I installed the IE 6 beta yesterday, and I’ve found two problems so far. One is that it forgets my toolbar settings every time I close it, so my Google toolbar and my links toolbar keep diseappearing. The second is that LaunchCast no longer works. There are supposed to be some new cookie management features in IE 6, but it looks like they haven’t been implemented yet. Perhaps I’ll try to uninstall it. ...
William Saletan has a great article about David Horowitz at Slate. In case you’re not tuned in to this, Horowitz tried to take out an ad in a bunch of college newspapers arguing against reparations for slavery, and some colleges refused to run the ad. In other cases, the newspapers that did run the ad were stolen, or the editors of the paper caught lots of flack from people on campus. Of course, that was the very outcome Horowitz wanted, because he knew that stirring up controversy on college campuses would garner him coverage in the mainstream media that he could never afford to pay for. Horowitz’s publicity stunt has garnered an amazing amount of media coverage (it was on the local news here, even), so in that sense it was very successful. Saletan’s article contrasts the 10 points in the ad with Horowitz’s own behavior since the ad ran, and comes to some damning conclusions. ...
I’m having real trouble getting a handle on what Microsoft is up to these days. Between .NET, Hailstorm, Windows XP, Office XP, and everything else, you have to devote real time to this stuff to sort it all out. I’ve read a lot of the articles in the trade rags about this stuff, but they’re no help. I guess I’m going to have to turn to the primary sources. I’m not going to be able to listen to baseball games over the ’net for free this season. I doubt I’ll cough up $10 a month in order to listen to day games while I’m at work. ...
Remember how Ralph Nader said during the Presidential campaign that there was no difference between voting for Bush and Gore? In case you hadn’t noticed already, reading the Washington Post’s review of Bush appointees drives the point home that the Republicans and Democrats could hardly be more different. Wonder what the scoop is on Extreme Programming? John Brewer has written up a short XP FAQ that hits the highlights. XP is one of those things that I’d like to try out just for the novelty at some point, but I don’t run a programming shop myself, so I just have to ponder it from the sidelines. ...
Slate has an article on the degree of dissent tolerated in the Bush White House. They keep getting love letters from favorable reporters on staying “on message” and containing leaks, but does this come at the cost of genuine internal debate? Over the past few weeks, Dubya has managed to hang Colin Powell and Christine Todd Whitman out to dry pretty blatantly, and it seems like the more moderate members of his cabinet aren’t being heard on the issues. I personally think that internal debate in the White House is pretty squelched these days. ...
Slate has a good rundown of the issues working against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform package. Current campaign finance laws seem very byzantine to me, and it looks like the McCain-Feingold legislation will only make them more byzantine. It seems like we could come up with some simple, transparent rules for campaign finance that would really improve the system. Of course, straightforward rules would never become law because that’s not the way Congress works. ...
Here’s a strange publicity stunt: Taco Bell is going to give a free taco to everyone in the United States if a hunk of Mir hits a 40 foot by 40 foot Taco Bell logo that they’ve placed in the South Pacific. Considering the fact that the projected splashdown area is thousands of square kilometers in area, I’d say it’s likely that they won’t have to cough up the tacos. I can’t imagine many things more gratifying than the XFL game broadcast on Saturday night achieving the lowest prime time rating ever recorded. As a sports fan, I delight in seeing this garbage go down in flames. ...
Declan McCullagh has an interview with David Touretzky, the guy with the amazing gallery of CSS Descramblers, for Wired News. It’s pretty interesting, and the fact that Declan feels compelled to point out that Touretzky is a libertarian offers added amusement. I had figured that Touretzky was a computer scientist, but it turns out he studies rodent brains. That’s probably why he understands so well how to tweak the MPAA. Salon is soon to launch Salon Premium. You pay them $30 a year, and in return you don’t have to look at ads and you get to see some yet to be announced premium content. I hope they don’t carve off existing content and put it behind the wall, because it will make my linking difficult. I’ll be kicking in the $30, not because I care about the ads but rather because I care about the future survival of Salon. It’s a bit disconcerting that all the ads I view at Salon every year don’t add up to $30 in revenue for them. No wonder all the content sites are dying. ...
This weekend I signed up at dyndns.org to get a static domain name for my home computer. It was easy as pie to get set up, and I’m using yiPost to keep my record up to date. DynDNS is a free service, supported by user donations. The veil has been lifted from Microsoft’s Hailstorm project. It, like the .NET framework, is heavily tied in with Microsoft’s Passport service, which I want no part of. ...
Last night, I found collections of Iron Chef icons at IconFactory (for the Mac) and dotico.com (their Windows affiliate). You can also get Iron Chef desktop wallpaper at The DeskStop. If you really want to muck around with the look and feel of Windows, check out Virtual Plastic. It’s a huge compendium of tips and pointers to programs that will let you get on the fast track to registry corruption and eventual reinstallation. Last night I also got around to checking out Noah Grey’s weblogging tool, Grey Matter. It won’t be replacing my home brewed Web logging system, mainly because it uses flat files for data storage and I like the flexibility of putting stuff in a relational database. Even so, it’s a very impressive piece of work and a great source of inspiration. I’m most impressed by the overall polish of Grey Matter, it’s extremely well thought out, and it doesn’t look like Noah cut any corners on error handling in the UI. ...