Posts

The Register has published David Skoll’s rebuttal to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute’s “white paper” arguing that open source software shouldn’t be used in security-sensitive contexts.

Garret Vreeland riffs on today’s NYT article about the blogging rift or whatever you want to call it. Garret’s a man of few words, so when he cranks out a long post, it’s definitely worth reading. One of the common patterns in life is newcomers thinking that they’re pioneers. The converse pattern is old timers getting up in arms about it. And aren’t we all pioneers and newcomers at one time or another? ...

The New York Times takes a look at Dr. Stephen Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science, which looks pretty darn interesting. Unfortunately, the book is about 1,200 pages long and would no doubt be over my head. Maybe I’ll read it someday when I’m retired and I’ve finished Goedel, Escher, Bach.

For the sake of completeness, I added an RSS autodiscovery link element to this page.

My mention of the fire bombing of Dresden this morning touched a nerve with one of my readers, Leif. He argues that the attack on Dresden was completely unjustifiable, and his position is one I’d agree with. I’ll let him speak for himself: I think I generally see eye to eye with you on a lot of issues, but your comment about the firebombing of dresden really got to me. As I understand it, there were absolutely zero significant military targets in Dresden. The Germans had gone out of there way to make it a non-target, and had moved priceless works of art from around the Nazi empire to this apparent safe city. Many soldiers also sent their families there for safety. I've also read that even the factories there were specifically producing a minimal amount of war-related goods, so that they would not make tempting targets. In fact, practically the only military presence there was a camp of American POW's (among them, American sci-fi author Kurt Vonnegut). My limited knowledge of Dresden comes mostly from Vonnegut’s (fictional, but historically accurate) ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, as well as from a highschool World History class where our (quite passionate) teacher made the event out to be one of the greatest atrocities of the century. Indeed, far more civilians were killed in Dresden than in Hiroshima, and in Hiroshima there were valid military targets amongst the large civilian population. ...

Since I started working on the RSS feed for this site, I’ve become RSS crazy. I’ve actually been messing around with RSS stuff passively for a couple of months, ever since I got around to really giving AmphetaDesk a fair chance at joining my daily routine. Since I started working on my own site, though, I’ve been delving a lot more into the various RSS feeds that are available, RSS-related sites, and the RSS tools that are out there. So far, I’ve tried out three RSS tools pretty extensively, the previously mentioned AmphetaDesk, FeedReader, and Aggie. I’ll post short reviews of the pros and cons of each of them this week. I’m also creating a growing list of RSS feeds that I watch. It’s truly amazing how complementary RSS is to blogging (and more importantly, to reading blogs). I confess that there are time periods when I don’t read many blogs at all due to lack of time and frustration with going to blogs and seeing that they haven’t been updated since my previous visit. Viewing things in an RSS reader eliminates both of those problems, for the most part. ...

John Gotti, the celebrity mobster, died in prison today. The NYT certainly had a lengthy obit prepared in advance for today.

Yahoo is redesigning its home page to be more accommodating to advertisers. Yes, it really is that bad. They gave in to interstitial ads awhile back (at least on Yahoo Sports), so this doesn’t really come as a shock. I kind of wonder whether there’s a point at which ever larger and more intrusive ads will actually lower traffic for these sites. The Salon Premium ad seems more and more sensible to me every day – offer users the opportunity to buy their way out of the downward spiral of increasingly irritating advertising. ...

Mark Steel mounts a spirited defense of sports fandom for the Independent on the occasion of the World Cup (via Electrolite). For me, being a sports fan felt, more than anything, inevitable. My father is a huge sports fan, all of my uncles are huge sports fans, and I grew up playing sports. My general tactic these days is to ignore sports to the degree that I can, that keeps me from becoming overly obsessed with them, but I still hit the sports sites every day. ...

I kind of wish I were here, not here.