Dave Winer: Google's IPO bidding site is live. Does that mean the IPO process has started?

Quote: Of the shares to be sold in Google's initial public offering of Class A common stock, 14,142,135 shares will be issued and sold by Google and 10,494,524 of the shares will be sold by the selling stockholders.

Randy: Wow, this is starting to sound more like a cash out by the current investors. A $1 billion cash out. Some $200 million to go AOL and Yahoo! bank accounts, NOT Google's. Of the expected $3.3 billion offering, Google is only getting about half, while the investment community walks away w/ the rest. Cash is King. Google is being evil again.

Quote: Uzbek suicide bombers targeted the US and Israeli embassies and the general prosecutor’s office in Tashkent yesterday. The blasts left five people dead, including the three bombers, and at least five more injured. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) claimed responsibility for the bombings in a statement posted on a website. The attacks were staged as 15 suspects with alleged links to Al-Qaeda stand trial for a wave of violence earlier this year that left at least 47 people dead.

Randy: Terrorism rises again after a lengthy period of calm. Has anyone else noticed the lacking amount of terrorist attacks this summer? Or has the media simply grown tired of reporting it?

So, who do you think has visited my site more times than myself? Believe it or no, there's at least 9 users that have done just that, w/ each having more than 200 visits this month or 7 visits per day and one user actually visits my blog more than 10 times per day. I think these are unbelievable stats, so I spent the last few moments figuring out who the hell these guys are.

• Two of the 9 are bloglines.com. That's a little ridiculous. Why does bloglines need to visit my site more than 500 times during a month?
• The biggest visitor of kbcafe.com is a DSL user from snfc (SanFran?) on the PacBell network. I won't give the exact IP address, for confidentiality sake, but you'll know who u r.
• I also got a post from a different IP address on the same PacBell network. This poster tried to fake a comment post in my name.

EFF: Last week, "Internet marketer" Scott Richter got off with a slap on the wrist in one of the most high-profile spam cases in recent months. New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer sued Richter, president of OptInRealBig.com, back in December for sending deceptive junk email, and promised to seek millions in damages. But in a somewhat mysterious move, Spitzer wound up offering a settlement in which Richter paid only a $40,000 fine plus $10,000 for legal fees. [cut] Cases against Delta Seven and Synergy6 are still pending.

Source: BoingBoing.

Randy: Let the SPAMming continue. I'm guessing Spitzer no longer has political aspirations.

Kinetic: Ouch. Looks like MS misconfigured an authentication server and many MS-Money users were locked out on Monday - and continue to be locked out of their own files.

Randy: Ouch is the word!

Quote: On February 10. 2004, the White House released a number of documents related to George W. Bush’s military service in the Texas Air National Guard. The White House claimed repeatedly (twelve time in fact, see box) that these documents proved that Bush had fulfilled his duty. In fact, not only did those documents fail to prove that Bush had “fulfilled his duties”, they prove the opposite.

Randy: A War Hero v. an AWOL?

XML Schema 1.1 working draft: Please send comments on this Working Draft to www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org (archive).

Randy: I've posted to the W3C mailing lists on many occasions. Obviously, my voice is not worthy. Not only did my posts not make the list, but I didn't get a rejection message either. The W3C is irrelevant?

Dare: An XML vocabulary should be designed in such a way that the applications that process it do not break when it is inevitably changed. One of the primary benefits of using XML for building data interchange formats is that the APIs and technologies for processing XML are quite resilient when faced with additions to vocabularies.

Randy: An amazing article on designing XML vocabularies w/ extensibility in mind. Much less than the 24 obvious errors typical of XML.com.

The three laws:

1. A Republican may not injure a corporation, or, through inaction, allow a corporation to come to harm.
2. A Republican must obey the orders given it by corporations except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A Republican must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Source: Steve's No Direction Home Page.

Tony Pierce: for the exception of the hello kitty vibrator that i got clipper girl's cousin, i dont buy a lot of sex toys. [cut] i read today that the Alabama law prohibiting the purchase of sex toys was upheld by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. [cut] therefore i suppose the only way that we could help get guns off the streets in alabama would be to start a fetish where people started using them in a sexual way.

Randy: I don't know why, but I really like this blog post. But I don't know why. I'm trying to figure it out.

Have you ever tried putting a Windows.Forms.Form as a child of Windows.Forms.Form? Not trivial. Here's some code I used to get this to work.

this.miniSearchForm = new MiniSearchForm();
this.miniSearchForm.TopLevel = false;
this.Controls.Add(this.miniSearchForm);
this.miniSearchForm.Show();

The trick is to set the TopLevel member to false. In this example MiniSearchForm is a Windows.Forms.Form child of this. This code is part of the Juice Browser project.

Quote: “The dictator welcomes sex tourism. Here’s how he bragged about the industry,” said Bush. “This is his quote — ‘Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world’ and ‘sex tourism is a vital source of hard currency.’”

BoingBoing: It turns out that Bush's speechwriters found the quote in an undergraduate paper for Dartmouth, and they plagiarised it out of context.

Quote: This page is not yet ready.

Source: Scripting.

Well, my bandwidth is out-of-control again. Monday was my first 3000 visitor day, because I released the 2.4 version of Juice. In the next few days, I'll break 10 gigabytes of transfers this month w/ is my soft cap and the over charges are quite large. Upto to now, I could pay twice as much for 10 times more bandwidth, but now the packages at my ISP provide only twice the bandwidth for thrice the cash. That doesn't scale in my pocket. Or, I can jump to a dedicated server for ten times the cost. Suggestions are welcomed. Help!!!

Update: Actually, I've had 3000 visitor days before, but only when I get Scobleized or Scripted. This is the first 3000 visitor day when nobody significant linked to me.

I was recently asked by John in my comments, "Could you give a wannabe web app programmer some tips on where to start?"

Here's my suggestion.

Come up w/ an idea for a Website and try to make it yourself. Something simple please. If you're just getting started, then you'll want to get some cheap Linux hosting and code the Website in PHP. Any reader suggestions for free LAMP hosting and PHP tutorials? I found W3Schools is great all-around for PHP, HTML, Javascript and CSS. Next, understand that it's a lot of work to make a good looking Website, so start off w/ something simple and basic. Don't worry, w/ years of experience you'll get better, maybe even good.

What about school?

Don't bother w/ computer science schooling if you can't make a simple PHP Website. On the otherhand, if you can already slap together a PHP Website and want to be more than a hack Web programmer, then consider some schooling. I don't find that short-term schooling helps much. Consider a 2-4 years program w/ a college or university. I don't think the quality of the school really matters as long as you are a self starter. Mind you, you'll end up w/ a better professional network of friends, if you attend a prestigious school.

MHO.

Quote: The XML Schema Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of XML Schema 1.1 in two parts: Part 1: Structures and Part 2: Datatypes. The drafts include change logs from the XML Schema 1.0 language and are based on version 1.1 requirements. XML schemas define shared markup vocabularies, the structure of XML documents which use those vocabularies, and provide hooks to associate semantics with them. Visit the XML home page.

Randy: At first look, doesn't look like they've addressed inclusion of unordered elements w/ cardinality > 1. Does the new XML Schema support groups of unordered elements w/ maxOccurs >1? XML Schema has been said to be broken because of this failure.

Tim Bray: I hate this trade-off, polluting a language design because of the broken-ness of a particular schema language is really irritating.

Randy: Atom is looking to be an XML language of the future. The ability to accurately describe it in XSD would be more than a nice to have.

Quote: MSNBC.com today begins its test of the MSNBC Newsbot, a new way to give consumers personalized online news powered by the latest MSN® search technology. For a limited time starting today, consumers may participate in testing this first-of-its-kind "personal newsstand" service that automatically taps user preferences to search for news from more than 4,800 sources.

Source: Geeking w/ Greg.

Randy: Microsoft seems to be spending a lot of money going after Google. Maybe an attempt to scare the investment community into devaluing the IPO? I have to wonder if this is their strategy. A brilliant one!

I was saving them for my kids, but hell, it'll be years till they can use them. If you want one, then contact me via IM at randymorin on Yahoo! or randy@kbcafe.com on MSN. Friends and regular kbcafe posters only. Thanks!

Update: 2 left.

BBCNews: The third and final Star Wars prequel - due for release next summer - will be called Revenge of the Sith, producer Lucasfilm has said.

Source: glassdog.

New.com: Google's search engine was out of service to people in some places Monday morning, giving error messages in response to search requests. A new variant of the MyDoom worm was released Monday.

Scobleizer: Looks like more than Google is down. Channel 9 and Altavista and other sites are having troubles too, friends are reporting to me in IM and over email.

Update: The outage was caused by the latest MyDoom virus.

• W32.MyDoom.M details and removal instructions @ Symantec.

Quote: Do you feel lost and confused when it comes finding a reputable real estate agent?  It's hard to know who to trust these days.  This site offers an invaluable forum for use in networking with other buyers to hear what they have to say about real estate agents in your area.  At the completion of your real estate transaction you may leave feedback on this forum to allow others to benefit from your experiences.

Randy: A cool site owned and coded by a friend of mine.

Steve: Robert Scoble, Microsoft Geek Blogger, is the ultimate corporate blogger. There's a lot we can learn from him so I have started a club for all his fans. Robert Scoble, Microsoft Geek blogger, rocks. He tells the truth. He pulls no punches. He's the blogger we all want to be. So I am starting a fan club. Come join me in worshiping the Church of Scoble.

Scripting: I should have seen this coming. I'm a fan too. Now the question is, will it go to his head? (Yeah, of course it will.) 

Randy: A fan club of two and counting. Come join us.

Anne: The W3C has released a new working draft of XHTML 2.0.

Randy: Awesome, another spec that will remain ignored for 5 years.

Gizmodo: The US Army's Soldier System Center in Natick, Massachusetts has created a pouch filled with chicken and rice that can be rehydrated with a soldier's own urine.

Source: WongDude.

Scripting: The full 9/11 report is available as a 585-page PDF. Jason Kottke created an HTML version of the executive summary of the 9/11 report, with permalinks for each paragraph.

Source: BoingBoing.

HP Exec: We now understand that Microsoft is about to launch legal action against the industry for shipping Open Source software that may force us out of using certain popular Open Source products.

Randy: Other relevant articles and sources on the issue.

• Newsforge - Note the author fails to understand the difference between Open Source and Free Software. Don't make the same mistake.
• Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch.
• Scripting News.

Dave Massy: The IE team now has their own blog http://blogs.msdn.com/ie.

Randy: http://awesome. I'll poke my head in once in awhile (subscribe).

U.S. Newswire: FTCR president Jamie Court "Malpractice costs are a fraction of 1 percent of all health-care costs." FTCR has dedicated a resource page to correcting myths about the medical malpractice crisis that can be viewed at http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/healthcare/medmal.php.

Source: cosmicsurfer.

1. Use the <INVISIBLE> </INVISIBLE> tags around the entire document.
2. Use the DONTSTEAL attribute in the <BODY> tag.
3. Ftp to your server, select all files and directories, hit "Delete".
4. Put every existing copy of every file on floppies, place them in a shoebox and bury them in the backyard. There is another version of this method which involves placing the floppies in a plastic bag and hiding them in a different sort of hole. Both are equally effective.
5. Password protect your entire site and make sure no one has the password, not even you.
6. Employ a small but fanatically loyal and well-armed band of mercenaries to guard your site.
7. Start>Run>format C:\
8. Attack dogs, preferably rabid.
9. Use any version of Microsoft Frontpage to create your site. (This won't prevent people from viewing your source, but no one will want to steal it.)
10. Don't put your pages on the web.

Randy: HTML Obfuscation :)

Quote: Verizon Communications has stepped up its battle against cable operators with plans to debut a broadband-over-fiber service later this summer. A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service. The service will cost $40 if purchased alone. A connection of up to 15mbps is available for $45 a month if purchased as part of the same telephone service bundle, or $50 alone. The company did not reveal pricing for the 30mbps plans.

Randy: Gotta luv fiber. I can't wait. I'll cancel my cable Internet, host my blogs from the basement and save money. In fact, I'll host your blogs too. Mind u, iM in Canadera.

Quote: As part of that package, the company will issue a onetime cash dividend of $3 a share at a cost of $32 billion. Bill Gates, the company's chairman and largest shareholder, will receive $3.3 billion of that payment. Mr. Gates, already the world's richest man, will also see an extra $180 million per year from the company's decision to double its quarterly dividend from 4 cents a share to 8 cents a share. The company said, in addition to the dividend payouts, it will buy back as much as $30 billion of its own stock over the next four years, making it the largest stock buyback plan ever.

Source: Scripting.

Randy: It's getting easier to talk about Microsoft ;)

Quote: What is Online Presence? Online Presence allows people to see if you are currently online and using Yahoo! Messenger.

  

Randy: You may have noticed the online presence in the right pane of my blog. More specifically, the Yahoo! badge that indicates whether iM online or offline. If you double click on that icon and have Yahoo! Messenger running, then you would open a chat window w/ yours truly. If you want this on your own site, then click here.

I have 72 Yahoo! MSGer contacts and only 12 are online. The service, although amazing, is slowly IMHO being abandoned in favor of MSN MSNer. I have 133 MSN MSGer contacts w/ 66 online (half). A few times of late, I've crashed into the 150 contact limit in MSN MSGer. I didn't know it existed until recently and had to remove stale accounts. I've removed about 20, which were always offline or that I had blocked. Further, most of the 12 online Yahoo! contacts also have an MSN MSGer account.

Cory: Wired News has a good piece on the backlash against the growing trend of news-sites requiring logins to read their articles, covering automated tools like the Mozilla bugmenot plugin that automatically spoofs your logins to 14,000+ sites. The point that everyone seems to miss is that no one can possibly keep track of a thousand passwords for a thousand websites, which means that these sites undoubtably contain recycled passwords (admonishments from security experts to never recycle a password are the infosec equivalent of telling people to "eat less and exercise more" -- simplistic doctrine that is vanishingly unlikely to be adhered to in the field).

Randy: The problem of proliferation of passwords is growing.

Quote: A man who shot himself in the groin after drinking 15 pints of beer and stuffing a sawed-off shotgun down his trousers was jailed for five years Tuesday for illegal possession of a firearm.

Source: AVC.

or should I say, Orkut is an embarassment to .NET.

Server Error

The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

Please try again in 30 seconds.

Here's a picture of my kids. You can't see Adelaine's face, my six year old, as she is the one in the middle back w/ the Jasmine costume. Celeste, 1 yrs old, and Brayden, 4 yrs old, are front and centre. The picture was taken at Celeste's first birthday party just over a week ago. The party was a costume party and also my 35th. The wife is thinking about #4. More news in 3 months to a year from now. I guess that would make the 4th one a summer or early fall baby.

Last, both Brayden and Celest are sleeping w/ me on the couch this evening. Adelaine is up stairs playing w/ her cousin, Eden, whose parents are watching the Esther concert.

Quote: NUnit is a unit-testing framework for all .Net languages. Initially ported from JUnit, the current version, 2.1 is the third major release of this xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities. NUnit brings xUnit to all .NET languages.

Randy: Testing is always my favorite subject at work. I've worked in countless organizations that claim they do unit testing, but haven't seen one yet that uses any of the xUnits.

A good start on C# coding standards, presented by M$FT themself. I found this about a year ago.

Quote: Microsoft will pay upstart Linux seller Lindows $20 million to settle a long-running trademark dispute, according to a regulatory document filed Monday.

Randy: By settling w/ such childishness, Microsoft is only encouraging further exploits.

relaxedguy: Yahoo! is countering a common trend of dating sites using plastic-looking people in their marketing efforts and web ads. They're looking for real singles to star in their new ad campaign.

Randy: Good idea. They'll likely get thousands of bonus sign-ups to fill a few positions they needed filled.

Quote: While most shows go out of their way to find the next truly talented performer in the country, The WB's Superstar USA is out to find the not so talented!!

Randy: I think I finally found a reality show that appeals to me.

Update: I watched all five episodes w/ my wife, consecutively, today. I missed the British Open, sorry Mike. The entire show was quite amuzing, except the ending. The blonde bombshell, that won, didn't seem to understand when they revealed to her that the contest was for the worst singer, not the best. She was confused, but was still overjoyed. It was pitiful.

A common error when writing Javascript is to access the document model before the document is fully loaded. For example, look at the following code.

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById("wait").style.borer="solid red";
function OnLoad()
{
   document.getElementById("wait").style.border="solid blue";
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="OnLoad()">
<div id="wait"> </div>
</body>
</html>

Note the two calls to getElementById. The first will return null and then cause an Object required exception in IE6. The second will return the referenced div and set the style appropriately. The reason is that the document is not loaded when the first call to getElementById is made. Note, that first call to getElementById fails in Mozilla also and the problem is not IE specific.

Quote: Bush reportedly told the group, “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.’’

Source: Scripting.

Randy: Another religious quack who thinks himself a prophet. I guess the differences between Osama and Bush are fewer than previously believed.

Quote: Protected Identity - The identity we disclose when we have the assurance that we are in control of not only what we present but also who we choose to have it presented to. Though in shorter supply, we're more comfortable when we feel we're in control, despite the potential illusion. The most common area where this occurs is within secure online applications such as banking, auctions, and the like. In recent times, we've seen this begin to appear in social networking applications such as Friendster and Lemontonic.

Randy: Cool! A reference for Lemontonic, along-side Friendster.

Martha is the perfect example of what I mean by Justification and Argumentative. No matter how wrong she has proven to be, she's still pushing product and denying her guilt.

I'm completely jaded by the amount of justification that occurs day-by-day in the workplace. Deadlines missed? That's ok, we have a reason. Deadline hit? Shame on you, you could've finished earlier. You can always justify any good or bad news into the opposite. You can be argumentative and never give in on any issue, even when you are clearly wrong.

Quote: Domestic icon Martha Stewart moved one step closer to a drastically different lifestyle behind bars when the millionaire entrepreneur was sentenced Friday to five months in prison for a stock-trading scandal.

Randy: The crazy part is that the shares of Imclone that Martha sold are worth 50% more today than what she sold them for.

Blue Steele: Wouldn't it be hilarious if someone took a whole lot of George Bush's incoherent ramblings, mispronounced words, sentences that make no sense and empty rhetoric, set it to music and made an album of it? Yeah, that would be great. Well guess what? Someone did. The George W. Bush Singers present Songs in the Key of W Be sure to check out the sample MP3s, and if you're anywhere near Austin you can see them live on the 24th.

Randy: Something to listen to later, while iM at the office, pretending to work.

Stefano: The Semantic Web has a serious problem: the XML people don't understand it. So, this is a RDF guide for XML people. A much needed one, IMO.

Randy: Bookmarked for later reading. iM one of those XML people.

Quote: Microsoft Corp. plans to release a product that will allow business users to send and receive messages from Yahoo Inc., AOL and Microsoft's instant messaging systems, regardless of which brand the user is running. The option will be available with Microsoft's Live Communications Server 2005, due out at year's end. In the first half of 2005, businesses who buy that product will also be able to purchase extra licenses so their employees can send and receive messages from the three instant messaging entities.

Randy: Game. Set. M$FT wins again.

Mark Evans: At the forefront of this emerging trend in North America is Toronto-based 1X Inc., which will launch new software called BetBug in the next few weeks.

Randy: I helped start 1X Inc. 3 yrs ago. Reblogs appreciated.

Brad: I liked T (Tammi) and H (Holly) but they are nothing compared to Megan.... yes, Im going to use first names... it will be ok, im sure... Anyway, yes... we met online... thru Lemontonic dating thingy, which is so amazing since, I didnt think she would ever email me back, but she did... and goddamn am I glad...

Randy: iM the artchitect of the Lemontonic software. Glad to hear someone experienced the greatest day in the history of their life w/ the help of my software.

Quote: Federal broadcast regulators have cleared the way - in theory at least - for Canadian viewers to gain access to the Arabic Al-Jazeera television network via cable. But the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, in a ruling released today, set stringent rules designed to keep anti-Semitic or other abusive comments off the air. The result may be that most cable TV firms will pass up the chance to carry the 24-hour news channel often described as the CNN of the Arabic world.

Randy: I wonder what the CRTC is afraid of? Afraid that we'll find out the enemy is a lot closer to home?

There's 100 million people close to home that are still thinking about voting for the administration responsible. Even after the President himself admits that they attacked Iraq for the wrong reasons. If after the President's men admit to war atrocities. There's still 100 million American's stupid enough to vote for him. Again!

Don't you get it? Your country attacked another country under false pretenses, then raped and murdered their women and children. Buy a mirror!

Now for the CRTC. We have countless American channels disseminating a wartime doctrine to the Canadian public. What? We can't have one pro-Arabian channel?

Quote: The DNRC continues its unstoppable drive toward total world domination, now boasting 419,000 inexplicably attractive members. Each one of you is so bright that night falls a full hour later wherever you live.

Randy: It's never a bad day, when you get email from Dogbert.

Quote: If Dexit Inc. had gone public in late 1999 with the dream of conquering the cashless society, investors would have begged their broker for shares.

Randy: They did go public in earlier 2000. Back then, they were called 724 Solutions and they eclipsed a market cap of $10 billion. Dexit spawn from 724's offices, 724's employees and 724's ideas.

Quote: One of the most difficult exercises I'm going through right now is finding a business name to encompass the feel of my new company. I've tried everything and no matter what I select, the domain name is already registered. I even tried a domain name generator website, but to no avail. I don't want to pay $1-million to a creative firm to come up with something ridiculous, like LemonTonic or AllStream, or a name that a few glasses of Zindafel could've helped me to develop on my own.

Randy: Hey, be nice!

Quote: America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are teaming up to link their separate instant messaging services for use in the workplace, the first major step by the industry leaders to enable computer users to communicate with one another no matter which of the three systems they use.

Randy: Seeing is believing. This is reading. This explains why AOL recently cancelled their corporate IM offering. This is quite a $$$ play. Seems that you have to license a M$FT corporate IM server (maybe LCS) to get these benefits. That won't be cheap. This is definately not for the average IM user. Thanks Robin for the heads up.

Dave: Neat public domain footage of an F4 jet crash test.

Randy: View the Quicktime.

Danny: I just got a mail from the folks for whom I did the self catering in tuscany pages, wanting to know how to boost their search engine ranking. I suggested the usual thing of getting yourself listed in directories. Also the trick of trying the target search query (”tuscan holidays“) in Google, then checking their incoming links with link: e.g.
link:http://www.tuscanholidays.co.uk/. Anyone got any other tips?

Randy: A few posts in the blogosphere like this should help.

Quote: 724 Solutions (NASDAQ: SVNX; TSX: SVN), announced today that Nasdaq has approved the company's application to transfer its listing from the Nasdaq National Market to the Nasdaq SmallCap Market, effective at the opening of business on July 13, 2004.

Randy: And the story unfolds further :(

Quote: We are a group of researchers at the MIT Media Lab who are studying the use of online personals and other mediated environments for dating.

Dmitry: This article describes the new SOAP extension for PHP.

Randy: Awesome, WSDL support in PHP. I wonder if order of elements matters? Or for that matter, how complete the WSDL support is? Does it support more than trivial examples?

Source: Smartpatrol.

Randy: My high score is 41 meters. I should get a few rounds of Yetigolf in tonight.

Nominator Howard said: "Alec offers an introspective soapbox on World Events, Canadian Politics, and the Technology Business." We found a nice mix of lists and links, well worth a visit.

Randy: Congrats Alec!

Quote: Google has registered to be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange for its upcoming $2.7 billion initial public offering, it said in a regulatory filing Monday. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search company, which filed to go public in late April, had not previously disclosed information on its chosen stock exchange, and it has yet to propose a trading symbol.

I once believed as other programmers do, that wrapper classes around 3rd party components was a good thing. When you switch components, you simply changed the wrapper class and everything else kept working w/ no code change. This, sorry to say, is a falacy. In the end, when you switch components, for whatever reason, you will end up rewriting the wrapper class interface and this will in turn require you to rewrite large amounts of code outside of the wrapper class to integrate the new 3rd party component.

At 724 Solutions, we decided to go w/ CORBA as the IPC object transport. Against my usual wishes, a wrapper was written around our CORBA interface. The idea was that some CORBA ORBs had different implementations and that we would benefit from this wrapper as we could swap in a new CORBA implementation without rewriting any code outside the wrapper. I tried to explain my opinion that they were going to have to rewrite the wrapper regardless. They laughed this off and suggested that my previous experienced were due to individuals who did not understand how to write a reusable wrapper interface. You can guess what happened when we changed ORBs. The wrapper was thrown away and a new one was written. All servers required complete rewrites. Lesson learned.

1. Safari crashes ...
2. Safari crashes ...
3. Safari crashes ...
4. Safari crashes too much.

Quote: In muted tones, Microsoft’s chairman warned governments and companies that open source software is not the way to go if they are in the business of creating jobs and intellectual property.

Oleg: This is the same as saying that automated assembly line kills jobs.

Randy: I have to agree, automated assembly lines kill jobs. I guess iM the fortunately person who lived thru the automotive layoffs and the software development layoffs.

Japan Times: Softbank's Yahoo BB ADSL offers up to 45 Mbps for downstream, or receiving data, but a mere 1 Mbps for upstream. FTTH's maximum speed is 100 Mbps for both directions.

Randy: How do you pronounce FTTH? This is surely the future. I investigated FTTH for my home two years ago. It wasn't overly expensive, but neither was it available in my neighbourhood. I don't exactly live w/ the cows, but ADSL access is not available either for me and my neighbours.

100 Mbps would make basement hosting of Websites a profitable business.

Quote: As discussed in WhenU Spams Google, WhenU attributes its cloaking and other prohibited sites to "an outside search engine optimization firm based in New York." (See c|net article quote from WhenU CEO.)  It is therefore of interest to detmermine which outside SEO WhenU hired. It is necessary to know which SEO WhenU hired in order to attempt to confirm (by asking the SEO) whether the SEO acted in accord with WhenU's instructions, or whether the SEO went beyond what WhenU requested and/or authorized. Knowing which SEO did the cloaking is also of interest in order to seek out other search engine optimization sites that might violate search engines' listing rules.

Quote: An anonymous donor in Canada has come forward with a pledge to pay all hospital expenses incurred by a young Afghan boy facing life-saving heart surgery in Ottawa, say officials.  Doctors at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario have waived their fees in the case of Djamshid Djan Popal, a nine-year-old village boy with terminal damage to three valves in his heart, but other medical expenses could amount to $200,000.

Randy: iM CDNian. While the rest of the world kills each other, Canada says 'have a nice day.'

Dare: It is now quite clear that GW Bush and his cronies started a war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis, cost the US and Iraq billions of dollars, and has increased the negative feelings towards the US across the world [especially in the Middle East] for no just cause.

Randy: The ultimate in accountability is elections. Vote him out! Oh wait! I keep forgetting that you didn't actually vote for him in the first place.

Dare: It is now quite clear that GW Bush and his cronies started a war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis, cost the US and Iraq billions of dollars, and has increased the negative feelings towards the US across the world [especially in the Middle East] for no just cause.

Randy: The ultimate in accountability is elections. Vote him out! Oh wait! I keep forgetting that you didn't actually vote for him in the first place.

Rods are an interesting topic. They could fall into many categories.

• They could be video figments.
• They could be extraterrestrial creatures.
• They could be unknown earthborn creatures.
• They could be unknown natural phenomena.
• And much, much more.

Dare: The W3C still has a good brand name since many associate it with the success of the Web but it seems that it has become damage that vendors route around in their bid to create the next generation of the World Wide Web.

Randy: Further evidence is that Tim Bray, x-W3C Technical Architecture Group, conceited that Atom would be better in the IETF and not the W3C.

The problem w/ patents is not that they can be used to create reasonable royalty revenues, but rather that they can be used to exclude others. If the patent laws were returned to their former glory, these billion $ lawsuits would go away. Patents are about sharing ideas, while protecting the author by giving him a reasonable (not small, not large) royalty to compensate him for his invention. $500 million is not a reasonable royalty and that's the problem. Eliminating patents is not the solution. Requiring patent issuers to license at a reasonable royalty is the solution. Limiting damages to a reasonable royalty is the solution. Limiting the cost of royalties to make them available to companies other than IBM and M$FT is the solution.

Mind you, don't get me wrong, the root cause isn't patent law. The root cause is that the U.S. government is not capable of keeping current in the Internet age. Further to patent law stagnation, the U.S. government has failed to act on SPAM. CAN-SPAM is a failure.

Alec: Check it out at this location -- www.seewhogotfired.com.

Feature Rich

Suite

Value

Compatible

Randy: Can't wait for the full multimedia view tonight at home.

Update: Just watched the full videos at home. Funny! The last is inapproapriate, but the others are funny!

Quote: The United States is not raising its terror alert level, despite new intelligence that al Qaeda is moving forward with plans to attack the United States in this presidential election year, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said on Thursday.

Randy: After raising the terror level in May from Yellow to Yellower, I assume the latest threat moves the level to Yellowest.

Quote: "Within a short number of months," consumers will be able to transfer money to their Dexit cards by dialing an 800 number, said Blair Makin, Bell Canada's executive director of business networking solutions. During a briefing to IT Business editors Thursday, Makin said the Dexit system will verify customers' identity by recognizing their voices over the phone. "It will be a simple call to a voice recognition system, to say, 'Hi, it's Martin. Can you put another $20 into my account?' They already know who you are by your voice pattern."

Cory Doctorow: My next novel is called "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and Tor Books will publish it next spring (here's an excerpt). It's a bit of a departure for me: it's a fantasy novel -- well, more of a magic realist thing, actually -- about community wireless networking. Happy as I am with it, I'm unbelievably ecstatic over the cover-art.

Colour me ecstatic. 336K JPEG Link

Randy: Cory's a Dude. Literally.

As per Q317169.

Dim doc As XmlDocument = New XmlDocument()
doc.Load("rss.xml")
If (doc.FirstChild.NodeType = XmlNodeType.XmlDeclaration) Then
   Dim decl As XmlDeclaration
   decl = CType(doc.FirstChild, XmlDeclaration)
End If

I required this code in order to Respect RFC 3023.

Quote: John O'Malia, an American based in London, is hoping to win a share of the Internet gambling business. His latest venture is 1xInc.com, a company that plans to begin a peer-to-peer betting service on July 21.

Randy: Congrats to the 1X gang.

Quote: It used to be only Superman who could see through concrete walls, but an exhibit at the National Building Museum shows mere mortals can do it too. Called "Liquid Stone," the show features variations of translucent concrete, a newfangled version of the old construction standby that offers a combination of aesthetics and practicality. One display is a wall of translucent concrete blocks. When someone stands in front of it and light is shone from behind, the person's shadow can be seen clearly on the other side.

Source: BoingBoing.

Quote: Welcome to Your Disease Risk, the source on prevention. If you were looking for Your Cancer Risk, don’t worry. You’re in the right place. We’ve simply expanded. Now, in addition to cancer, you can find out your risk of four other important diseases and, as always, get personalized tips for preventing them.

Randy: This is worth 15 minutes of your time.

Neal Stephenson: About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."

Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours.

Source: Smartpatrol.

Randy: Here's an idea. I'm going to sell SPAM.

Today, I got comment bombed. Neat! I figure around 100 comments. Unsure if the intent was SPAM, Page rank help or somebody who didn't like me. The IP address of the attack was "218.85.61.242".

Update: All gone!

Update: And again on Thursday. 218.5.29.213

Update: And again on 11th. 218.85.63.76

Quote: More than $1.2 billion has been raised for a Linux consolidation campaign by the two leading vendors of the open source operating system since the beginning of the year.

Randy: A good overview of the Linux companies and some really funny sentences.

Quote: Novell is No.2 if you don't count IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Randy: My blog is #2 in the blogosphere, if you don't count a lot of blogs. Why didn't they just say Novell is No.4?

Quote: Red Hat trades at an astonishing 185 times trailing earnings while unprofitable Novell trades at 28 times expected 2005 earnings; neither is poised to achieve breakthroughs that justify current valuations.

Randy: Dexit IPOed last week on $2k in 2003 sales. Valuations?

Dave Kopel: This is a preliminary version of an article that will be published on National Review Online. [cut] There are many articles which have pointed out the distortions, falsehoods, and lies in the film Fahrenheit  9/11. This report compiles the Fahrenheit  9/11 deceits which have been identified by a wide variety of reviewers.

Randy: The answer to many questions asked on this blog. This is something that I love about the Web. If you lie, then I can link to it.

Kevin Hayden: Really, how many Americans do you know who go to bed each night thinking "gee, I hope Muslims and Arabs get the freedoms and enjoyments of democracy soon?" Or are we really only in it for ourselves?

Randy: Kevin makes an awesome point. Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, is in the middle of their first ever direct presidential election and we in the western world are oblivious. Do we truly care about the freedom of Muslims or do we really want security from attacks and a stable region to suck all the oil out of?

Quote: John Kerry announced today that he has chosen North Carolina Senator John Edwards to join his campaign to build a stronger America.

Randy: Although I like Edwards, I feel that this doesn't increase Kerry's chances in Florida or any other key state. Unless Edward can rescue a few southern states, this will be seen as a bad decision.

Tim Bray: I’d be really happy if someone explained to me how this is different from what Netscape and Microsoft did to each other so irritatingly back in 1996 (<MARQUEE> anyone?). What the W3C and Web Standards Project were created to stop?

Randy: Tim isn't happy that Safari has joined the extend HTML club.

TalkLeft: If you're at work and away from radio and tv this morning, make sure you stay on line. The LA Times reports it is likely that Kerry will announce his VP pick Tuesday morning in Pittsburgh.

Randy: Unfortunately, after accepting the nomination for VP, I will have to reduce my blogging for awhile. Assuming Kerry and I win the election, I will likely stop blogging for four years. Sorry!

Translation: We are sorry that Our President is an idiot.We did not vote for him.

Source: Oleg Dulin.

Quote: Stephen Ames, who was born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and is now a citizen of Canada, picked America's biggest holiday to win his first PGA Tour title at the Western Open.

Randy: On a sporting day dominated by Soccer, the Euro finals, a CDNian won on the PGA tour (and not Mike Weir). Congrats to Stephen Ames and Greece! My brother lives in Toronto's Greektown. I wonder if he'll be able to park anywhere near his house tonight?

Quote: The Hubble Space Telescope may have discovered as many as 100 new planets orbiting stars in our galaxy.

Quote: This week, Dexit became the latest tech offering to stumble coming out of the gate. The company runs an electronic system in downtown Toronto stores that lets clients pay without cash for small-ticket items -- coffee, doughnut and newspaper. After shrinking the size of its IPO, Dexit raised $25-million Tuesday by selling stock to investors at $6 a share. When trading began on the Toronto Stock Exchange, it was all downhill.

Randy: Congratulations to Debbie Gamble (Opencola lineage) and P.A. Roberge (724 lineage). I missed the IPO on Tuesday (working too hard). The future looks bright for this little engine from Yonge street. If my numbers are correct, they have about 11 million fully diluted shares, which means they were valued around $66 million at the IPO, which is greater than 724s current market cap, from whence they were born.

Dave: I'm going to go see Farenheit 9/11 today.

Randy: Don't underestimate the power of the dark slides.

Patent Abstract: The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar.

Randy: The M$FT patent lawyers are at it again. Next thing you know, they'll patent oxygen. Then we're all screwed. Well, at least they aren't as bad as IBM. IBM patented child birth.

Quote: On June 21, 2004, I joined ten or fifteen thousand other people to watch the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first private-venture craft to attempt to leave the earth's atmosphere and enter space, defined as an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles).

Scobleizer: Awesome pictures of Space Ship One.

Randy: Thanks Scoble for pointing these out. They truly are awesome.

Another new blog, dedicated solely to RVing and any other fun you can have away from a grounded house and Internet connection. Now w/ RVing and RSS moved over to separate blogs, iBLOGthere4iM has returned to its original roots of blogging for the fff hell of it.

The Old New Thing: The name for grouped taskbar buttons comes from the version resource of the underlying program. You can view this directly by viewing the properties of the executable program and looking on the Version tab.

Notes: In .NET this is the AssemblyTitle. If you already have run the executable, then modify the EXE will not modify the group name. That's because Explorer has cached the group name in the Registry.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\MUICache

Go to this Registry hive and delete the relevant group name.

I've always wanted to claim to have written the funkiest RSS ever. Here's my attempt. I created a lot of rules that I had to follow to make this a valid attempt on my part.

• It had to be valid RSS 2.0 according to the feed validator.
• It had to be not well-formed. Funny that most everybody believes its well-formed and valid. I must be missing something. Help? If someone can tell me why it's well-formed, I would be most grateful.
• It had to be incomprehensible by most RSS readers.
• All XML nodes had to be used appropriately.
• It had to use elements from all the flavors of RSS; including Atom.
• I couldn't use any constructs more than once.
• Inline XML had to contain no XML markup.
• Encoded XML had to contain no XML markup.
• I had to include every known RSS namespace, whether used or not.

Update: It seems the feed validator was changed in order to invalidate any utf-8 .xml files served from an IIS standard setup. Long been one of Sam's projects. The consensus, I thought, was to issue a warning, but Sam, Director of Apache Software Foundation, authors of Apache HTTP server, primary competition to IIS, has decided to call the feeds invalid.

Update: Sam has suggested in a private email that the invalidation of the feeds was not intentional, but rather the result of bad refactoring of the FeedValidator code. I have stricken my remarks and apologize.

The CDNian holiday, July 1st, Canada Day, is today! Hurray Canadara! I've decided to work today and take tomorrow off. Friday morning, I'll be headed up to a cottage in the Fenelon Falls area. No RV! The wife wants to stay in the cottage.