February 2003 Archives

CNET reports that Lexmark has won an injunction in its DMCA case against Smartek. So long for competition and fair use.

Note to self, carve this on first page of editors guidelines: Don't use "click here" as link text.

Don't be fooled by the irony in the above paragraph, it's good advice.

I'm upgrading to the latest Movable Type version. Everything is not finished yet, I have an issue with a diarrhea of paragraphs tags with pretty random closing and starting, and I haven't figured out where the problem lies between NetNewsWire (which I use for most posts) and MT. I also have to find a way so that the ampersand characters in URLs are turned into their valid "&" entity. NNW apparently does not take care of that.

Those issues prevent this site to validate, and it is not a Good Thing :(.

MT is not for the faint hearted. The documentation is fantastic, as always, but following core and custom changes in the templates are the most difficult part to handle. Anyhow, MT rocks.

Jason Kottke: je suis introverti mais je me soigne. I have mixed feelings about this.

An interesting point of view on Microsoft, blogs, and community by a non less interesting Microsoft fellow. Macromedia weblogs are also famous, although they illustrate the difference between empowered individuals who express themselves as easily as they would on a face-to-face chat with you and me, and corporate marketing using yet another fashionable channel.

Weblogs have a tremendous potential for companies. Internally and externally. Most theories on knowledge management are utterly disconnected from reality. I wonder, not if, but by which order of magnitude a mix of weblogs, semantically correct intranet sites and a simple search appliance would beat the overly complex towers of Babel that "KM theories" produce in corporations.

Likewise on the Internet, the impressive number of active communities that have been built around weblogs ranking from open-source to ridiculously cheap software or service, cries for revisiting strategies based on expensive and closed solutions.

Technologists finally convinced corporations to look into free software (despite what the bean counters claim). Now they have to convince the content producers that everything lies in their content, the only thing where they can't afford to be cheap.

The Apple Death Knell counter will soon be incremented with one of the most stupid and clueless piece of crap written by somebody who pretend to be a journalist but can stick a fork in his reputation.

Michael Moore just received the César du meilleur documentaire étranger for Bowling for Columbine in Paris tonight. Here is, to the best of my typing speed and deciphering skills (I was trying to filter out the French translation that was disturbing me), what he just said to the audience five minutes ago:

I'm going to be crucified in the American press for what I'm going to say. Without the French, we would not have won our revolution, we wouldn't be independent, we would be speaking British English now. Thank you for having the courage to stand up and say no to war. The majority of us Americans never elected George W. Bush. There are millions of American who appreciate what France is doing. We are living a coup right now in our country, that's why we do not support coups in other countries. The best definition of an ally, is that it's a friend who will tell you when you're wrong. Thank you for taking position for something really important. Many Americans are thinking like you. Thank you for helping us stop this war.

Meryl Streep -- who received an hommage -- said "I have the impression that history is repeating itself. It's as if human beings weren't able to learn from their past mistakes". Earlier during the ceremony, Roman Polanski -- who received seven Césars for The Pianist -- dedicated his prices to the martyrs and heros of WWII.

Spike Lee, who received a César d'honneur, also said kind words of support to France, noting that the French are really making a difference between the American people and their foreign policy. He thanked France for "fighting this war for oil".

[updated]

CNET on Microsoft's migration plan after their deal with Connectix:

The server software drove the deal, said analysts, and will play a key role in helping Microsoft to attract users of its aging Windows NT 4 server operating system to Windows Server 2003, slated to debut on April 24.

So that's another point for their interest in the virtualization feature. Now the interesting bit of this article lies in a quote from a certain DeMichillie, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft:

"Microsoft is taking a lot of flak from Oracle through ads that say they can consolidate Exchange better than Microsoft can. Microsoft looks at Connectix as a way to run more Exchange Servers on a single Window (sic) server."

For our readers who don't dig Windows (with an s), Exchange is Microsoft's email server and is famous for its inability to scale well (that's what the trolls who look after our email server in the basement keep telling me, and we all know the story about Hotmail). What DeMichillie is telling us here is that running multiple copies of Exchange under multiple instances of Windows Server on top of a virtual PC stack is more efficient than having a single instance of Exchange running alone.

Ahem, tell me about optimization and scalability. Here in the big IT business it's a known fact that IT is not an exact science. But we're not supposed to make it so obvious to world+dog!

Something I deeply enjoy doing on the web, and particularly with weblogs, is following a trail of links and uncover little jewels -- and often true marvels -- along those little random journeys.

While I was watching some photos taken by Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan in Paris last November, trying to figure out if Meg had finally enjoyed her stay at the City of Light (but not bandwidth) (I'm gentillement mocking her in the comments on that article), I spotted that they went to Marseilles (why can't the Anglosaxons get that name right?) and in Pompignan. On Pompigan, I'm already a reader of Dean Allen, but I discovered Gail Armstrong along the way on Kottke's weblog.

I'm not finished laughing, her weblog cracks me up. Two excerpts:

From the Pompignan Times Gazette:

In other news:

• Claudette P. hung only 6 pairs of underpants on the line last Thursday, instead of the usual 7.
• Mr. and Mrs. Souche are renovating their kitchen. They say it will be blue, but many think that green would be better, to match the living room rug.
• Frédéric will be selling pot in the usual spot behind the school before tonight's Bingo game.
• A follow-up on our story from last week: Arlette's bunion has not improved, and this week she had some pain in her left elbow.

Frédéric will be selling pot in the usual spot behind the school before tonight's Bingo game! This so not what le petit Nicolas wants for us, especially in such a good little province!

And a fabulous post about the history of translations:

[...] it is interesting that a number of historians have suggested that linguistic efforts made by the French in Canada were key to reducing the bloodshed, and led to largely peaceful negotiations. Although I suppose it's legitimate to debate whether any virtue lies in screwing people with words rather than violence.

It is said that French is la langue for love and politics. No wonder why the French kiss is a universal value and that Dominique has a unique capability to put the Honorable Donald out of his mind. Fais l'amour Donald, pas la guerre.

It's buying frenzy this week. After Google buying Pyra, Microsoft is buying Connectix's Virtual PC assets. According to this article from the Seattle Post Intelligencer, 30 out of 100 Connectix employees are joining Microsoft. Virtual PC for Mac is a Mac OS software that emulates an Intel PC and allows Mac users to run Windows and Linux. From the beginning, VPC has had the unique ability to permit the installation of multiple versions of Windows and IE, which adds value to the Mac as both a design and cross-platform testing environment. Connectix has since released VPC for Windows which brings this ability to run multiple configurations on a single box to PCs. Microsoft has also acquired an unreleased server version which further builds on this OS/applications virtualization idea.

Most weblogs out there report that Microsoft has bought Connectix as a whole, while it appears that Connectix will continue to have a life on its own. At the other extreme, the Seattle Times reduces this to the Mac OS bit alone.

Todd Dominey thinks Microsoft must have some big plan behind that move. He makes a point in the capacity of Microsoft to throw more resources and improve the product farther than Connectix could ever do alone. However I disagree on the following:

Perhaps Microsoft sees the application as a gateway product - an integrated emulation environment - for companies and small businesses that are dropping Windows environments for Unix / Linux / OS X.

If they dropped Windows in the first place, why would they want to buy it back to emulate it on a Mac? Unless they are all in the web design business, there is little chance that they need VPC at all. Also, most weblogers out there hope that Microsoft will transfer VPC to their MacBU, forgetting that VPC is not just a Mac OS application.

Todd, elaborating on an allegedly malicious nature of Microsoft, suggests that it could remove the current options that allow users to buy VPC without an OS, or with Linux, thus forcing everyone to purchase a version of Windows along with the emulator. While this is a possible scenario, I am not sure it wouldn't go unnoticed while Microsoft remains under close scrutiny for overselling Windows everywhere they can.

An intellectually interesting idea is that instead of developping multiple-OS versions of its products, Microsoft could turn VPC into a complete Windows emulation stack for Mac OS. Instead of supporting two development paths for its cross-platform applications (like Office, IE, WMP), it would only develop a single Windows version and ship VPC along for Mac users. There is a real drawback to this scenario: the disappearance of the MacBU division, which is recognized (even by some Microsoft people) for its ability to often come out with better versions of Microsoft products on the Mac than on Windows!

According to MacCentral, the MacBU will be responsible for all versions of VPC. So I might be wrong, unless the MacBU role turns exclusively into developping the VPC line.

Out of all this smoke and speculations, I think Microsoft is digging into the software virtualization business, which is the core feature of the whole VPC line they acquired. However, a close watch of the MacBU and certain weblogs will be required to reassure the Mac users on the fate of VPC for Mac!

[Update] The Register about this notes the absence of VPC for OS/2, the disappearance of the Linux version and advise Mac users to worry. They also think as I reported above that the virtualization features are what MS is after to.

IBM, sell that to Apple, please.

Thanks to eBay and an opportunist Slashdot member, you can buy a venerable Slahdot account as if you were there from the beginning:

This account's excellent karma allows you to speak slightly "louder" than other people . You can earn the karma on your own through painstakingly composed, wise comments garnering the praise of others like I have. You can scour the internet for stories to submit that just might be of significant enough merit to get published on the front page like I have. But you can never hope to get the low ID of this account.

Karma is what makes Slashdot usable despite one of the cheapest geek-designed site ever, it's a sort of time-proofed, community awarded vernis that veterans acquire and allows a reader to skim down to the interesting content by filtering out me-toos, trolls, rants and "where can I find big t1ts video sample clip?" nonsense.

Within the slashdot community, a low ID declares that you are in fact incapable of being a troll.

Looks like it's not true anymore, as any troll with a credit card or a Paypal account can now spoil a venerable community for a couple of bucks:

You were there in the early days, part of the community before it made it to the mainstream. So unless you make a time machine, this is your only chance to make yourself cooler than you really were back then. This is your chance to buy reputation, trust and esteem.

And all that for $32.99 as of today. Reputation is cheap nowadays.

Emmanuel Décarie has published an interesting critic of Clay Shirky's paper on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. He makes, in my humble opinion, an excellent point about the fact that "the power law doesn't give a damn about context and content".

Columbia wipes 8000+ .uk.co domains and you can read the story in full color here. Will Tony send the army? If that's not evil, what is?

And there are still people at work who want me to register every single ourcompany.stu.pid domain out there. Go figure :)

Oh oh, Google buys Pyra. Pyra is the editor of an Internet phenomenon called Blogger (more than one million users to date).

With the rise of numerous experiments aiming at digging the blogosphere such as Technorati, Popdex, Blogrolling along with its additional search services for news groups and news sites, Google is catching up on the weblog bandwagon.

Expect a "Bloogle" tab soon on Google!

The Register is UK's No.1 IT news site. Now for my francophone fellows: à quand une version française ?

404 error - Iraki Explorer: These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed. (via Boing Boing).

Wired announces: "As the original Mosaic Internet browser celebrates its 10th anniversary, co-creator Marc Andreessen talks about where Internet navigation is headed in a Wired News Q & A."

Frankly, the conversation is far from compelling and doesn't really add up to the headline. Sure you can think of improvements over the back button, but what Andreessen suggests (a graphical tree browser) doesn't look visionary to me.

Another thing that shocks the former Netscape folk in me is the only reason he invokes for using such or such browser:

I'm using Mozilla pretty much full time. I switched six or nine months ago. I had been using IE for three or four years before, because it was rendering page views faster. But now Mozilla does it faster.

Well, if I can appreciate that speed (or lack of) can be a big factor, a word on standards would have been nice to hear, especially from him. Ironically, if speed is just what Andreessen needs, then he should be less contemptuous about Safari.

IT Analysis via The Register on Microsoft vs. Nokia:

A recent article in The Economist about the battle between Microsoft and Nokia for operating system supremacy on wireless instruments (Smartphones) concluded that Nokia with its Symbian OS based Series 60 SDK was already the victor over Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 SDK [...] The reason given for the Nokia victory was the 'fear of Microsoft' extending their hegemony to the mobile device market.

Actually, IT Analysis thinks that the real reason is more simply that "Pocket PC is still a bloated OS for a portable device by any measurement":

Can anyone introduce me to a PDA user who regularly edits Excel and Word files on their PDA?

Indeed. It's refreshing to see that consumers may have a preference for things that just do what they need to do vs. techies' dreams that are full of promises but don't deliver. This is the reason why Palm, a ridiculous company compared to Microsoft by any financial standards and marketing muscles, and its Palm OS licensees are still leading the PDA market with rather simple but efficient products. Being a long time Unix fan, there is no mystery why I prefer the "do one thing but do it well" approach of the Palm OS-like smartphones as opposed to the "stuff-Windows-in-everything" approach in Microsoft's Pocket PC.

I have yet to find a reason why I would need Office or even Windows on a smartphone. And I don't dig into fatal error messages in the middle of phone calls:

Using one of the first versions of a Microsoft smartphone, after several unsuccessful attempts to use it to make a phone call, we got a dialog box that said, simply, "Nothing beyond".

Regularly I dig into the stats of this site, prentending that it will help me understand how people come here. I particularly like the search engine phrases, very helpful. The best to date is (I'm not making this up):

i want big tits video sample clip

Go figure...

One problem with simplistic minds is their manicheism. Things are either good or bad -- or evil for the braves who dare to explore a few nuances. Since they are not equipped to decipher subtle things, they have a 50% chance to be wrong in many of their judgments (and they are very prone to judge).

In an unrelated post (quoique) I linked to Dermot O'Connor's hilarious Gulf War 2 Flash game. Dermot has since posted selected pieces of feedback he has received from viewers. He summarizes them very well:

Some of the folks out there seem to want to live in a country where dissent is crushed. Fine...then YOU leave. North Korea is nice this time of year.

An American colleague who has sent the link to this game around is now called names and traitor to the pacifist cause by people who took it as a call for war.

It's dangerous to expose simple minds to humor and derision. All the others can enjoy Dermot's new production: Ashcroft Online 1.0.

While reading that NCR has patented the Internet (except hyperlinks which are BT, navigation frames which are SBC and templates which are IBM), I found this jewel in the comments: a method of swinging on a swing.

It's the problem with technology. It has become too complicated for the children who run the US PTO.

Enfer et putréfaction, the blinking horror is back!

If you see nothing blinking above, you're lucky enough to have a browser that does not render text-decoration: blink.

I had a dilemma with the external links. When I started this blog, all external links were hard-coded with "padawan" as target name, so they would open in an external window but always the same to avoid cluttering. Then, I had a nightmare where Jakob Nielsen was telling me, with the voice of Donald Rumsfeld, that if I wasn't with him, I was against him. So I removed all the targets. Then half my audience (from old Europe) started complaining that they wanted the external window back...

I knew there was a better solution out there, like here and here. I like Adrian Holovaty's one better, because it makes the difference between internal and external links (OTOH), it stores your preference in a cookie (although I have to figure out how to make it work with MT), and it makes the entire option text clickable (smart). I wrote to Adrian and he gave me permission to reuse his code, thank you Adrian.

Now, you have choice, isn't that cool? (oh là, je m'américanise à vue d'oeuil)

NetNewsWire 1.0 is now shipping. If you've got a Mac, read lots and lots of weblogs or news sites, and run a weblog yourself, this is an all-in-one news aggregator and weblog editor that may make your day. There is also a Lite version, free, without the weblog editor.

NNW is very simple to use, you can start using in a matter of minutes. But as simple as it looks it's full of surprises. Among what I prefer, it tells you how many new entries have been gathered that you haven't read yet (even lists them in the Dock), it stores the feeds for offline reading (very handy if you plan to catch up offline) and the weblog editor is a relief compared to filling forms in a web browser.

It's a 1.0 version so don't expect it to be perfect or bug free, but it can only get better. The developer -- Brent Simmons -- has been very responsive to requests during the beta testing. I'm looking forward to the integration of Apple's WebCore (from KHTML, the engine behind Safari) which should make the rendering just great.

While reading this post from Eric Meyer's blog, I found this little jewel:

Never ascribe to malice that which can be more easily explained by stupidity.

I'm going to name this assertion the Rumsfeld's razor™. Not that Donald Rumsfeld did ever say something like this (could he?), but by using Ockham's razor to determine if Rumsfeld is malicious or stupid, one can easily come to this very conclusion.

OK, this is a copycat try after seeing my Sun fellow Patrick discovering that he's a transvestite ;-)

Except that for me, it turned out to be the right match:

Which OS are You?

Relax Pat, it's a joke.

I have an undergoing discussion with a musician friend of mine. My stance, purposely provocative, is that if the music industry is not showing any added value between artists and their audiences, we should cut the middle man. He's not confortable with this idea, probably (my interpretation so far) because the present industry represents the established economical model and that traditional channels as well as the web still require a significant amount of marketing to succeed.

I'm more than happy to pay the artists for their works, but I question why I should bare a massive overcharge on what they earn, to finance intermediaries which currently do nothing but threaten my civil rights to increase their profits. The music industry appears to me as an old dinosaur which is just incapable to adapt to any change in its ecosystem. Unlike mostly all other sectors which have managed to adapt their business models and seek for new opportunities the web could offer them, the pigopolists(1) have consistently failed to show any positive sign of adaptation. Their reactions go from stellar corporate blindness (VU, thank you Jean-Marie Messier, l'exception culturelle française vous survivra) to brutal force in fighting theft at all costs, e.g. the highly criticized DMCA (and its European sequel EUCD), intrusive technological measures such as CD copy protection, knocking down civil rights like fair use or vaporizing privacy, etc.

Buying a CD is one of the least compelling things a consumer can do. When we had vinyls (a rather fragile support) it was very easy to listen before buying. Decades after CDs ( rather solid support) have been introduced, it's close to impossible to listen to them in the gigantic music stores that have replaced the shop around the corner. In Paris (a respectably big capital with zillions of tourists at all times and huge music stores open 365 days a year) you simply can't listen to music unless you're prepared to wait 45 mn for a maximum of three tracks (witnessed angrily by disgruntled trolls who start showing signs of impatience after the first ten seconds). Tired of queuing in unfriendly store, you head to Amazon, to find that you can listen only to the first 8 or 9 seconds of a CD, a choice that is not only completely stupid but totally useless (they probably have found an "efficient" way of doing this, using ridiculously underpaid morlocks who feed CDs à la chaine in automated readers).

Five years ago I had the chance to attend a presentation on Music Boulevard business model by their CTO. It is this presentation which compelled me to take a closer look at the pigopolists. The main point was that the music industry had no clue about consumers, and it was a mature if not sclerosed industry (their revenues being flat for over a decade). They have only two main clients: distributors and big music stores with high buying power. Distributors sell to retailers and know nothing besides the number of palettes they push. Retailers and music shops may be able to track individual sales but can't infer anything useful on consumers habits since they have no way to link two separate sales together. This was the driver to Music Blvd main idea: linking artists directly with their audiences and offering them innovative ways to discover one another. I find it sad that they failed, because there are plenty of signs that the music industry remains clueless about consumers.

For years now, it has been clear that the majors want us to subscribe to their catalogs. They dislike that you can hear a CD at will for a one time fee. They abhor the fact that you can lend it to someone else. They are horrified that you can read it on a PC and transfer it to your iPod. Their idea of mobile music is for you to pay a fortune to subscribe to a tiny catalog available on... your mobile phone, with the sound quality of, er, a mobile phone. I foresee more innovations like this, e.g. music unbundling: don't like the Sanctus part of Mozart's Requiem? No problem, you can subscribe only to the parts you like! Did I tell you they were clueless about what consumers want?

What is starting to make sense to me is that they are using things like P2P and digital copies as an excuse(2) to rush things towards the subscription model. They don't care that much about the Napster copycats but it gives them a formidable opportunity to build a sense of urgency and an aggressive platform to achieve their goal. Look Senator, those people are thieves, they are driving us out of business, artists will die, it's the end of civilization, you must do something now! And comes one of the most formidable plans to lock consumers out of their present rights to the pay-as-you-listen wonderland. It starts with securing the legal battlefield: prevent technological workarounds with the DMCA, set the intellectual thermostat in the United States to "permafrost", remove the embarassing bits of consumers rights by bidding them to shrink-wrapped licenses (how long before we see Microsoft-like EULA on music CDs?). Done with fair use. No you can't lend this CD and no I won't refund you because it doesn't play on your computer (are you a pirate?). You accepted the license terms by unwrapping the disk. Then it continues with the technological counter-measures: DRM, TCPA, Palladium. Sorry, you can't upload this song to your iPod because you didn't subscribe to this service. Once the plan is rolled out, they will not only have cleared all legal obstacles but also plugged the digital hole. You're surrounded, resistance is futile.

To finish on a positive note, I'd like to think that competition still stands for something, and that bad laws can be turned down. Such an unbalanced situation between record labels and music consumers is doomed to failure. I can't believe that it can go this far without eventually creating a huge opportunity for a radically new competition to the majors. May be this is the only way dinosaurs can evolve, by being replaced by fitter species.

(1) I've seen the term pigopoly appear on The Register to describe the RIAA. El Reg is very good at coining colorful descriptions and I love Briitish humour. It gives an appropriate snout to an otherwise pretty boring oligopoly. And they're doing a useful job in reporting regularly on the above mentioned subjects.

(2) It's a tactic called diversion. It's heavily used today by some guy who's using some events to make some people forget about smelly affairs, reduce their civil rights, forge a police regime, establish an empire and start world war 2.5.

Two weeks ago I reported on new weblog software coming. Dan Benjamin is teasing us again about Postmaster:

Because of the way you've built the system, Postmaster v3 could easily grow into either a web-application (like a Movable Type) or a desktop application (like Photoshop, Word, or Winzip). [...]

If it were to remain a web-application as it has been since version 1, users would need to find a place to host it themselves [...]

So, maybe Hiveware hosts it for the world. Which means better control, fewer problems ... but then there's the overhead. Server maintenance. Bandwith costs. Less appealing. [...]

Or ... create a desktop application with a slick interface. Make it complete. Stable. Fast. Embed a super-small database, and hide this from the user. Let them run the thing on their desktop. No server needed. A true desktop application.

Would people want this?

Probably, yes. At least the ones who, like me, are fed up with the terrible interface you have to bear when constrained within a web browser.

I see two streams emerging rapidly to solve this problem: desktop applications (yeah, finally the desktop UI strikes back) and Flash 6 "Rich Interface" applications.

Radio Userland functions as a desktop application. Another example is Ranchero's NetNewsWirePro (Mac only, in beta), which is primarily a news feeds aggregator but sports a weblog editor compatible with several weblog engines. NNW builds on the idea that editing your weblog is better done while you also browse other weblogs and news sites (a complete weblogging experience?), and it demonstrates that the editor and the weblog engine are two different things. Note that Radio is primarily a weblog system but has also a news aggregator.

You can quickly see two different breeds of desktop applications here. One that is tied to a weblog engine (Radio), another which is fairly independent and builds on mainstream APIs (NNW). The former can go much farther in terms of functionnalities because it is tied to the engine, the latter will remain more basic but allows you to manage several weblogs using different engines in the same application.

The Flash 6 "Rich Interface Application" is fairly young but promising. Once the Flash developers get the idea behind XHTML+CSS and stop throwing old-school things such as font faces and sizes, colors, bold, italic in their production, we can hope to see excellent editors coming up. Flash 6 can be expected in two flavors: self-contained Flash applications (which are, then, desktop applications) or embedded within web pages (e.g. replacing the highly annoying HTML text area). This last option will be popular to help the existing web-based editors to ramp up with the desktop applications in terms of UI comfort.

I wonder where Dan is heading to with Postmaster (actually from his last two posts, he's probably wondering about that too ;-). There is just one thing that bothers me on his last shot: "No server needed. A true desktop application.". Not even a web server?

By popular demand, I'm going to post something in French (but don't worry Tommy, I'm going to continue with English after that). Here is what Michèle Alliot-Marie (MAM, our ministre de la défense) said yesterday to Donald Rumsfeld who went ranting again on the old Europe:

Etre alliés c'est un statut qui implique le dialogue et le respect de l'autre. Cela veut dire que l'on évite les accusations infondées, que l'on évite les interprétations fallacieuses, que l'on évite les assertions mensongères.

Brilliant.

[Warning Babelfish users, the translation is jerky, but you should get the point easily.]

Half of my audience (actually one of my two readers) is asking me to post more stuff in French. Ah! zut alors.

I've been wondering before launching this weblog how I should do it: in English only, bilingual (translating every post), a mix (different posts in both languages or with link summaries and quotes translations), two separate weblogs with their own language. At some point I decided I had procrastinated long enough (five years, not bad) and that I should go for the simplest option: write in English (the American flavor because by experience the Brits don't email you when you write organization, while Americans apparently can't get that organisation is not a mispell on this side of the Atlantic*) for an international audience.

I wonder what the other half is thinking. Give me a sign, please!

(*) when www.capgemini.com was written in plain old British English, we used to receive one email per day telling us that "you mispeled (sic) organization". At some point we decided to switch to American English. We received no such complaints ever after.

After reading this article from Aviation Week, reporting that USAF imagery confirms that Columbia left wing was damaged, I wonder if the shuttle crew could have done something beforehand.

At launch, the left wing (the one which broke and caused the ship to break apart) was hit by foam debris coming from the external tank. At the time, Mission Control did not consider that it had caused a serious damage to the orbiter -- and from what I read all around it's not even clear that they informed the crew at all. What I don't understand is why a crew member did not fly around the shuttle to make a visual inspection before their reentry in atmosphere. Especially in this case, with NASA knowing that the foam debris could have caused damages to the wing.

I'm a completely clueless padawan in this matter, so this idea may be completely stupid. The damages could be completely unrelated to the launch incident. However, when I head off for a significant car trip, I inspect my car. Can't they afford a visual inspection of a space shuttle?

There is an interesting interview of Noah Grey on WriteTheWeb. This article holds not only a little bit of history about weblogs -- Noah Grey is the creator of Greymatter, "the original opensource weblogging and journal software" -- but a thoughtful point of view about copyright and intellectual property:

I'm mystified and slightly angered by the growing feeling among many on the web that the rights of artists over their own work just aren't important (or are at least of equal importance to the user's desire to do whatever they want with it). [...] The ethic of openness and sharing is a great one, but somehow that got mutated in a lot of people's minds into the idea that it should be the users deciding what's open, and not the artists.

For years now I've had numerous conversations with artists (mostly musicians, painters and photographers) about their perception of the web as a threat and/or an opportunity. Their first impression was always the threat to their IP rights but they also perceived the web as an opportunity to touch their audiences, morover in a much more direct and broader way than through traditional channels. Artists are no fools and they are perfectly entitled to fight for what is simply their gagne-pain.

I mostly agree with what Noah Grey says in that after Napster and Kazaa there is a growing number of users who think they have a right to exchange, copy, duplicate whatever can flow through the Net. However, the real feeling that emerges all around the world seems more related to the behavior of the music industry alone.

I wonder which version of Windows his computer got upgraded to?

Erik J. Heels wants to compare the ROI of his weblog vs. his traditional website:

Do weblogs generate more traffic than traditional websites? I republished my entire website with weblog software to find out.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results. There is something in weblogs that make me feel they would be very useful on a company intranet. Actually I have the intuition that a comparison of ROI between big bucks knowledge management systems vs. weblogs and a Googlebox would give a heart attack to many CIOs.

[Source: Patrick Chanezon which cannot say "nobody quotes me" anymore (Hi Pat!) ;-)]

The National Physical Laboratory in London has created a "Super Black" material which absorbs 99.7% of the visible light incident upon it. Scientific uses for black materials are numerous but Annanova reports that several artists have reported an interest. If there is one artist who should be thrilled by this, it's Pierre Soulages.
[spotted on Slashdot]

Last month we saw Lexmark using DMCA to prevent Static Control Components to produce chips that are used into Lexmark-compatible printer cartridges. CNET reports that the toner company is fighting back, arguing that DMCA exemptions include interoperability and therefore permits reverse-engineering (a traditional fair use right).

From CNET in Patent scare hits streaming industry:

a company called Acacia Media Technologies, said it owned patents on the process of transmitting compressed audio or video online, one of the most basic multimedia technologies on the Net.

From the article it's nor clear whether the claim has serious IP ground, but this new patent threat is following the same exact pattern as SBC and others: go after the little fishes that can't fight and will have to pay a license because it's cheaper than litigation, and get enough of them to convince bigger pockets that they should follow suit.

The article outlines that all patents can be challenged, that broad patents have been thrown out in court and that "legal teams on the defense often spend considerably more time than the overworked United States Patent and Trademark Office in researching possible previous inventions that would invalidate a patent." This yet another sign of the failure of the patent office at doing its job and letting others clean the mess.

People are constantly complaining about those "assistants" in MS Office, which keep getting into their way, and about Microsoft trying to be smarter than them. Yet, more and more bots are added everyday in a desperate fight against spam, obscenity and whatever "unconvenient" content travelling on corporations pipes. With interesting results, nothing that the Dog or the Clip in Word would be ashamed of.

Today's first pick is Jason Kottke's portfolio, categorized as pornography.

We also have UK MPs banned from emails. Apparently their new email filter is "now blocking parts of the Sexual Offences Bill being sent to parliamentary e-mail addresses. It also blocked a Liberal Democrat consultation paper on Censorship."

I like the last one. May it give them a taste of their own medicine before they cast censorship in stone.

A few years ago a colleague was trying to access an IT site and was banned by a company filter (something like webnonsense) because the site was labelled "obscene or inappropriate content". If all IT companies would licence the same software, it would make competitive watch a piece of cake.

It's Z as in Zorro. Bas les masques!

Mozilla offers a way to hide ads on web pages. It's not as easy as blocking pop-ups but if you are allergic to ads you should give it a try. The trick is to use the userContent.css file which allows users to customize the content that appears in the browser windows. Examples are poping up around the web that hide or dim (reducing their opacity) the ads:

floppymoose (hide) - more info
Jan Moesen (dim)
Adrian Holovaty (dim)
tidakada (hides Flash banners)

I'm sure there are a lot more variations on the same theme (add your favorites in a comment). So far there is one missing for what I find the most annoying ad practice today: blocking those Flash ads that are sliced just before the page you want to read (Salon is heavily using them, so now I hate going on Salon).

Boing Boing on news trolls: "WashPo prematurely reports successful shuttle landing". Cory Doctorow mirrored the article before it was removed from the news site.

Boing Boing again on human greed: shuttle debris on sale on eBay. Check for yourself on eBay and here is my mirror today.

Just caught this on /.: Columbia shuttle breaks up over Texas with seven astronauts onboard. There is no hope that they could have survived. It's the biggest space accident since the explosion of Challenger on January 28, 1986. Columbia was the oldest of NASA's shuttle fleet. It first launched in 1981 and was on its 28th mission. Space shuttles have a life time of 100 missions. CNN reports that its age (22 years) may have played a role in the accident.

Dan Benjamin has launched Hiveware and showcases a bunch of neat products. It reminds me of Panic because of both the cute icons and the simple but no-nonsense products. While Panic products are only for Macs, Hiveware has cross-platform applications for desktop computers and servers among which I recommend Enkoder which encrypts email addresses to hide them from evil spambots. Enkoder comes in many flavors except one: a CGI script that could be integrated into a blog for encoding the email addresses on the fly. Actually Dan runs it on his site, but did not release the source. Dan, pleeeeeease!