Posts

The update beat goes on despite the fact that my domain name has been turned off due to my own negligence. I paid to have the name renewed yesterday, but Network Solutions hasn’t turned it back on yet. I’ll be transferring the domain to PairNIC asap. This is a brilliant idea: Yahoo is donating 2 million dollars worth of banner ads to tolerance.org. The ads will run when people access hate groups hosted by Yahoo Groups, or when they search for terms that seem to indicate that the user is intolerant. ...

Tell me I’m not dreaming: Judicial Watch is suing Tom DeLay for his campaign finance practices. I love this on so many levels. The deal between Borders and Amazon.com provides further evidence that the times are changing in the world of ecommerce. Amazon.com is taking over the online operations for Borders. This deal makes less sense to me than, say, the Toys R Us, deal, because Amazon.com is already the dominant seller of books online. Why would someone buy books through Borders Online powered by Amazon.com instead of through Amazon.com? Will the prices be different between the two? The upside for Amazon, I would imagine, is that they’ll profit from every book they sell on behalf of Borders. I’m sure that isn’t the case with the all the books they sell through their own store. ...

Here’s the problem with hobbyist sites: when they become too popular, bad things happen. Usually, they get turned off for consuming too much bandwidth, or for bringing down their servers due to resource starvation. Then the guy who runs the site has to turn into a business person instead of a hobbyist in order to pay for upgrades, and the sites wind up dying. That sucks. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a solution to this problem. ...

John Markoff covers Dave Winer’s battle with Microsoft over SOAP in the New York Times. I don’t know what to say about that. For future reference: Georgi Guninski Security Research.

Call me Mr. Responsibility. Today, instead of messing around playing computer games, I cleaned up the public_html directory for rc3.org and got rid of a bunch of old, crufty files. I also moved some things around so that they’re better organized. Hopefully this will enable me to get off my butt and build some new stuff for the site in the very near future. I have a ton of ideas floaring around that I’ve not yet found the initiative to implement. ...

RMS storms England. George Friedman of Stratfor has some theories on the motivations of the Chinese in instigating and intensifying the airplane collision crisis. I have no idea whether he’s right, it’s just another data point.

Amazon.com is finally assimilating Bibliofind. That’s too bad. James Bamford’s op-ed in the New York Times today questions whether the utility of spy-plane missions outweighs the risks and cost in human lives of those missions. The issue of the utility of spy missions aside, the Chinese are really starting to piss me off. Their continued demands for an apology are enraging me, and the fact that they claim our slow, prop-driven aircraft intentionally rammed a jet fighter are as offensive as they are ludicrous. Yeah, we were spying on them, but as has been pointed out in the media, that’s a game with set rules that great powers have been playing for half a century. I really don’t understand why they don’t just release the crew of the plane. All of their posturing seems completely pointless. ...

David Plotz is a bit disturbed by Dubya’s hyper-promotion of baseball now that he’s President. There’s no bigger baseball fan than me, and even I find his obsession with baseball more than a bit disturbing (and unseemly). Memo to Dubya: shilling for your favorite professional sports league is not one of the jobs of the President. Microsoft is cleaning up the big mess with their Passport Terms of Service. Nationalize Salon! is a modest proposal by David Propson. ...

File this one under bad hacks: Microsoft Outlook 2000 now informs me when a program tries to access my address book and asks me whether I want to let it. This is their solution to email viruses reading all the names in your address book and sending email to each of them. (My solution is to just not use Outlook to read my email.) Unfortunately, their stupid security measure prevents TrueSync from synchronizing my Outlook address book with my Yahoo address book and the address book on my Palm. I’m having all sorts of weird problems trying to get things to sync with my Palm since I got a computer running Windows 2000. What a pain. (For what it’s worth, Microsoft should use a certificate-based security system to control access to the address book. Then again, Microsoft has been having problems with certificates lately as well.) ...

The lzip project is a pretty decent April Fool’s Joke. Programming Parrot in a Nutshell is an exciting new book by Guido van Rossum and Larry Wall that O’Reilly happened to announce yesterday. I had a great idea for an April Fool’s joke for this site, but the fact that April Fool’s Day fell on a Sunday this year killed my interest in implementing it. Fortunately the idea is evergreen, so maybe you’ll see it next year. ...