Generosity?!. From the Wall Street Journal, May 13. It's sometimes said Americans are stingy when it comes to foreign aid. Perhaps, but a recent study reports that our $19.7 billion in gov't aid in 2004 topped the charts and was more than #2 and #3 combined—Japan and France. Far more important, private contributions (schools, religious [...]

Mark Shuttleworth: US visa-waiver program.  Joi ito has had a few stern looks from the US INS regarding visa waiver forms. I can relate. I have a UK passport by virtue of the fact that my father was born in the UK (mostly by accident – another fun story). So I also know about the [...]

How OPACs Suck, Parts 1, 2 & 3. If you're a librarian, Karen Schneider's series on ALA TechSource, “How OPACs Suck”, should be required reading. Certainly any vendor of library software should sit up and take notice. Library online catalogs have not adapted to the expectations of users familiar with features provided by sites such [...]

Jean-Louis Seguineau: A real dial-tone. The concept of “killer app” is a powerful driver of our collective psychology. We want to believe that our entire community can be propelled forward and our lives reshaped by the next must-have technology. A search on “VoIP killer app” will give you an idea of the extend of this [...]

U.S. Quake Warning Systems Lag. Alert systems in Japan, Mexico, Taiwan and Turkey give earthquake warnings that allow trains to stop, gas and electric utilities to protect their systems and people to get away from windows. Why does the U.S. have so little in place? [Wired News: Top Stories]

On Conflicts of Interest and TechCrunch. On a recent Gillmor Gang, at around minute 21:30, Jason Calacanis innocently says something like “I heard you could buy a review at TechCrunch”. A discussion begins about conflicts of interest, at one point Jason says “just the appearance of impropriety is impropriety.” Or, in other words, when it [...]

quick, effective diagrams with Gliffy.  Gliffy is a great new tool for creating diagrams. It recently opened up it's doors to a public beta. I've been using it for a while. It's awesome to be able to create a quick network diagram, and then publish it to get a easily accessible jpeg image. I've never [...]

Jeff Waugh: Sunday Grab Bag!.  Seamless RDP: Cendio has released SeamlessRDP, a set of changes for rdesktop to provide rootless RDP functionality. I can see this being extremely useful in small business environments, where staff would be perfectly happy using Linux desktops if only they had access to one or two line-of-business applications. Rock on, [...]

Just Give Me a Simple Phone. Many consumers are not impressed by the endless tricks and functions manufacturers keep adding to cell phones. They just want a sturdy phone that's easy to use. [Wired News: Top Stories]

Vista should've been codenamed White Elephant. I just leafed through Chris Pirillo's Vista Beta 2 feedback and had to chuckle. I don't know what OS X 'Tiger' or 'Panther' looked like 8 months before release, maybe they were in a similar kind of mess, but I doubt Apple had to contend with dialog boxes from [...]