Just blew away the last of my partitions (and my /etc/shadow and other files)and have cancelled my Rackshack server. Awful timing as I’m insanely busy, but the price to be paid for having principles. Here’s the letter I dropped:

I’ve been a loyal customer for the past two and a half years, but regretfully, will be cancelling my account.

My reason for doing so is not due to the level of service — on the contrary, I’ve been quite happy, having practically no network downtime and consistently good bandwidth — but rather, due to your unfortunate licensing deal w/ SCO.

Both for matters of principal and pragmatism (evidence has shown that businesses entering into a legal contracts w/ SCO have increased, not mitigated exposure), I’ve moved hosting providers (definitely inconvenient and something I would have rather not had to do).

Over the years I’ve made numerous recommendations to friends for using Rackshack hosting, but can no longer do so in good conscience.

(I’ve read Marsh’s letter of contrition, but perhaps that could actually be backed up by actions. Say by considering matching your contributions to SCO with a similar or great contribution to open source supporting organizations such as the OSDL, FSF, or EFF)

• Save RTSP video streams to a file – sorta works, but audio loses sync

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Sometimes it’s easy to get inured to all the lying that goes on and chalk it up to ‘politics,’ but then some things make your realize that no, it’s still really wrong, especially when these people have been given power and entrusted with great responsibilities:

Rice said in a TV interview that she wants to testify publicly, but is constitutionally barred from doing so, a senior administration official said Sunday afternoon, before the program aired. Rice also said in the “60 Minutes” interview that she wants to meet with family members of the Sept. 11 victims, to hear their concerns, the official said.

Jeez, constitutionally barred? Have they even read this document (well, we know Ashcroft doesn’t care about it)? And for their information NSA Sandy Berger testified while serving back in ’97.

Hmm, haven’t bothered to do any searching with it, but obviously Google Personalized’s approach of manually creating a category profile is only a stepping stone to say, building a profile from your past searches or via *eh-hrrrm* scanning other personal information exchanges.

Interesting tidbits. They require DOM/JS support for creating a profile, an yes, it is Kaltix based:

• google_kaltix_results.gif
• profile.js
• categories.js

• Vim for Perl developers

Hmm, China blocks Typepad – they still haven’t learned that true control is most effective when everyone is free to say and read whatever the heck they want but that no one listens or can be bothered to do anything. Also, some good points.

Kerry quotes Bible, irks Bush camp

ST. LOUIS — Sen. John Kerry cited a Bible verse Sunday to criticize leaders who have “faith but has no deeds,” prompting President George W. Bush’s spokesman to accuse Kerry of exploiting scripture for political gain.

Oh my, now that’s funny.

Just popped back in my head. Internally at Yahoo, web standards is sold as ‘LSM’, Layered Semantic Markup. Actually, I’m sort of half-and-half on either term. ‘web standards’ really isn’t all that descriptive. HTML 3.2 is a web standard. In fact, nothing in the spec says you can’t lay out tables and spacers and not be completely valid and conformant. On the other hand, the term semantic markup gets thrown around way too much. It’d be easy to replace the ‘S’ w/ structured, but I agree with Tim that ‘descriptive’ might be the most accurate term. That being said, and while at the end of the day, I’m just not convinced on how semantically rich (X)HTML is, I guess semantics (meaning) is the goal, so maybe it’s okay. Also, I do really like the ‘layered’ part, which suggests the idea of organizing around different qualia. And nothing like a TLA to convince the PHBs of the ROI of LSM.

Okaaay, back to work.

(before that, this is a stupendously awesome troll (now at 0, Insightful — YHBT. YHL. HAND.)

Revision tracking/visualization:

• Trac – web-based project management, defect tracking, revision control, wiki integration
• Meatball Wiki: HistoryFlowVisualization – see IBM History Flow visualization (great stuff, to be presented at CHI 2004)
• Meatball Wiki: InformationVisualization – related fun: MacroScope
• Meatball Wiki: VersionHistory
• TWikiPresentation21Jan2004
• PhpWiki: Wiki Versioning – see also BetterDiffs
• Visualizing Source Histories
• Collaborative Proposal Development
• zigzag

Web page change tracking:

• WebCQ (source)
• WebVigil
• WebTracker
• The AT&T Internet Difference Engine: Tracking and Viewing Changes on the Web
• Dive into accountability
• LazyWeb Request: Change Tracking a la Word for Any Text
• CODEX RFC/Proposal

The White House attack machine goes into full gear on Richard Clarke. So far he’s been able to handle it all w/ aplomb. Here’s the latest: Clarke wants all testimony, records declassified

“When you’re in the White House, you spin,” he said. “I have no obligation any more to spin.”

I’ve mirrored Lisa’s Clarke video clips locally here.