Two new interviews with Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. MySQL developer Lenz Grimmer has a quick chat with David for the MySQL developer zone. Also, uk.BUILDER.com has a long and insightful interview. David explains how 1.0 should have really been 2.0, what the continuum of database evil entails, why Rails is useful for the enterprise [...]

Trademark power grab Big companies, their lobbyists, and their lawyers have already used political muscle to lengthen copyrights worldwide and extend the concept of patents to absurd length. The next area that they are eyeing is that of trademarks. At this very moment, there is a bill going through the US congress which would radically [...]

Why SBC bought AT&TOK, there were strategic reasons that motivated the $16 billion acquisition of the remainder of once dominant AT&T  by Baby Bell SBC Communications. That deal ended with the birth of a new AT&T  and with a far more concentrated US telephone industry. The new company has a large base in local and [...]

Goals for a 2.0 Library. John Blyberg has written a list of practical goals for libraries seeking to take advantage of Web 2.0 and/or Library 2.0. His goals all focus on interactivity of information, contributions from the public, self-styled information delivery, modularity, and an overal laissez-faire approach to what our users do with the information [...]

Your hard drive on Google's servers. Google Desktop is now storing your hard drive data on Google's servers. LiB's recommendation? Use Copernic instead if you're dying for a good desktop search. It works better, is easier to use, and doesn't harvest the ba-jeebers out of your data. [LibrarianInBlack]

The Use and Abuse of Secrecy Here's a great example from a lecture by a former agent (this is real life experience as opposed to the crap spin you get on so many political blogs): The Administration’s ignoring of the law in the case of wiretapping is but one part of what I see as [...]

Windows Access Control. I just found an interesting paper: “Windows Access Control Demystified,” by Sudhakar Govindavajhala and Andrew W. Appel. Basically, they show that companies like Adobe, Macromedia, etc., have mistakes in their Access Control Programming that open security holes in Windows XP. Abstract In the Secure Internet Programming laboratory at Princeton University, we have [...]

Categories and the short head. Zipf's Law tells us that something that ranks #1 in a category often sells 100 times as well as the item ranked #100. Human nature makes that likely–we want to read the most popular book, hire the most successful… [Seth's Blog]

Adam & Eve. Adam & Eve: I'm linking to some Adobe tech you may not know about, at opensource.adobe.com… “Eve” is a layout engine used within Adobe application development, and “Adam” is an interactivity engine to make things happen when you press buttons. … [JD on EP]

The voices of a failed government Meet the Press discusses the NSA program to spy on Americans. How overweening pretensions of the value of secrecy undermined protection of the Constitution. Listen to the entire thing, it's very depressing…. We are ruled by a bunch of idiots.  [John Robb's Weblog]