Happy Halloween everyone!

OK, I can't resist pointing to the most popular blog link today: Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies.

The Onion: Scientists Discover Gene Responsible for Eating Whole Goddamn Bag of Chips. I have this one!

Work is keeping me busy, so little time to blog. Still, I needed to post something today to keep my calendar filled. So here you go :) Thanks for understanding.

I just took a quick look over the rather paltry entries I've made over the last five days. Nothing about the current situation. Odd, because the whole "anthrax scare" is actually starting to freak me out a bit. They seem to be finding the spores everywhere. Are they? Everywhere, I mean? See, kinda freaky.

Jakob Nielsen: Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models. "Things happen to you, and you don't know why. You don't understand how your own tools work because of their random and unpredictable behavior. Your mental model is a mess because you are trying to model a mess." Exactly.

Aaarrgh! Now my domain name appears to have vanished completely off the net. DNS lookups on multiple servers always yield the same "host not found" response. I've put a call into my DSL provider, who has the authoritative name servers for my domain, but I haven't heard back from them yet. It's been almost an hour — what's up with that?

Update: I'm back up, it seems. Thanks guys!

ZDNet: Microsoft braces for browser battles. Anything that challenges Microsoft's de facto browser monopoly is a good thing. I just wish there was a powerful challenge on the technology front, not just on the marketing front.

I'm finally taking a moment to back up all my old floppies onto CD-ROM. It's amazing the stuff you find, stuff you'd forgotten you'd ever had. Old term papers, old software, old, well, I can't really tell what it is but I'm saving it anyways. I just copied a bunch of floppies that were 14 years old, and they still work, god bless 'em.

The coolest discovery so far: While backing up some Lotus spreadsheet files, I noticed that all the application files were timestamped 1:23 AM. Get it?

Next coolest: The timestamp on my floppy copy of the Starr Report is September 11, 1998. Setpember 11 hasn't been a good day recently.

ZDNet: A long road ahead for Win XP? A Gartner study is saying that Win XP won't be the dominant Windows OS for at least two more years. Most users won't upgrade until they buy a new PC, me included.

CNN: More anthrax found at Hart Senate Office Building. Each day the news gets more frightening. I'm worried now that bio-terrorism is now a permanent part of our landscape. Of course, some people are having a hard time understanding that, on a fundamental level, this isn't funny.

Guardian: Dubya Dubya Dubya. The best of the Bush websites. Most are anti-, or in fun-poking mode. One they missed, though: The George W. Bush Scorecard of Evil.

New York Times: On Many Fronts, Experts Plan for the Unthinkable: Biowarfare. A fairly comprehensive summary of how the United States is positioned to combat bioterrorism.

Thomas Friedman: Dear Ariel and Yasir. Bush to Sharon: "We're not interested in debating with you whether or not Arafat is your Osama bin Laden, as you've been saying. Clearly, you can't make up your own mind. After all, you've been secretly negotiating with Arafat, and have sent your own son, Omri, to meet him several times. I've never sent my daughters to meet bin Laden."

New York Times: U.N. Confirms Bomb Hit Hospital on Outskirts of an Afghan City.

CNN: Anthrax test positive at offsite White House mail facility. Bush: "I don't have anthrax."

College Football Wrap-up

Better late than never, I guess. USC made a strong recovery following its loss to Arkansas last week by opening up a can of you-know-what on Vanderbilt and winning 46-14. The Gamecocks are now 6-1, and ranked 12 in the AP poll. Cornell continues to be nothing if not consistent, losing to Brown 49-21, moving to 0-5 for the season. And UMass mercifully got its first win of the year, beating James Madison 43-20, and moving to 1-5.

Bush Aerobics. Feel the burn, W.

Still more DNS craziness. So enough already: I changed my nameservers back to my ISP's, and while I still can't connect from work directly, I can connect through AOL. While some folks still can't reach this site, I think the worst is past, and at least I can post again.

Washington Post: Special Forces Open Ground Campaign. "Their presence on the battlefield comes amid growing indications that the war's intensity is about to increase dramatically…"

I just found out that my secret Hobbit name is Fredegar Millstone of Bywater.

My DNS problems are starting to piss me off. I still can't connect from work or via AOL, and I'm beginning to think something is seriously wrong. As a result, some of today's news was actually compiled yesterday, but I couldn't post it then.

Charles Babington: Republican Faces Tricky Dilemma in South Dakota. "Daschle's ascendancy to the Senate's top post has given sparsely populated South Dakota its biggest political clout in decades. Thune must convince the state's voters that he can protect their interests even as he tries to demote Daschle to Senate minority leader status."

London Times: Israel says Arafat era is over. Things are certainly heating up since the assassination of Israel Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi earlier this week. Prime Minister Sharon: "Arafat has seven days to impose absolute quiet in the (occupied) territories. If not, we will go to war against him. As far as I am concerned, the era of Arafat is over."

I'm definitely seeing some problems related to my DNS change-over. I can't access this site from home or office, but here at my morning meeting, I can access it fine. I'm a little relieved, since I was beginning to fear that something had gone horribly wrong.

I added a new section last night: "Errata". This is where I'll be keeping my musings on more technical things. Some of my "Notes" will be moving over here later.

Washington Post: FBI, Postal Service Offer Award for Information on Anthrax Cases. Who wants to be a millionaire?

I'm deep in perl land today, digging into some cool new tools that I'll be using soon at my day job. It's all linux based, so I just had to make a rather momentus decision: which desktop environment to use. I picked KDE, for the sole reason that I couldn't select text in Netscape under GNOME. Now that I've made the move, I find out there's a big plus to KDE — more and better games!

Washington Post: Pentagon: Taliban Forces 'Eviscerated'.

I'm definitely having DNS problems. I can't get to this site from AOL or from the office. Shit.

CNN: US House to shut down for anthrax sweep. The House will be closed until Tuesday in the wake of 29 Daschle staffers testing positive for anthrax exposure.

I'm looking at my site for the first time in Netscape running on my Linux laptop. I was expecting it to look like crap. It doesn't. Good news for me.

More DNS changes are in the works. Fingers crossed, everyone.

Washington Post: Tests Confirm Anthrax in Letter to Daschle. One wing of the Hart Senate office building is now closed. This is really starting to freak me out; Hart is just around the corner from me now.

Bruce Schneier gets the motivation for the SSSCA right: "I have long argued that the entertainment industry doesn't want people to have computers. Computers give users too much capability, too much flexibility, too much freedom. The entertainment industry wants users to sit back and consume things. They are trying to turn a computer into an Internet Entertainment Platform, along the lines of a television or VCR. This bill is a large step in that direction. The entertainment industry will use this bill to further erode fair use, free expression, and security research."

Wired: RIAA Wants to Hack Your PC. What's next, does the RIAA want the keys to my apartment, too? I'm pretty sure I might have copied an audio CD last year…

Jakob Nielsen: The End of Homemade Websites. "Web services will free individual site designers from having to program and design common features. This will decrease business costs, increase usability, and let designers focus on and improve features that are unique to each site." All true, perhaps, but this hardly spells the "end of homemade websites." Lots of features that you might want to offer your visitors are going to require a good deal of customization, so much so that it will remain easier in many cases to roll your own code.

My network went down last night just before 6pm when my linux router blew a power supply. It's an old machine, and AT power supplies aren't easy to find, but the IS guys at the office had an old machine in storage I was able to pirate from, so I'm back up and running.

Joyce Bosc: Where is the Web when we need it most? In principle, she's right: local governments should use internet more effectively to communicate with their citizenry. But the example she chooses — September 11 and the anthrax outbreaks — aren't the best to prove that point. These stories are national in scope and implication, and most people will be looking to national organizations — CNN and the CDC, for example — to give them the news.

Washington Post: Use of Anti-Anxiety Drugs Jumps in U.S. This shouldn't come as a surprise, I guess.

New York Times: Pentagon Says Error Led to Bombing of Houses in Kabul. According to the US military, the toll is 4 dead, 8 wounded.

Washington Post: High-Tech Gear To Get Workout In Afghanistan. While the geek in me says these are some cool new toys, the sceptic in me says these toys won't help us much in Afghanistan.

Linux Journal: The Ultimate Linux Box 2001: How to Design Your Dream Machine. I'm not a hardware geek, so I love pieces like this that give me "news I can use".

Guardian: Iraq 'behind US anthrax outbreaks'.

Dan Gilmor: How Liberty Withers. Speaking about the Anti-Terrorism bill just passed by Congress, he has some truth to share: "…the potential for abuse is extraordinary. The legislation is a major step toward a surveillance state. And it will surely lead to conditions under which petty criminals — and innocent people — get labeled and punished as terrorists."

Washington Post: Anti-Terrorism Bill Is Approved. The House version has some sunset provisions, but other than that, it's almost identical to the Senate version. It's a bad bill.

Scott Andrew on journalism and weblogs. I think the problem here is that Scott gives to much credit to mainstream media. Do bloggers insert their editorial opinions into the story and call it news? Yes. Do the major dailies, the networks? Yes. Am I a journalist? Yes, when I choose to be.

Progressive: Interview with Edward Said. "And what terrifies me is that we're entering a phase where if you start to speak about this as something that can be understood historically — without any sympathy — you are going to be thought of as unpatriotic, and you are going to be forbidden. It's very dangerous. It is precisely incumbent on every citizen to quite understand the world we're living in and the history we are a part of and we are forming as a superpower."

Wired News: Terror Bill Clears Senate. The bill passed 96-1, with Russ Feingold (D-MN) the lone "no" vote. Thank you Russ!

I'm playing around with my DNS today, so if you can't get here later, that's probably why.

Dan Bricklin: Copy Protection Robs the Future. "Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so."

Todd Spangler: Windows XP's outsized expectations. "None of what's new in Windows XP necessarily justifies the time-consuming, expensive and disruptive process of upgrading or replacing existing Windows machines."

Michael Moore: All I Am Saying Is Give War a Chance. Who said sarcasm was a lost art?

Today is the one month anniversary of the attacks. What hasn't changed?

Well, the Onion hasn't. I didn't get around to reading this yesterday, but it's another good issue. My favorite article: Freedoms Curtailed In Defense Of Liberty.

CNN: Administration urges caution in airing al Qaeda statements. "'CNN's policy is to avoid airing any material that we believe would directly facilitate any terrorist acts,' the network said. 'In deciding what to air, CNN will consider guidance from appropriate authorities.'" How incredibly gutless of CNN. National security here is a smokescreen. The administration doesn't want al Qaeda statements airing because it wants to control the media's coverage of this war.

New York Times: American Action Is Held Likely in Asia. US official: "There has been a concerted effort by bin Laden and his people to expand their activities in East Asia, not only in the Philippines but in Malaysia and Indonesia."

Washington Post: Toxic Scare Shuts Metro Station. "A 23-year-old Prince George's man who pushed his way onto a Metro Green Line train yesterday with a gun and a knife was wrestled to the ground by police officers after he sprayed a clear liquid inside a train car and fired a shot on the platform of the Southern Avenue Station, authorities said." One thing has definitely changed since September 11: the first thought you have when you hear about something like this is, "Was that a terrorist attack?". Yesterday at the office, people were turning on their TVs and rushing to the web looking for information, wondering if they were in danger again. "Metro shut down the station until it was determined six hours later that the liquid was a cleaning agent and contained no biological or chemical threat." Whew.

Reuters: Taliban Lift Curbs on bin Laden. What "curbs" could those possibly be?

CNN: President notifies Congress about troop deployment. So troops are going to Afghanistan. I wonder if Bush looked at the CNN poll I pointed at yesterday?

Bert and Osama? Go figure this out if you can. First, there was this picture, which shows Bert on a poster featuring Osama bin Laden seen at a pro-bin Laden rally in Bangladesh. Similar pictures made the circuit in the "mainstream" media. And now, Fox News is running a story on the whole weird thing.

My friend Sarah has posted her photo essay of our trip to NYC a couple of weekends ago. Mine is here.

AP: Democrats Elect Pelosi to Be No. 2 House Leader.

USA Today: Experts fear cyberspace to be terrorists' next target. The most likely form of attack? DoS and worms. Been there, done that.

Yahoo: Feds enlist Hollywood for spook theories. "In a reversal of roles, government intelligence specialists have been secretly soliciting terrorist scenarios from top Hollywood filmmakers and writers."

Washington Post: Supreme Court Denies Microsoft Appeal. "The high court denied Microsoft's petition without comment, leaving intact a federal appeals court ruling in June that Microsoft illegally abused its monopoly power in the market for personal computer operating systems." Finally, some good news for a change.

The international reaction to the bombings is mixed. Our closest allies seem satisfied for now, but there were anti-American riots yesterday in Gaza and Indonesia. Whatever the results of this particular military campaign, the US will have a lot of work ahead trying to rebuild strategic relationships all over the Muslim world with governments that may not be as receptive as in the past.

Washington Post: Food Shortage May Be Worsening. "'Before the current crisis, we were already seeing pre-famine conditions in some parts of [Afghanistan],' said Abigail Spring, a WFP spokeswoman in Washington. 'We still have some stock inside the country, and we believe many people are getting our food. But there's no question this is a race against the clock.'"

New York Times: 4 U.N. Workers Killed in Initial Strike on Afghanistan.

An interesting poll on CNN. As of 12:30 PM EDT, 82% are in favor of sending US ground forces into Afghanistan. Of course, after we send in the troops, I bet we're not looking at numbers anywhere close to that high.

New York Times: Taliban Foes, With Supply Problems, Sharply Reduce Attacks

CNN: U.S. launches first daylight attacks on Afghanistan.

CNN: New airstrikes hit Afghanistan.

Washington Post: Allies Hail US Fire; Muslims Ask Who's the Terrorist? It sounds like the coalition the US has constructed isn't exactly global.

CNN: Taliban defiant: 'Bin Laden still alive'. Also, they claim that about 20 civilians were killed in yesterday's attacks.

Hindustan Times: Taliban cabinet backs Ulema's call for Jehad.

Howard Kurtz: Covering a 21st Century War. "Taliban officials also hold news conferences — and, once the bombing stops, they are certain to lead journalists to neighborhoods where civilians have died from the U.S. and British strikes. The Pentagon will be putting out its own version of collateral damage, and the propaganda war will be in full bloom."

CNN: Fighting continues between Taliban, Northern Alliance.

AP: Bin Laden Calls Americans 'Sinners'. "America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that."

The Northern Alliance claims to be closely coordinating their actions with the US.

Washington Post: Conservatives Sound Refrain: It's Clinton's Fault. Pushback from Jennifer Palmieri: "I would hope the gravity of the task before us would enable these partisans to rise above their obsession with Clinton, but I guess not."

Jane's is reporting that the Russians gave the US a detailed intelligence briefing on the Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan, but that the US chose not to act.

CNN has a transcript of Bush's speech to the nation earlier today, shortly after the attacks were launched.

Hindustan Times: Uzbeks fear war at home following US-led strikes on Afghanistan.

Washington Post: US Attacks Afghanistan. "U.S. and British forces launched missile attacks today against several targets in Afghanistan, as President Bush announced the start of what may be a long battle against terrorism."

College Football Wrap-up

The USC Gamecocks continue their winning ways, beating Kentucky 42-6, and moving to 5-0 on the season. Cornell remained consistent in a different way, losing a squeaker to Lehigh 38-35, and dropping to 0-3. UMass was thankfully idle this week, and so remain 0-4 for the year.

John is looking for a new job. Give him one.

Eric Schultz: Whatever It Takes? Why racial profiling is not the answer to terrorism (or anything else for that matter).

Village Voice: Media Assembles Fractured Picture of War.

ZDNet: Microsoft confronts security fears. This new program sounds like it has more to do with marketing than with security. Here's the problem: MS released buggy software, and now there is no way to reach the vast majority of users with compromised systems and get them to install patches. The users that the new program will target are most likely the users that already take security most seriously.

Don Marti: Open Letter to Michael Eisner. This is YA reason why the SSSCA is a bad idea. (Via Doc Searls.)

A Russian charter plane has crashed into the Black Sea on its way from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk. Terrorism, military miscalculation, or accident?

Edward Said: The Necessity of Skepticism. "We should expect no less of ourselves than we should of others. Would that all people took the time to try to see where our leaders seem to be taking us, and for what reason. Scepticism and re-evaluation are necessities, not luxuries."

National Review: L'Affaire Coulter. "We did not 'fire' Ann for what she wrote, even though it was poorly written and sloppy. We ended the relationship because she behaved with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty." Like I said yesterday.

Washington Post: National Reopens With Tightened Security. This is the latest sign for me that life in the District is getting back to normal. The first sign came on Monday when they opened Washington Blvd, changing the status of my morning commute from "unbearable" back to merely "miserable".

Washington Post: National Review Cans Columnist Ann Coulter. Interesting — they seem to have fired her because of what she said about them, not what she said about September 11.

New York Times: Salon, Magazine on the Web, Will Charge Readers of News. Oh well, looks like I'll be freeing up some space in my bookmarks list.

CNN: Sen. Thurmond taken to hospital.

ZDNet: Anti-terrorism bill to go to House. While the bill has been modified, it's still bad news for civil liberties. Everyone needs to remember: terrorists can't take away our basic freedoms, only we can do that to ourselves.

Republicans say the darndest things. This time, the culprit is Kay O'Connor, a member of the Kansas State Legislature. The quote? "The 19th Amendment is around because men weren't doing their jobs, and I think that's sad." That's right folks, an elected women condemning the Constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.