Craving some Bugles? Maybe you won’t after reading 10 Super Foods You Should NEVER Eat!. I’ve been concious of the labels you see on packages for the past few years, but it’s still good to see specific offenders called out like this. (Even better that alternatives are listed!)
Tim Bray points to rome: All feeds lead to Rome, which is a (you guessed it) RSS/Atom feed parser for Java. They list the version as 0.1. I’m not sure how this would compare with Informa which includes goodies like Lucene searching and Hibernate storage.
Update: Sam Newman posted a brief article about this with an interesting point about Informa’s ease of use.
A couple days back, I posed the link to BugMeNot, a site which provides registration information for a significant number of websites. A newspaper industry person (not an official industry rep, I believe, but someone in the industry) had an interesting response: Lockergnome - Windows Fanatics - June 8, 2004. As also mentioned in this article, there are clearly plenty of sites that make money off of ads without obtrusive advertising. I didn’t mind the sites that asked me my age and zip code. That was quick and fine… doing yet another registration form is often more than I want to do for most sites. I did it for the NY Times, but I’m not going to do it for the Podunk Gazette.
I haven’t been linking to the various parts of this story as it has unfolded. I finally decided to include a link to Andy Tanenbaum’s Rebuttal to Ken Brown on the subject of Ken Brown’s report that Linus Torvalds stole code for Linux from MINIX (Tanenbaum’s creation). This story is really funny, because this looks like one of these cases where someone (Ken Brown) was asked to do research where the conclusion was decided up front. Interestingly, Microsoft was caught at this a couple of years ago.
For the record, I think that Ken Brown must have stolen the inspiration and parts of his book from someone else. No single person could be so misguided 
Here’s a good set of Digital Photography Composition Tips. The links included here provide a bunch of simple ways to improve your photos.
Via Tim Bray, here’s SeatGuru.com - Your Enlightened Guide to Airplane Seating. I’ve flown 100,000+ miles, so I’ve generally gotten a feel for which seats are good ones. That said, this site would be handy for unfamiliar aircraft.
The 3 C’s of Mac Backup describes (briefly) Carbon Copy Cloner, a Mac OS X backup program that includes the ability to create bootable disk images. Backups are good!
Sun has announced the Java Desktop Integration Components (JDIC) project, which is designed to help you integrate your applications with the native desktop better than you can currently. (No writing JNI stuff yourself!)
Part of this includes support for embedding the native browser. That’s a great feature, but it currently only works on Windows, Linux and Solaris. I do hope they add Mac support for that.
That niggle aside, this may come in handy with my current project at work. Our users there are all using Windows.
Just the stuff listed on the front page of the site can save gallons of water and lots of energy. There’s also a nifty picture of Aerogel there. Meta Efficient: A Guide To the Most Efficient Things in the World: Energy Efficiency, Self-Sufficiency, Off-Grid, Efficent Appliances, Product Reviews, Best Products
It would be hard to deny that the premise for the war in Iraq was exaggerated at best. Even with the exaggerations, the Bush Administration was unable to convince the UN that there was a pressing need for war. Given that, does it make sense to start a draft? I was 19 during the Gulf War, and we were worried about the possibility of a draft then. But, at least there was a clear mission: get Saddam out of Kuwait. And there was real multinational support for that mission! It felt more justified.
Today’s war has none of that feel to it.
Update: I just thought of something worth mentioning here. It is entirely possible that this bill does not have anywhere near the support that this site is implying. This bill was introduced last year. Certainly, the war in Iraq doesn’t seem any rosier now than it did then. However, the US and Britain have announced intentions to pull troops out of Iraq by 2006. Unless that’s a ruse, that plan may obviate the need to resurrect the draft.
