Month: January 2003

O'Reilly swag for sale. “For years, our customers have asked us to make and sell various items with our animals on them. We are pleased and proud to present our first collection of official O'Reilly animal swag.” So, if you're a geek and you know it, um, buy a t-shirt (and clap your hands if… Continue reading O'Reilly swag for sale

The New Yorker(Issue of 2002-12-09): The Talk of the Town(comment) – Too Much Information. The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help suspecting that somebody on its staff might be putting us on. The Information Awareness Office's official seal features an occult pyramid topped with mystic all-seeing eye, like the one… Continue reading Too Much Information

Court Rules Against Network Associates' Software Review Policy. A court has ruled that the company may not require people who buy its software to get permission before publishing reviews of its products. By Matt Richtel. [New York Times: Technology]

Harry Potter, AWOL, Returns in June for No. 5. The long-delayed fifth book in the Harry Potter fantasy series is now scheduled for release on June 21. By Seth Schiesel. [New York Times: Books]

NY Times: “The Supreme Court today upheld the 20-year extension that Congress granted to all existing copyrights in 1998, declaring that while the extension might have been bad policy, it fell clearly within Congress's constitutional authority.” [Scripting News]

Local Optimization, or, The Trouble With Dell One of my core beliefs is that if you pick some aspect of your business to optimize, and focus only on that one number, you tend to ruin other parts of the business that you're not measuring as carefully, resulting in a local optimization that actually harms your… Continue reading Local Optimization, or, The Trouble With Dell

Blawg.org. – Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Bill Gratsch has created Blawg.org, a web directory of legal-related weblogs. Two neat features: there is an RSS Feed, plus a blog with updates to the site. This is going to be perfect for getting sources for my law firm library newsletter, plus a… Continue reading Blawg.org

The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing. Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences. 1. The network is reliable 2. Latency is zero 3. Bandwidth is infinite 4. The network is… Continue reading PHP Everywhere

Dell Moves into Electronic Cash Register Market. The PC-based registers are designed for retail store systems. [Internet Product News]

Jenny reminds me not to forget the librarians, and I totally agree; and I'm hoping that when the time comes, she and other librarians-with-weblogs will help me find the right librarian to talk with at Harvard. My goal is to do as little work as possible. Glenn Reynolds nailed it when he said I was… Continue reading Jenny reminds