for a company that believed that spending a king’s ransom on WebLogic or WebSphere was a good idea.