Today, I found an annoying bug in the way that My.Userland parses and displays the XML file that’s generated by a Manila site. I posted a patch to Discuss.Userland to fix it, but was rebuffed (I didn’t know it was inappropriate to offer free help for bug fixes!) — so I now present the patch to you here.

I also found two other big bugs in the way that Manila parses your site to create the XML, and would be happy to provide fixes for those to anyone who wants them for their own personal (or corporate!) Manila servers.

Check out last night’s new feature: in the navbar to the left, click on Referrers. It’ll show you all of the sites that people have found us through. Dynamically-updated, at that!

The referrer logs are great — I just found Brent Simmons’s Manila site (now, I wish that he’d update it more often!), Medley (which has my current favorite X-Files quote in the banner), and What’s On It For Me? (with a great poll currently!).

What a beautifully done website — the Yale Introduction to Cardiothoracic Imaging. I wish I had had this when I was in class and going through my cardiothoracic rotations.

Another interesting converstation in the open source community is taking place on the samba-ntdom list. Samba is a suite that implements Microsoft networking
on Unix boxes; the discussion is about whether or not they should create the ability and hooks that would allow use of the Windows Server Manager to start and stop the services remotely (just as can be done on all Windows boxes that can authenticate against each other).

What’s unsettling to me is that, for the most part, the discussion seemed to end with the idea that only a certain class of people should have the ability to do certain things on Unix — that Windows users aren’t smart enough, or good enough, or whatever, to make the decision to stop and start the samba services on a Unix box. (Even the lone concessionary message throws around anti-Microsoft insults.) The pure ego in these statements just floors me; speaking only for myself, it’s this kind of attitude that works against mindshare for the open source movement.

Today’s music: Dave Brubeck, The Great Concerts: Amsterdam, Carnegie Hall, Copenhagen. A truly great CD; I heard Brubeck play last Father’s Day at Carnegie Hall, with his son and James Moody. It was awesome, and I’m glad that Brubeck is still going strong.

The last Peanuts daily is online today. (The site’s a little slow, for obvious reasons; in addition, this link will break at some point, since United doesn’t permanently archive the cartoons.)

There’s a particularly clever One Swell Foop from the turn of the year… I kept rereading it and finding something else to giggle at. (Do they archive old OSFs? If not, this link will die when a new one is posted.)

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to the federal law which prevents people from suing their managed care health companies. I truly don’t understand the legal justification for the restriction in the first place; in this article, the CEO of Aetna uses the fact that this is always how it’s been to justify that it makes sense (never a good argument, just as all self-referential ones tend not to be).

ESPN has a nice article about Sean Elliott, the San Antonio Spur small forward who had a kidney transplant from his brother last year just after winning the NBA Championship, and his drive to return to the NBA. He’s just awesome, and I don’t think anyone isn’t wishing him the best of luck.

After comparing the primary process to a blockbuster movie, Warren Beatty has bowed out of potentially running for President this year.