Danny O’Brien talks about the denizens of the hinternet today. Who have you converted to a popup blocking alternative browser like Mozilla lately? I’ve been a total failure in that regard. I should at least set up SpamAssassin for my parents … they’re modem users so I can’t in good conscience encourage them to download Mozilla.
Don’t fall in love with the name Firebird yet. Now that Mozilla changed the name of Phoenix to Firebird due to trademark issues, the makers of an open source database called Firebird are complaining. I’m thinking maybe they’re going to have to go with an unpronouncable symbol as the name of the stripped down browser. Or perhaps Mozlkahdjfya.
I think a reporter from the estimable Charleston Post and Courier was had: Throughout the morning, law enforcement officers stood on the perimeter of the five-acre field. At no point did the protest turn violent, though officers escorted Heywood Jablome away after he held up a sign directly in front of Burk that read "Make me dinner" before shouting "Oprah rules." A quick review of Google News seems to indicate that only James Scott got the name of Mr. Jablome before he was taken away by police. ...
Lately, even Brad DeLong has jumped on the trash Robert Fisk bandwagon. Every time I go to read a Robert Fisk dispatch, I expect to howl with outrage. Fisk, after all, has a reputation among many as everything from an al-Qaeda sympathizer, to a hater of the United States and the United Kingdom. To some people, he’s an antisemite, and to others he’s the archetypical Westerner, seeing Arabs as noble savages. And yet when I read a Robert Fisk article, I never find outrage rising up my esophogus. I don’t always agree with everything I read, in terms of analysis or sensibility, but I appreciate him for what he is. ...
I’ve been using SharpReader for a little while now, but it took me until yesterday to find a mode of usage that really works for me. To open an item in my external browser of choice (Mozilla), all I have to do is hit “enter” in the list of articles, as opposed to clicking on a link down in the item detail section. This enables me to both open pages in the right browser and never remove focus from the pane where I can delete items. The application could still stand some tweaks, but it’s working better for me now. ...
It’s through the regulation process that we learn just how much most businesses hate the idea of competing on price and service. I offer as proof the dogged resistance of cellular carriers to number portability.
The current New York Review of Books includes Ian Buruma’s review of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. The great thing about the NYRB is that often after reading their review of a nonfiction book (especially a book written to make an argument), I don’t need to read the book itself.
After a drunken design session, the OpenBSD group has come out with some countermeasures that should prevent buffer overflows. All of the stuff they’re doing could be implemented in any OS, and does look like it should work. Given that most of the major Internet attacks since the Morris worm have been based on buffer overflows, needless to say this is huge.
I have only one thing to say about re-code.com: this idea is hardly new.
In the midst of the death and destruction brought about by the war in Iraq, for some reason it’s the pillaging of Iraq’s museums that really leaves me depressed, mainly for the senselessness of it all. It seems odd to be as upset about things, especially things that don’t really have any practical value, as one might be about people, but I can’t help but feel so very sad that some Iraqis have chosen to destroy or steal the cultural artifacts that document the history of their civilization. Maybe it’s because all of the death and destruction that we confront every day all sort of melds together. If the violent deaths of innocents sent me into a deep depression, then I could never leave the house. On the other hand, the destruction of a national museum is something more unusual. Obviously, given the attention being paid to the musem story, many other people feel similarly. ...