freeform goodness

• The XML Files: All About Blogs and RSS — MSDN Magazine, April 2004
  A lucid, readable, and most importantly unbiased primer on blogging and syndication tech.
  
  
• Microsoft hit by record EU fine
  €497m, $613m, £331m [i.e. the interest on billg’s Christmas Club account]. More interestingly: “Mr Monti has ordered Microsoft to reveal details of its Windows software codes within 120 days”
  
  
• XP SP2 RC1
  Details on IE6/Win’s new popup blocker. For those of you who still use that thing.
  
  
• Interview with Matthew Dillon of DragonFly BSD
  A couple of weeks old, but very interesting. As a FreeBSD fan, I’m very interested in seeing where DragonFly BSD ends up.
  
  
• AbiWord 2.1.1 Released
  Includes a new native OS X binary. Interesting.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 12:15 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• Butterfly XML — Elegant XML
  “Butterfly XML Editor is an IDE built on top of a new real-time incremental XML parsing algorithm. The editor features syntax and error highlighting, incremental validation, code completion, XSLT pipelines, and side by side DOM and source viewing.”
  
  
• Dilbert Mar-21-04
  Gross, but very, very funny.
  
  
• Emap closes down the Face
  “The Face, the magazine that was once the epitome of cool, is to close after 24 years, unless a last minute buyer can be found.” (via Hans)
  
  

:: Dave Walker 23:02 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• Markdown (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)
  Lots of pointless (to me) metabitching of the “why didn’t you just use so-and-so” variety in the comments (hmm, where have I seen that before…) There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Thank goodness.
  
  
• Zombies Drive Jesus From Top Of Box Office
  No comment, I just loved the headline.
  
  
• MacDevCenter.com: Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics [Mar. 19, 2004]
  by Mitch Chapman — Mac OS X Panther includes many updated developer tools. Among them is an enhanced version of Python 2.3 with its own SWIG-based bindings to the CoreGraphics library.
  
  
• Buying Guide: LCD Displays
  LCD monitors have finally overtaken CRTs in the marketplace, and now the chances are good that your next monitor will be an LCD.
  
  
• DVD-Audio News: AAC Chosen for DVD-ROM Zone of DVD-Audio Discs [HFR]
  The DVD Forum has chosen AAC for the DVD-ROM zone of DVD-Audio discs…
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:13 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• Robot Christ used in Gibson film
  Go Go Robot Jesus!
  
  
• Inspiration - EP (iTunes Exclusive) - William Hung
  
  
  
• Sony readies Q2 dual-layer DVD+R drive debut
  Sony will ship its first dual-layer DVD+R recorders next June, the consumer electronics giant said yesterday.
  
  
• DARPA’s portable atomic clock
  built a portable atomic clock that’s accurate to within 0.0000001 seconds
  
  
• Audio Lunchbox
  Web based music store. No DRM, VBR MP3s and Ogg Vorbis. 99 cents a track. Indie labels.
  
  
• The Fault Tolerant Shell
  “If any element of the script fails, all running process trees are reliably cleaned up, and the block is tried again with an exponential backoff. You might think of this as exception handling for scripts.”
  
  
• Java, Mono, or C++?
  “Rephrased: is there some way we can find to move away from C/C++, without causing massive alienation and forking?”
  
  

:: Dave Walker 12:53 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• Kevin Shields: “I lost it”
  Guardian claims the first Kevin Shields interview in 12 years. Chinchillas. A crying Alan McGee. A lost decade. “No More Sorry”
  
  
• The format=flowed FAQ (f=fAQ)
  “Format=flowed is a new way of displaying text. Currently, we find f=f most often in quoted text within E-mail messages.” The list of mailers that support it is especially useful.
  
  
• Amiga, Inc. to Focus on Mobile Markets with AmigaDE
  The dark, eldritch forces unleashed upon the world when one of the Elder Gods placed a curse upon the Amiga are once more set loose upon another unsuspecting corporate victim.
  
  
• Opera 7.50 Preview 3 for Mac available
  Choice is good. I’ve never been particularly fond of Opera’s interface, but it’ll be nice to have another standards-compliant rendering engine on the platform to test against
  
  
• mjb: it’s a grand ol’ party.
  Separation of powers? What separation of powers?
  
  
• 5ives
  Merlin’s lists of five things. Really quite good.
  
  
• Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes Of All Time
  It’s that time of year…
  
  
• Wired News: Honey, I Shrunk the URL
  Brief article about Gilby, the guy behind TinyURL
  
  

:: Dave Walker 21:12 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• Mac OS X: About the Mac OS X 10.3.3 Update
  Tech notes - what’s new in the latest free update (yellow bottle caps optional)
  
  
• Rael Dornfest on his plans for Blosxom 3
  A complete rewrite… completely object oriented… new plugin architecture… standalone CGI script, Perl module, or even as a subclass… much more
  
  
• BlogPolling Voting System :: Free Polls for your Website or Weblog
  Looks pretty painless
  
  
• The Rasterbator
  21st century version of those old TTY banner progs
  
  
• ~stevenf: New Rules for Spam
  A few ideas for tweaking spamassassin rulesets
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:46 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• George Michael retires to make songs available for free download
  Pop star George Michael is abandoning the music business to release his songs online for free instead.
  
  
• Marc Liyanage - TestXSLT
  TestXSLT is a small, AppleScript-able Cocoa application for experimenting with the XSLT and XSL-FO languages on Mac OS X.
  
  
• Microsoft behind $50M SCO investment - Computerworld
  “Executives from Microsoft Corp. introduced The SCO Group Inc. to an investment fund that provided the Lindon, Utah-based company with a $50 million investment last October, a spokesman for the fund confirmed today.”
  
  
• intraordinaire » Sun, RSS, and my cock
  be sure to follow the links
  
  
• Engadget: Nokia sends mobile spam, breaks own cellphones
  “Unfortunately, the messages also disable the phones of anyone with a Nokia 3510i, 5100, or 6100… the phones have to be brought into a Nokia service center (and left there for a day) in order to be fixed.”
  
  

:: Dave Walker 20:12 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• One view on liberal XML processing
  James Robertson: “ponder how well you would like a world where your radio bailed on weak stations immediately and your CD player refused to play a CD after finding a single error….”
  
  
• The Devil’s Dictionary (2.0): BigCo
  via Mark Pilgrim’s B-links
  
  
• AP - Virginity pledgers’ STDs not reduced
  “Teenagers who make a one-time pledge to remain virgins until marriage catch sexually transmitted diseases about as often as those who don’t pledge abstinence, according to a study of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents”
  
  
• New York Metro: The Friends of Martha Stewart
  A 19th Century Novel — Trollope, to be exact.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:49 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• Scotland on Sunday - Our friends electric
  A rare thing: a Kraftwerk interview. Well worth checking out (thanks, Hans!)
  
  
• Inmate Caught 44 Years After Fleeing Jail
  “Authorities learned who Eddie Mayes was after he visited his son at a prison in Avon Park in December and wrote his real name on a visitors list, the Fort Pierce Tribune reported. A routine check of the names identified him as a fugitive.”
  
  
• spamradio
  “Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet.”
  
  
• distant, early morning: Pinging remote sites on updates?
  A list of sites to ping after updating your weblog.
  
  
• HeadlinedNews.com - Ipod Used In Domestic Homicide - Mar. 05
  A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod.
  
  
• radio vox populi: live from the commons
  As weblog authors update their sites their writing is collected, synthesized into speech, and streamed to listeners as an Internet radio station. Live from the commons 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:19 (EST/EDT) [+]

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• APOD: 2004 March 5 - V838 Mon: Echoes from the Edge
  Variable star V838 Monocerotis lies near the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy, about 20,000 light-years from the Sun.
  
  
• jwz - it’s martian! it’s meme-o-riffic!
  What if the Mars rovers were 15 year old girls? spiritrover + opportunitygrrl.
  
  
• Ohio Salad Arrives With Piece of a Thumb
  “Red Robin spokesman Dwayne Chambers said that employees, in their haste to get the injured man to a doctor, failed to follow the chain’s procedures and throw out all food in the area.”
  
  
• Internal memo proves that SCO is Microsoft’s sock puppet
  “We now know that Microsoft raised at least $86 million for SCO, but according to the SCO conference call … their cash reserves were $68.5 million. If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today.”
  
  
• Bruce Sterling: Strategic Insights from the Zarqster
  “This letter is just amazingly sinister, malicious, bonkers, and cynical. It reads like a crazed supervillain from a Fu Manchu episode.”
  
  
• intendo: mindset in stone
  “But why sell the company jet to pick up a moniker that suits your brand? Simply enter your name, choose your values and your goals and, Hey Prestognia!, your new name will be automatically displayed - absolutely free of charge.”
  
  
• EFA files for bankruptcy
  Big dance music distributor fails, it might take a lot of smaller labels with it. :(
  
  
• Seniors Brawl After Salad Bar Dispute
  A dispute at the salad bar turned into a food fracas at an upscale retirement home, with a man taking a bite out of another’s arm and other residents suffering minor injuries.
  
  
• Unicode Checker 1.6 (Quarter Life Crisis)
  Earthlingsoft’s quite useful swiss-army-knife application for dealing with character encoding gets a major update.
  
  
• 10th Anniversary of the Original Green Card Lottery Spam
  I was around for this. It was the shitstorm to end all shitstorms. If only we’d known what kind of nightmare was going to follow it. The original seems almost quaint in its limited spread, and the way the sender used his own email address to send it.

:: Dave Walker 19:35 (EST/EDT) [+]

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