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Both my old friend Diana and my father wrote to inform me of the closing of the M&M bar in Butte Montana. I wrote about the M&M here, along with a couple of pictures. The passing of an era. Very sad news.

Supposedly there is a story in the Montana Standard, but I can't find it...
- jim 4-18-2003 7:27 pm [link] [9 comments]

How do I not notice these things? Nested comments were not ordering correctly in the comment threads. Should be fixed now.

I dislike this nested style more and more. I'm not going to remove the option, but I'm thinking of switching my page to flat comments (one sequence of comments, ordered by time posted - no indenting.) I really think that is the better way. If you need to reply to a comment some way up the page, just quote part of that comment in your reply.

Any feelings on this?
- jim 4-17-2003 7:57 pm [link] [22 comments]

aktiom.net is offering linux server colocation, with 40 GB of traffic, for $75 a month. How do they do it?

A common question concerns how we're able to provide such a high-quality service for $75/month. By using powerful hardware combined with a specialized Linux kernel, we can put multiple client servers on one physical machine. This is unlike virtual webhosting in a few ways: This is also different from a FreeBSD jail()configuration. Users inside a FreeBSD jail are unable to use tools such as ping, traceroute, and tcpdump (they require access to raw sockets), and are limited to one IP address. None of these limitations appear in our solution. Security-conscious people might be wary of allowing tcpdump, but please remember that other server instances are completely partitioned away from your data and network traffic.
I wonder how this works out? Price is right.

- jim 4-17-2003 12:14 am [link] [add a comment]

The U.S. government has appointed the former head of privacy at Doubleclick - the dot com company with the most sinister privacy track record - as the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar.

Don't they even try to convince anyone they are not evil anymore? This would be like hiring the former head of the KGB to advise the department on monitoring U.S. citizens. Oh wait, they already did that.
- jim 4-16-2003 11:58 pm [link] [2 comments]

The second public beta of Apple's new browser Safari is now available. This is v.73 if you're keeping track. I'm not sure why they are still calling it a beta, but whatever. I'm very happy with it as my main browser (but I was happy with v.67, so this is to be expected.)

My very small gripes are as follows: spell checking (finally, yay!) has to be enabled in every new textarea (why not gloabally on? Boo!) and, of even less concern, but still, there is no way to force links from external programs to open in a new tab (rather than a new window.) Camino could do this.

Otherwise, perfect.
- jim 4-15-2003 7:54 pm [link] [17 comments]

Looks like Rys McCusker will be leaving the Chandler project. Sounds like everyone is on good terms. Unclear what this will mean for the project. Hopefully, for Rys, it will mean more time to blog.
- jim 4-15-2003 6:37 pm [link] [add a comment]

Mark's new page of news clips pertaining to the U.S. / Syria situation is really well done. If you have an account you can add it to your front page here.

I hope this style becomes a trend. It seems important that we try to remember what these people actually say leading up to an event, because afterwards there is so much spin it is very easy to become confused. WMD? Regime change? Liberation? Why did we start this war again?

This same style would be great for the coming election season. I wish I had one with all the juicy GWB quotes made during the last campaign. The distance his policies (especially foreign) have come since then is amazing. Or disturbing. Maybe this type of exhaustive record keeping could help hold people to account.

And I also have to mention Bruno's weblog ruminatrix. This is my new first stop on the daily round of global political analysis pages. It's really great to have him writing.

Of course Dave and Tom (despite sporadic attempts to actually run an art page ;-) are still going strong, but you already knew that...
- jim 4-14-2003 11:26 pm [link] [38 comments]

David Reed is worried about the Total Information Awarness program. And he has some advice for building arguments against it.

In fact, the privacy and liberty folks, by expressing concern in the form of risks to "privacy" tend to reinforce the belief that there is any real investigatory information that can be extracted by inference from a very noisy and randomly selected pile of information.
This is interesting, and strikes me as being true. Probably it is better to argue that there is no useful information to be had from Poindexter's method, rather than arguing that the cost to privacy of extracting the information is too high. I believe the math is on Reed's side, but he has to unpack his thoughts a bit more if he wants someone like me to really get what he's saying.
- jim 4-13-2003 6:11 pm [link] [add a comment]

Waxy.org says that loading this page will cause your CD drive to eject if you are using IE on Windows. Is it true?
- jim 4-11-2003 11:23 pm [link] [7 comments]

Really interesting Paul Graham article on designing a programming language of the future. I love stuff like this. (via HTP)
- jim 4-11-2003 8:03 pm [link] [add a comment]

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