Ed Felten: “Recently I met a promising young computer scientist, whose name I will withhold for reasons that will soon be evident. He has developed a very interesting network software system that would be useful for a great many legitimate applications. The problem, he told me, is that if too many people find out what [...]

What's Behind British Power? ColdFusion. We're always noting ColdFusion dominance within U.S. government agencies, and often neglect to mention ColdFusion's use by governments in other countries. Here's one worth noting. The United Kingdom Parliament site is powered by ColdFusion. [Ben Forta's Blog]

What on Earth are we doing to our planet?. HUMANS are damaging the planet at an unprecedented rate and increasing the risk of abrupt collapses in nature that could spur disease, deforestation or “dead zones” in the seas, an international report has found. [The Scotsman]

REALBasic for free. REAL Software is providing REALBasic 5.5 for Windows Standard Edition completely free of charge in response to Microsoft's discontinuation of Visual Basic 6.0 support. The offer is good until March 31, 2005. [microISV]

WordPress and permalinks and Mac OS X. I’m playing around with a WordPress installation on my laptop for a project, and had a hell of a time getting permalinks to work properly. I figured that my experience might be worth documenting for anyone else who’s playing around with Mac OS X. I should note that [...]

Historical Maps of Britain. The British Library has launched a new collection of over 800 digitized (or digitised, if you're British) historical maps of the British Isles from Saxon times up until the reign of James I. Part of the “Unveiling of Britain” project,… [LibrarianInBlack]

Shiny Clean Websites with Ajax.  There is lots of development energy being spent on two relatively unknown pieces of web technology: Ajax and Ruby on Rails. Ajax is the name given by Adaptive Path's founder Jesse James Garrett to the combination of technologies used so effectively in recent web projects, particularly Google Maps, Gmail and [...]

How open is OpenSearch?. Last week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Jeff Bezos announced OpenSearch, an API that enables third parties to inject their own live search results into Amazon's A9.com. I didn't attend ETech this year, but that cloud had a silver lining: I was able to dive right in and do an [...]

Biggest Complaint Of Blackberries So Far – Interface Lock Up.  For most of the attorneys, the Blackberries are pretty good devices for keeping caught up with emails. There are a few attorneys, however, who really require a robust platform for emails as well as Personal Information Management (PIM) and phone use. The Blackberry is usable [...]

James Madison Online. The Library of Congress's collection of James Madison's papers is now available in an online archive with 72,000 digital images. [NYT > Books]