Category: Uncategorized

Seth Godin points out that Amazon has moved their buy button from the natural righ-hand column to the nerve-jangling, eye-ball focused left-hand column. [here]
I don’t like it. Not one bit. Change it back.
The freaky thing is that when I went to Amazon, Freakonomics, the book that Seth screenshot for his post, is the one that popped up on my main screen.

Hmmm, looks like GSK can’t shake the bad news that seems to follow Paxil/Seroxat wherever it goes. [here]
If I wasn’t addicted to the stuff, I would be worried.

Someone exploited a hole in the version of MySQL I was running (4.1.10) this morning by sending the following malformed URL:

http://www.newestindustry.org/index.php/2005/04/
2005-04-14-13:33:16%7c-1%7c104%7c2005-04-14-13:33:04%7c151.99.208.233
%7c3%7c-1%7c0%7c-1%7c0%7c-1%7c-1%7c10%7c-1%7c7%7c7%7c
http://www.newestindustry.org/index.php/2005/04/2005-04-14-13:33:16
%7c-1%7c104%7c2005-04-14-13:33:04%7c151.99

You can try it now, but it does not cause the database to crash anymore, because I have upgraded to MySQL 4.1.11.
DOH!

Now, I never even heard about this Comcast outage until this morning. [here]
One reason that I likely didn’t notice it is that I run my own caching name servers on my home network. I do this because I have never trusted any provider’s overworked name servers (goes back to the history of the industry I work in; more on that some other time).
This is still a fairly crippling outage. Surely there is some redundancy in the Comcast name server infrastructure…please?
There is a list of possible workarounds to this problem linked from here.

Neuvo reports that Scoble wants a Powerbook.
Get the *&&^^%##$%#^%()*)()*(&*& outta my way Scoble! I’m first in line for Powerbooks!

Someone else scores a new Powerbook! [here]
Damn you! Damn you all!

Obviously BillG has spent too much time blowing glass with Dale Chiluhy; no oxygen getting to his brain.
BillG believes that the dinosaur campaign was good! [here]

Siebel changed CEOs…again. [here]
It’s at times like this that I still wish I worked for my former employer, as it’s offices are directly across the street from Siebel’s headquarters. Not much room to hide the bodies though.
More happiness on Siebel. [here]

CEOs:

Part 1 of this series is a phrase book of programmer-speak.
Part 2 is the meaning of “done” and how to know when you’ll get there. There’s another Bill Gates story here as well.
Part 3 is about features that kill projects.
Part 4 is about super debuggers.

Programmers
Managing Non-Technical CEOs
Managing Technical CEOs

The Managing the Technical CEO is some very fine writing.

Running a dev/release candidate version of Apache 2.0.54. Let me know if you see any weirdness.

Mailbox is getting a number of these requests on a daily basis, most are from automated trawling that I mark as spam.
A few haven’t bother to check that I am Canadian.
A few actually want to talk.
Anyone else seeing activity a la 1999 recently?
Hank Stringer has, of course…