Posts

Molly Ivins writes about Monsanto’s latest nightmarish creation in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The latest scheme cooked up by the terminally irresponsible folks at Monsanto is The Terminator, a genetic technology which will prevent the seeds of crops from being able to germinate, thus ensuring that farmers will have to buy new seeds (from Monsanto) every growing season. Unfortunately, this new genetic technology could lay waste to everything growing near it as well. ...

Salon makes some predictions for 1999 that I can buy into.

I’ve added a new entry to my author’s journal. This one discusses book length and page count. Naughty UK computer news site The Register starts to tie up the loose ends in the cloak and dagger world of the computer industry. Check it out. I’m intrigured by Medusa, a Web/FTP server for high traffic sites that I hadn’t heard of until today. Google! runs on it. Here’s a link to an interesting old story in the Detroit News about Cary, North Carolina, where I work. It discusses white flight from large urban areas to smaller, more homogenous communities. It was written in 1996, and as far as I can tell from my first year here, the problem seems to be growing. I can say that Cary is probably the most boring, culture starved place I’ve ever lived. Despite the fact that growth here is rampant, and capacity for most services (like doctors, education, and other necessities) is stretched to the limit, this area doesn’t seem to be getting more ethnically or culturally diverse at all. By the way, the cost of living is spiralling upward. Care to join us? ...

rc3.org has been redesigned for the new year. Faster loading. Better looking. More easily maintainable. Tell me what you think. AltaVista can be so cool at times. Here’s a search which returns all of the external links to my site (which also happen to be indexed by AltaVista). Check it out. I also like Google!, which was obviously created by geeks. If they added some of the more interesting features provided by AltaVista, I’d use their search engine all the time. ...

I added a tip to my list of HTML tips. This site designed by Rafe Colburn. Copyright 1999.

Wired News continues its fine tradition of publishing IRC-sourced stories about crackers and hacktivism today with its article about a pending hack-attack on an x.25 network that may or may not be in Iraq. These stories always seem to garner attention for WN, but is it the kind of attention they want? The Council on Hemispheric Affairs is tracking the Chiquita banana debacle that cost the Cincinnati Enquirer millions of bucks, and investigative reporter Mike Gallagher his career. The fact that Gannett newspapers allowed themselves to be bullied by Chiquita galls me every time I think about it. Chiquita finds itself in the news again as it complains about monumental losses in Honduras from hurrican Mitch, but fails to mention the role that its own poor environmental practices played in the devastation. ...

SunWorld provides a useful list of Web-related resources.

I’ve added a new entry to the SQL book journal Merry Christmas, in case I don’t get the chance to update this page before then.

How complex does the interface to an online dictionary have to be?

My apologies for the lack of updates to this site in recent weeks, but I’m working on a new book about SQL. Since my real job and my wife both take precedence over my Web site, I haven’t had time to add much here lately. However, I am logging my experiences in writing this latest book in an online journal. This may or may not interest you. Check out the web site for my book on CGI programming. ...