You know that spring has sprung in New York City when you wake up to a street fair outside your building… ahhhh, happiness.

Michael J. Hammel has a good column about the necessity of rigorous software testing on Linsider this week. This has been my standard response to the open source vs. big company issue — some people choose to be able to fix, on their own, any problem they discover, whereas I prefer to leave those fixes to companies with the resources to standardize and regression test them. It’s not a better/worse thing, it’s a difference thing.

I just got my April MSDN shipment, and with it came Interix 2.2. Does anyone know anything about this? It looks like it could be tres cool… but I know absolutely nothing about it.

In looking at my various logs this week, I have noticed port scans and random connection attempts from a static machine belonging to Williams/Gerard Productions, Inc. (warning — obnoxious Flash movie at that link). Anyone know what they do, or know people working there who feel that it’s a good thing to probe machines that don’t belong to them? Their upstream provider, AT&T, specifically prohibits this activity.

Interactive Week has a view that doesn’t seem too well-represented in the media right now — that Microsoft may have legitimate legal arguments to refute almost everything that Jackson decided. Certainly, in looking at Jackson’s decision, he is openly challenging the unanimous D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals verdict in 1995 which overturned Jackson’s earlier ruling; it will be interesting how this plays out in the higher courts (since it’s definitely headed there).

Every now and then, I read something that makes me sad. Today’s example: the following quote (emphasis added by me), from the New Jersey Chancery Court opinion that was the first step taken by Dale v. Boy Scouts of America on the road to the Supreme Court. On the notion of the difference between the criminality of homosexuality versus its morality:

The criminal law has changed. The moral law — as to the act of sodomy — has not. The numerous certifications submitted by various ministers, priests, and rabbis attest to that. Individual religious persons may distinguish between the moral culpability of a psychological tendency (perhaps innate) or sexual attraction to a person of the same sex, (a state of mind) but all religions deem the act of sodomy a serious moral wrong. The act is something deliberate and intentional; the thought might not be. An analogy with adultery and fornication is apt.

Later in the decision:

Human beings with homosexual tendencies or thoughts have existed since the beginning of the human race and undoubtedly will continue to exist until its end…. But when the tendency turns to action, the bible story of Sodom, the common law penal laws, the laws of New Jersey up until 1979 and universally held religious positions, condemn that act. Today in New Jersey the moral law as espoused by the major religions continues to declare the act of sodomy to be a serious wrong.

For a rights-affirming position, though, read the concurring opinion from Justice Handler of the New Jersey Supreme Court (you have to go about 2/3 of the way down that decision to get to Handler’s concurrence). He specifically condemns all of these nasty beliefs and assumptions, and essentially scolds the Chancery Court judge for his closemindedness.