FBI Abuses of the USA Patriot Act. Since the Patriot Act was passed, administration officials have repeatedly assured the public and Congress that there have not been improper uses of that law. As recently as April 27, 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified that “there has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.” [...]

Automated Tagcloud Tool – TagCloud.  TagCloud is a service that can create a weighted list of tags (or tag cloud) based on an RSS feed. You can then add this list to your Web site. TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the [...]

The general-purpose CMS (pipe dreams, part II). As t approaches zero, people will realize that many types of software are non-sensical in their generalized form. I believe the time has come to mark a date in the not too distant future for celebrating the death of the general-purpose content management system. In many ways, I [...]

Life after Radio. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I not only have my entire weblog archive in MySQL with all the entities playing nice (although much of the older HTML needs tidying up somewhat) but also have Rails rendering archive pages to disk which will honour the Radio permalinks. This is actually a [...]

'Shakespeare'; 'A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare': Straight Out of Stratford. Two takes on Shakespeare’s life, from Peter Ackroyd, a British man of letters, and James Shapiro, an American scholar. By JOHN SIMON. [NYT > Books]

Self Inflicted Damage Economist. In an attempt to ferret out the small money transfers that fund terrorism, an intrusive regulatory tsunami is underway. For KPMG's Mr Dillon, the resources already spent on the effort have handed a victory to the terrorists. “The cost to our global economy is so large, they've already had the effect [...]

How to Eliminate Whiteboard Ghosts.  Got a problem with ghosted marks on your white boards? Mr. Clean Magic Erasers can work magic. They're all the rage at our local public schools for getting rid of stubborn marks. Reader Adam French adds: I struggled with this all the time until a friend handed me a Mr. [...]

A GTD Success Story. The Guardian's David McCandless talks about his experience with David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) and shares some nice lessons learned. He also talks a bit about why GTD is so popular on the Web. On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals [...]

Red light, Green light: Go!. Mike Gunderloy Is one of the few developers every developer can learn a lot from, and his latest article at Developer.com is must reading if you want to develop world-class software and have world-class Micro-ISV sales. Image every time you made a code change in your Mico-ISV's product and checked [...]

Individual healthcare is backed by DiMasi. Tens of thousands of people without health insurance — many of them young, healthy, and able to afford coverage — would be required to get insurance, just as they must now carry auto insurance, under a healthcare bill being written by House lawmakers. [Boston Globe -- Front Page]