Some good comments in the /. Firebird post, including one by Mike Shaver (blog) that seems to sum up things:

I’m not involved in the day-to-day operation of Mozilla anymore, and I’ve been under email siege for days now. When this whole thing started, I was sympathetic to their emotional reaction, and interested in finding ways to mitigate the (incredibly small) chance of user confusion. Now, I don’t want to have anything to do with the Firebird people at all, I no longer care much for their feelings, and I’m very unlikely to expend more effort in trying to reach some sort of outcome that makes them happy. Maybe that was their intent, but maybe I’m starting to understand why their dealings with Borland were so troublesome.

Also, from a thread w/ an IBPhoenix developer:

I belive the IBP people had some more of a dialog (or with others in Moz, I only started my own conversations direct with Moz people recently) – but even that is limited to whoever is willing to reply.

Maybe it would have been easier to get in touch with them if they weren’t so busy dealing with all the spamming?

Note to self: Daniel Lanois is doing a free in-store performance at Amoeba on Wednesday, April 23 @ 7PM

Stem cells help paralysed mice walk – over in Italy, that is. Here in the good ol’ US of A, stem cells are the devil’s work.

Cells injected into the bloodstream found their way to the animals’ brains, where they repaired damaged and inflamed areas. Four out of 15 mice with paralysed back legs moved normally after treatment¹.

“It’s a great recovery,” says team member Angelo Vescovi of the Stem Cell Research Institute at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy. The other 11 mice retained only minor tail paralysis.

KCBS: Bomb Threat at Car Dealership

LOS ANGELES (CBS) A man claiming to have a bomb entered the Felix Chevrolet dealership in southwest Los Angeles Thursday, leading to an hours-long standoff with police.

Police are being very tight-lipped about the incident, but according to KCAL 9 News, the threat could be linked to an extortion plot.

Sounds about right. I had heard about the person w/ the bomb story from security, and while I was out getting lunch, there were multiple people who for some reason or other asked me if I knew what was going on. One student mentioned that the police weren’t telling them anything about what was going on.

LA Approves $5 Million For Police Device To Record Racial Data

The Los Angeles Police Department is required to collect race and other information on every police stop. It’s part of an agreement with the federal government aimed at ending racial profiling and other civil rights abuses.

Found this while trying to find out about the apparent bomb at the Felix Dealership (Jefferson / Figeuroa), but so far there doesn’t seem to be coverage (the whole area is sealed off and there are lots of police helicopters flying around though.

Wow, this is awesome.

Added a few notes to my earlier MP3 player post. It looks like I can choose to forget decent MP3 recording for now and just get the NEX ia for $120 when it comes out, or spend $130 for the RipFlash TRIO which should do decent recording (8-192Kbps) w/ mic and line ins, but is limited to 128MB of memory (90min of recording @ 192Kbps). I’ll probably go for the former, as the latter is still missing some basic features I want for recording.

Here’s what I want in a reasonably priced consumer MP3 recording unit:

• adjustable mic/line level input (and level meters)
• ability to monitor recording
• high quality, high bit-rate MP3 encoding (compressed lossless would be a plus)
• compact flash support
• smaller than MD player
• standard usb mass storage device interface (not as important w/ a separate reader, but still, makes drivers much less of a hassle)

Saw Better Luck Tomorrow last night. It’s not a perfect movie, but it really is well worth seeing for so many reasons (if I were a film critic, I’d probably label it as ‘significant’), and I’d definitely recommend it. Hmm, I wonder how the ending was changed…

“Better Luck Tomorrow” did get a face lift after Sundance, thanks to

MTV money that allowed Mr. Lin to tighten the editing, insert some

new scenes and tone down an ending that some viewers found too

cynical. “Just things that Justin said he would have done the first

time if he’d had the money,” Mr. Gale said.

Apparently there’s been a lot of grass-roots promotion going on for the movie, which at last in Los Angeles, seems to be working out. All the showings were sold out when we tried to catch it on Friday, and even last night the movie played to a full house.

Interesting web dev: Mark’s updated his Safari information w/ b73 info. Hyatt has put a call out for reducing the IHT design and seeing why John Weir’s brilliantly hacked columns code are giving Safari problems.

Baghdad City Size Comparison