Happiness is having a slow day in the newborn nursery, and thus ending up feeding a 14-hour old girl her afternoon formula.

Of course anti-Semites are going to worm their way out of the woodwork now that Joseph Lieberman has been chosen as the Democratic VP candidate, but I don’t know if it helps anything that the media keeps referring to him only as “that Jew who’s running for office.” I wish we were past crap like that in this country.

Lieberman is the source for one of the funniest quotes I’ve ever read, too. When asked about the Bush campaign’s suggestion that the VP choice has more in common with Dubya than he does with Gore, Lieberman replied:

“With all due respect, I think that’s like saying that the veterinarian and the taxidermist are in the same business because either way you get your dog back.”

In a pretty huge victory for musicians, today all sides agreed that sound recordings are not “works for hire” under copyright law, and thus, artists recapture copyrights to their works after 35 years. The Copyright Act of 1976 gave musical artists the ability to take copyright of their music back from recording studios after 35 years; under an amendment quietly slipped into a budget bill last year (this is one of the big issues raised by Courtney Love in her rant against the recording industry), all sound recordings would be deemed works for hire, which would have stripped artists of the 35-year reclaimation right. Today’s agreement will nullify that amendment.

Unixheads will want to read Let’s Make Unix Not Suck, a pretty damn interesting article by Miguel de Icaza. He actually defends some of the decisions that companies like Microsoft have made with certain aspects of code design (e.g., highly-reusable components), and proposes changes to the base mentality of Unix programming.

And in a similar vein, Joel Spolsky rocks again with a great article on his 12 rules for better code. Having moved offices recently, I can personally attest to the need-for-quiet-workspace rule; my old office was not conducive to personal reflection upon programming errors.

Followup on the huge gaping Netscape wound mentioned a few days ago: BugTraq now has two pages (1, 2) which go into pretty good detail about the bugs in Netscape’s Java implementation. Why two pages? Because Brown Orifice (the name of the exploit) actually takes advantage of two separate bugs to do its dirty work.

Thank God for the UN; in all honesty, my life just felt unfulfilling with ritarudner.com controlled by hooligans.