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John Tesh and Vignette have settled their lawsuit – I guess he got his money back. The more interesting question at this point is what content management system they’ll use instead. O’ReillyNet has an article on contributing to the Mozilla project. Uh oh – more patent trouble. eMedicine has received a patent on their Internet-based publishing system. Leftout is an organization for pro-life liberals. I always wondered if an organization like this existed. (I’m not interested in joining, but I am somewhat fascinated with outward lying data points on the ideological spectrum.) ...

This might be the most important thing you ever read on this site: the fools at the FDA are considering banning cheeses made using raw milk. Any lover of cheese knows that this is completely unacceptable. Please do your part and sign the petition provided by the American Cheese Society on their Web site. (It would be easier to sign if they provided an online form, but they don’t.)

So I’m finally getting started using XML on a real project at work, and I haven’t bothered to buy a book about it yet. I’m hoping to find some useful stuff in the list of tutorials at XML.com. You know what, bitter investors bring me much mirth. People bet a huge chunk of cash on volatile tech companies and then wail and gnash their teeth when they get pounded by the market. Anyone who says investing is easy is a liar. ...

Salon is spinning off a company to market its content management system, which is built using Perl. I know enough about Salon’s operations to think that this company could produce a Vignette killer. Salon’s system is much more open, and is based on Perl rather than TCL. I hope they do very well. I consider myself to be an educated person, and I knew that the Mercator projection distorted the sizes of continents on a map of the world, but until I saw the Peters Projection, I didn’t really get the degree to which the sizes are distorted. I imagine that if this map were shown to most people, they would say that it’s inaccurate. (As a couple of readers have pointed out, the map is inaccurate. It’s just not inaccurate in the same way that Mercator projection maps are. Here’s a mathematical description of how it’s skewed.) ...

Is it just me, or do this person and this person seem to have a lot in common? Here’s a potentially interesting developing story: a 16 year old claims that the domain AOLBeta.Com was stolen from him by AOL. He registered the domain name when it came available, and a day later, the domain was transferred to AOL without his consent. This is only interesting because AOL is itself an ICANN accredited domain registrar, and the domain name is now registered through their in-house registrar. Clearly it seems that AOL abused their powers as a domain registrar to transfer the domain name without permission. If that is indeed what happened, it will be interesting to see what, if any, action ICANN takes. ...

You don’t have to dig very deep into the Internet industry to discover that many companies attempt to solve hard problems by ignoring them and pretending that they don’t exist. For example, Akamai completely ignores the free rider problem on their network by ignoring it. If you know how to cut and paste an Akamai URL, you can use their caching servers to speed access to your content on one of their customers’ tabs. ...

Online jewelry store Miadora closed up shop because they couldn’t pay their bills. This is only interesting to me because I actually bought a gift from that site earlier this year, it was actually a very nice shopping experience. I guess people weren’t willing to spend thousands of dollars on jewelry that they’d never seen first hand. Java Web developers: Tomcat 4.0 Milestone 1 is available for download.

I’m ashamed to admit that I failed to join ICANN so that I could vote for the five at-large members of the ICANN Board of Directors. However, I do want to point to some of the interesting candidates for those seats in this space, in hopes that some of my more industrious readers did register. The first of these is Barbara Simons, a long time computer industry veteran and former president of the ACM. ...

O’ReillyNet has an article on customizing your shell prompt. There’s just no excuse for using the default. Raph Levien has taken over maintainership of Ghostscript, and is rekindling development on the project. I’ve never understood the thinking behind the Go Network. Apparently neither does Moneybox over at Slate.

Outrageous! Amazon’s 1-click ordering patent was insulting enough, but Apple’s decision to license the patent is just incredible. As the author of the article points out, the terms of the deal are unknown, so it seems likely that this was some kind of behind the scenes crap that allowed both companies to create value where none existed through the clever use of smoke and mirrors. Salon has a great interview with Gore Vidal today, in which he discusses corporate control of the American political system. It includes this great quote on the likelihood of Congress passing reforms that eliminate the corruption inherent in allowing corporations and fat cats to finance political campaigns: “Will it happen? No burglar who ever reached the second floor ever kicked the ladder away. " ...