Several places, including Arik’s blog, Haaretz, and Schneir’s blog covered the case of Israeli industrial espionage using trojan horses transmitted to targetted companies. Apparently proprietary information was stolen from these companies via the trojan horse.

Quite interesting, take a read. But the part I love is that the guy got caught because he used to trojan horse to target his ex-father in law after a nasty divorce. Beautiful. High tech spy stuff, foiled by the basic human need to screw over the ex-wife.

Check out Mindset from Yahoo. This thing is very cool. Yahoo search, but you get to set a dial to indicate whether you are in research or commercial mode. Works really quite well. The technology is very interesting, but I really like the UI. Having a single dial makes this usable; anything more complicated and it’d quickly become too much effort to be useful.

I dreamt up an AJAX app over the last two days, figured out the high level approach, was all set to get into it. Tonight I actually attempted to start.

And I’ve hit a stop. Granted, I haven’t directly touched dhtml, javascript, and the browser dom in some time (thank goodness), so I’m rusty, but this stuff is ugly. The first three articles I read, most of the space is devoted to making it work across browsers. Ugh.

The thing is, I have 15 other started-but-not-finished projects vying for my attention. I’d love to get into AJAX (all the cool kid are doing it), but it’s just too much of an effort right now.

Until there are some convenient wrappers around this stuff, it’s not going to be picked up very much, at least not by lazy but somewhat useful people like me. Maybe that’s a good thing; consultants always need complicated things they can charge a lot for.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I got things working.

I was reading Tim Bray’s post on AdSense for Feeds. This caught my attention:

I think that basically nobody in the world knows the answer to [how many unique subscribers per month you have]. I have more experience reading server logfiles than 99.99% of the population, and I have only the vaguest idea.

I agree, Tim knows more that almost anybody else, and he doesn’t know the answer. So what chance does a mere mortal like me have? I have roughly 4 times as many hits on my feeds as on my blog web page. What does this mean? Who’s subscribing to my feeds? How do they find them? No idea.

I believe FeedBurner will give you some answers to this, but somehow I’m opposed to routing my feed thru a third party. I don’t route my web traffic thru somebody else, why should I with my feeds?

So, I’m wondering if there’s any work on on a blog-oriented log analyzer, or for enhancing logs with blog oriented information (referrer for blog readers?). AWStats for blogs? Anybody know of anything? Tim, would you be interested in writing down some of your knowledge and heuristics for how you look at your logs?

Ran across FCKeditor, a web based html producing editor. MS Word style interface, produces nice clean html (no tag madness). Check out their demo; looks pretty good.

Somebody please marry this with a Wiki and we’ll have a nice usable publishing system.

Went to SDForum’s Web Services conference yesterday. Pretty good, particularly due to Tim Bray and Adam Bosworth’s talks.

So Bosworth is consistently smart. Has been for as long as I’ve known of him. Had a lot of gems this time. He presented a grand scheme for a data oriented web built on a simple URL based query language (OpenSearch slightly extended) and RSS/Atom. Visionary stuff, very interesting.

But what I liked were his one liners, things he can say and get away with because he is who he is. Some that I recall:

“Any standard that takes 7 years to develop is a bad standard”

“The job of a standard is not to enable anything anybody wants to do. It’s to enable most of what most people want to do”

The latter is not word-for-word what he said, it’s my recollection.

If you get a chance to see Adam speak, take it. It’s worth it.

This is a placeholder for the gsoap namespace issue for the article. I’ll fill it in with the actual content in a day or three.

Ran across TiddlyWiki courtesy of Don Park’s blog. This thing is pretty neat; it’s a wiki contained in a single html file, no server side component. Quite usable. I could see having lots of these for various projects; there’s almost no setup hurdle, so why not.

One of the joys of working at a larger company is the “Do not erase” on a large percentage of whiteboards. Here’s the fix: buy an inexpensive digital camera (4MP is more than enough), and take pictures of anything you want to save. You can email it to everyone interested. No more frantic note taking, no more do not erase. Plus, you can take team pictures anytime you want.

We did this at our startups with great success. I’ve brought it over to the larger company I’m at now, and it works just as well. The only danger is the gimp/photoshop geeks who’ll spend 20 minutes getting the perfect touchup on each image. Eh. Ok, so that’s me.

Ran across Micheal Day’s XML Namespaces Don’t Need URIs article. Nice. More unhappiness with XML Namespaces.

I think Michael is not just arguing we don’t need URIs; he’s arguing we don’t need XML namespaces. Or, if we need something, it’s much different than today’s XML namespaces.

So my earlier rant on XML namespace displeasure turned into an article entitled “Abolishing XML Namespaces” that’s going to be published on IBM DeveloperWorks. It argues, in short, that we should abolish XML namespaces. Surprisingly I’ve had very positive feedback from proofreaders so far, even those I expected would dislike it.

I’m still looking for feedback before it gets published. If you’re interested, particularly if you’re a big fan of XML Namespaces and can tell me why I’m wrong, please let me know. parand at darugars . com .

This BBC story is quite amazing. Someone had the idea of creating a “hole in the wall” to allow poor children in India who had never seen a computer access to a computer. The kids soon taught themselves how to use the computer, surf the net, download content, play games, and even learn a little English.
Interesting comments at the end: Couldn’t you have spent the money on a water pump?
Hmm. Water certainly is important. But everybody knows how to drink water. Not everybody knows how to work a computer. Those that do stand to make a better living for the rest of their lives.
What’s that old saying, make a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of the night. Set than man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.