Posts

Salon has an interview with newly elected ICANN board member Ken Auerbach. I think that his ideas for the reform of ICANN are 100% on the mark, I just hope he can persuade the other board members to go along with them. Of course, since ICANN is, for the most part, a tool of corporate interests, I don’t expect him to get much traction. G. Beato’s post mortem for Verde is good for a few laughs. All of these stories seem to include a villainous consulting firm that blows up the naive company and runts off with its money – in this case the villain is Scient. I don’t usually mine nuggets from the articles I link to, but this one was too good to pass up: ...

There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons not to vote for Al Gore, but the fact that he’s a habitual liar isn’t one of them. Phil Agre covers the list of famous Gore “lies” and provides evidence illustrating that not only weren’t they lies, but they were perfectly reasonable statements. He also links to a New York Times story that discusses the Republican party’s long term strategy to paint Gore as a liar because they can’t beat the Democrats on the issues. ...

SDMI (the “Secure” Digital Music Initiative) offered hackers ten grand if they could break SDMI’s proposed music protection technologies, so they did. The entertainment industry has a lot to learn about encryption. I doubt that it’s possible to build a system that will protect content but at the same time allow it to be played on millions of players built by various manufacturers. Either people will crack the system or graft something onto the players that allows them to extricate the content and store it in an open format. ...

Tara Calishain sent along a link to an email tutorial on UCITA being offered by the American Library Association. You just subscribe and they send you a series of messages explaining UCITA. Seems like a good way to learn about it. George W. Bush offhandedly blamed the Internet for the Columbine massacre during the debate tonight. The fact that he made a throwaway comment placing the blame for the tragedy squarely on the “Internet” (I don’t imagine he was talking about the protocol suite) pretty clearly illustrates his feelings and his ignorance. What’s worse, claiming to have helped create the Internet, or blaming society’s problems on it? ...

Steve Silberman’s article on the Perl cruise is the reason I bought this month’s Wired magazine. The article on skinnable applications was also good. General disgruntlement: the differences between Emacs and XEmacs really are a pain. If you’re keeping score at home, XEmacs is a much nicer application to use than regular old Emacs out of the box. The GUI looks better and has a few design features that make it really nice to use. Unfortunately, its API differs from the standard GNU Emacs API enough that most of the add-ons written for Emacs are broken in XEmacs to varying degrees. Even though I want to use XEmacs, I can’t, because it doesn’t work worth a crap with JDE. I think that the onus is on XEmacs to iron out the incompatabilities, but apparently the maintainers have little interest in doing so. You’d think that the Emacs developers would try to get Emacs to look as good as XEmacs, but Emacs development appears to be on the slow boat. When you spend many hours every day in your text editor, these kind of problems really begin to grate. ...

Is it just me, or have the PHPBuilder forum and to a lesser extent, the news feeds from Moreover ruined Meerkat? Every time I go to the site, all I get is a big list of stupid questions about PHP. AT&T; is reportedly mulling over charging Web merchants a transactional fee for every customer delivered to them over an AT&T; network. John Levine already explained why this isn’t going to work in a story for IBM developerWorks last month. ...

Like I said, I find the idea that Netscape 6 Preview Release 3 is the final beta release a bit shocking. For what it’s worth, I’ve tried to download it four or five times from home and from work, and have been unable to succeed. Hopefully Mozilla will release a new milestone build soon. Ken McCrary has an article in JavaWorld on accessing Gnutella using the JTella API for Java. I downloaded the beta of the desktop version of LaunchCast today. It’s just like the Web version, except that you don’t have to go to launch.com to start it up, and you can close the window without an annoying JavaScript warning. Well worth it! If you’re interested in the music I listen to, you can check out my station. (I can’t find the link to download the desktop application, I think that once I downloaded it, the site decided to stop showing me the link.) ...

I’m thankful that Tom Paine has published the story I desperately wanted to see written after the Vice Presidential debate. I was going to write up an item on Dick Cheney’s comment that he his vastly increased wealth over the past five years had nothing to do with the government, but frankly, I was too lazy to do the legwork. Fortunately, someone else did. There was a New York Times article about the billions of dollars in government contracts Halliburton got while Cheney was CEO awhile back (which I linked to), so I was more than a bit shocked at Cheney’s statement. And he calls Al Gore a liar … ...

I got more spam from Network Solutions today, this time trying to get me to host my site with DellHost. What makes these losers better than Sanford Wallace or other two bit spammer that scrapes the whois database is beyond me. Information Systems Journal is looking for papers on Open Source software. Scott Rosenberg revisits the well worn topic of Al Gore’s much-distorted statement about taking the initiative in creating the Internet (that’s right, he never used the word “invent”). Scott does a great job of tracking the history of this story and opining on how we got from the original quote to the brazen distortions of it that are common today. ...

Fred Heutte makes the case for leaving the [$special variable alone in Perl 6, rather than getting rid of it. (The $[variable allows you to change the initial index in an array from 0 to any number you choose.) I find this interesting because there’s always someone willing to argue a position that 99% of the people will find completely heretical. As Fred points out in his RFC, Perl has always been one of the few languages that actually accommodates most of those people. ...