Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes A Quiet Patch Tuesday on the Way. “Read our lips: No new Microsoft security patches next Tuesday.”
Pretty hard to believe.
Don’t mistake this for “there are no outstanding security problems” but rather “there are no solutions available for outstanding security problems.” I’m sure there are folks in the back room in Redmond working hard to address them. All software has vulnerabilities. SANS has a great list of the Top 20.
Lawrence Lessig in fine form in this Wired column: “You’ll be pleased to know that communism was defeated in Pennsylvania last year. Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities.” {updated: fixed broken link}
The Netcraft Web Survey for March 2005 is up, reporting for the first time on more than sixty million web sites. Interesting reading, great graphs.
Spent the day conferring with an associate up in Franconia, 100 miles north of the home office. Getting there involved traveling through Franconia Notch through the White Mountain National Forest. A winter storm made the driving pretty challenging, but the scenery was spectacular. Tremendous mountain views. Hope I get the chance to make the trip again when I can enjoy the view a bit more. (updated with links)
New Hampshire Public Radio – NHPR.org featured a show on their morning talk show, “The Exchange” hosted by Laura Knoy, titled Blogs of War. “Unheard of just a few years ago, these web journals set up by anyone with a story to tell…or an axe to grind….have brought down major media and picked on politicians, but now find the spotlight’s glare turned back on them.”
Featured guests included Dan Gillmor and Dave Winer. You can listen to the show at the link above, via RealAudio or WindowsMedia.
NewsForge features an article called “My Workstation OS: Mac OS X” Apparently, it’s part of a series that “So far, we’ve heard from fans of FreeBSD, Mepis Linux, Debian, Xandros, Slackware, Windows XP, Lycoris, SUSE Professional, NetBSD, Ubuntu, FreeDOS, Libranet, Mandrakelinux, and Arch Linux. Coming soon: Linspire, Knoppix, Gentoo, Fedora Core 3, and more.” It’s always interesting to read how other developers use their machines.
OSNews points to a useful review on NewsForge: Open source XML editors examined. “The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides a flexible and efficient way to store, transmit, and express data. The open source community has produced an impressive lineup of XML editing utilities. In this article Ryan Paul takes a look at some of the most useful.”
I’ve used several editors on the Windows platform, like XML and Stylus Studio, and I’m looking forward to trying out a couple of the products mentioned in the article, starting with Quanta.
Cory Doctorow posts on Boing Boing: “Why you should love Google’s toolbar”
Many web people have been critical of Google’s new Toolbar, which allows its users to choose to have the pages they view parsed for things like ISBNs and have them auto-linked to Amazon, or have Vehicle Information Numbers auto-linked to a VIN registry.
Okay, that’s cool. A toolbar of tools the user uses to manipulate a page is okay. What I objected to was anyone browsing to my pages and not seeing what I have written. If they want to hack it from there, well, that’s the Internet. That’s okay.
The Google Toolbar only works in IE. That’s uncool. Their choice.
Dave Winer blogs on Scripting News the sad news that 
Jef Raskin died last night. “Via Kottke. He struggled to see his vision implemented, and in the end it was a compromise. Raskin wanted computers to be radically simpler, not just evolutionarily simpler. The Macintosh, a project which he started at Apple, morphed when Steve Jobs took it over to become the evolutionary computer it is. Not sure who was right, but Raskin didn’t live to see his vision implemented. To me it’s a poignant moment, Raskin is a contemporary. The edge is moving through my generation. No way we’re going to die before we get old.”
RIP, Jef. Thanks for making Apple happen.
Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc. points to The Gannon Scandal, Not Continued.
Salon: See no Gannon, hear no Gannon, speak no Gannon. “It’s stunning to me that there are questions about the independent press being undermined and the mainstream press doesn’t seem that interested in it,” says Joe Lockhart, who served as press secretary during President Clinton’s second term. “People in the mainstream press have shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘It’s a whole lot of nothing.'”
I still find it weird that for two years this guy walked into the White House with Press Corps credentials and asked questions of the President of the United States. Who thought up this crazy idea? Who checked out this guy’s background? What were they thinking?
And… where is the media? Laura and I again heard Emily Rooney and John Carroll roast this guy on WGBH’s Greater Boston. Where’s the network coverage? Where is the outrage?