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I watched a couple of interesting television programs last night. The first was CNN Presents Beneath the Veil, which featured illegally captured footage from Afghanistan, taken by an incredibly brave journalist named Saira Shah. She travelled to Afghanistan and either took or obtained film of an illegal school (it teaches girls over age 12), an illegal beauty salon, and public executions being held at a soccer stadium paid for with international aid. She also travelled to the front lines of the civil war between the Taliban and other groups in the country that have not yet been subjugated to Taliban rule to get first hand accounts of the Taliban’s summary execution of enemy soldiers and civilians. I’m sure the show will be rebroadcast – you should watch it. I also watched The Human Face, hosted by John Cleese. Much lighter than the Afghanistan news report, but equally fascinating. ...

It looks like Buy.com might be the next big online retailer to bite the dust. I actually liked buying things from them, so this one hits closer to home than some. Did anybody else watch the Gary Condit interview last night? What was his reasoning for agreeing to give that interview? Truly one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen – his strategy seemed to boil down to asserting that everybody else (Chandra Levy’s mother and aunt, the flight attendant, and the chief of police of Washington DC for starters) is lying about him, and he’s telling the truth. Of course, he offered no specifics whatsoever to back up his assertions. I haven’t paid much attention at all to the ongoing story (I don’t watch the 24 hour news channels much), but I watched the Condit interview to see what he’d say. What a train wreck. ...

Windows XP is set to go gold on Friday in a big, stupid PR event. Windows XP definitely seems ready for prime time to me. The buggiest thing in RC1, from my experience, is Internet Explorer 6. Jesse Helms may be headed out to pasture, but unfortunately there are always more loathesome bigots around to pick up where he left off. Someone must have written a tool that allows you to launch a Denial of Service attack on Windows 2000 machines via the IR port, because Microsoft has released a patch that fixes the problem. ...

Sometimes it’s good to sit on a story for a few days, rather than blowing up over it and putting one’s fit in one’s mouth. For example, yesterday I read this LinuxFreak story about a guy in Oklahoma who is being prosecuted for doing a good deed. Today, I read that the guy wasn’t performing a good deed at all, he was rifling through files on a competitor’s web server in a malicious manner. ...

Dubya’s minister of faith-based initiatives (I made up that title), John DiIulio, has quit. I’d love to know the inside reason why, although perhaps it’s true that it’s just because the commute sucks and he was feeling run down. The city of Houston is planning on offering free Internet access and other computing services to all its citizens through publicly accessible terminals. Not only will they get free email accounts (which they can get anywhere, anyway), they’ll also have free file storage and access to productivity software. It looks like an interesting experiment, at least. ...

Ken Layne strikes back! His latest OJR column savages the perpetually downtrodden Salon, as only he can. Personally, I think he’s too hard on Salon, which has a lot more quality material than he gives it credit for. It’s the kind of column, though, that people working at Salon should read and take stock of, because I imagine that Layne is saying what a lot of other people in the media are thinking: “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich.” ...

Yesterday on NPR I heard the story of Vanessa Leggett, a Houston writer who is currently imprisoned for contempt of court because she won’t turn over the notes for a book she’s writing to the U.S. Attorney in a racketeering case (that stems from a murder case that the government lost). Her case is interesting because the Justice Department refused to grant her first amendment rights as a “journalist” because she hasn’t been published by a major corporate media outlet (her book on the murder has not yet been completed). Originally they argued that she hadn’t been published at all, but it turns out she had edited a publication for the Justice Department itself. Needless to say, independent journalists have many reasons to fear what happened to Ms. Leggett if the court refuses to agree that she is not owed the same rights that a reporter for the New York Times or Newsweek is granted. (You can also listen to the NPR story using RealAudio.) ...

Wired News has a Reuters story on increasing use of Linux in the digital effects industry. Since those guys are mainly looking for raw computing power, and their software runs on some UNIX-variant most of the time anyway, it makes sense to go the cheapest route possible. Linux and commodity hardware are as good a choice as any from that perspective. O’ReillyNet has posted the transcript from the Open Source vs. Shared Source panel at the Open Source Conference. ...

Joel weighs in again on the multitasking issue. More research seems to conclude that developers are unable to multitask. That doesn’t surprise me, but what’s interesting is that most people seem to believe that they can multitask, and in fact that they work better and get more done when they’re multitasking. They wear the fact that they have too many things going on as a badge of honor. (I’m as guilty of it as anyone.) ...

From the people who brought you America’s Dumbest Criminals , it’s The Beverly Hillbillies Bible Study. Sadly, I am not making this up, and it’s not a joke. ECB 1.50 (the Emacs Code Browser) is out. James Cramer thinks Salon is going to make it. I don’t think that really means anything. Larry Ellison has finally snapped. Don’t even bother to feign surprise.