Hogarth, Hogarth, where art thou, Hogarth? Ahhh, there, under the chair, you were merely asleep. Don’t scare me like that.

Yet another place for me to get into trouble. Jenn’s move to the Gore 2000 campaign has left her ethically unable to maintain her political log, ANPA, so she’s left keys to the joint with a couple of us miscreants. Now I have another place to lean, politically-speaking.

New York Today (the to-do-around-town website of the New York Times) had an article yesterday that cracked me up — it’s about how the size of New York City apartments has created a niche business for designers, all with the goal of making tiny space into functional space. One guy has his bed against the ceiling, and lowers it with a series of pulleys and counterweights; another family has spare chairs hanging from the walls. New Yorkers will chuckle with recognition…

Another trojan has been detected, of course in an attachment. (I have no clue how it distributes itself, though, and the advisory doesn’t say.) It runs processes that allow crackers to control your machine, and then connects to an IRC server to broadcast that your machine is ready to be taken over.

Once again, Joel Spolsky delivers with another strategy letter. This time, he talks about barriers to entry, how successful companies have dealt with them, and how failure to address them makes yours an unsuccessful company.

Regarding the reprieve granted to death row inmate Ricky McGinn, Slate took a look at Dubya’s claim that he applied the same standards he’s applied to all executions under his governorship, and they didn’t like what they saw. The centerpiece of the article: the case of Jerry Lee Hogue, who proclaimed his innocence until the end, who had legitimate claims of innocence, and who also asked for a confirmatory DNA test — and was denied this request by Bush. Poor man didn’t have the luck of having his execution scheduled in an election year…

Who knew Texas would prove to be one of the more progressive states in declaring sodomy laws unconstitutional? In the words of the Texas appeals court, the problem with the laws is that “the simple fact is, the same behavior is criminal for some but not for others, based solely on the sex of the individuals who engage in the behavior.”

Law.com has a good column on music sampling — generally, the issues involved with bands sampling the music of other people, and specifically, the lawsuit brought by James Newton over the use of a central portion of one of his songs by the Beastie Boys.