Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful
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Itâs easy to hate viruses for their freeloading ways, but they have also repaid us in ways we are just beginning to tally.
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The most painful kind of generosity are the promises you cannot fulfill. The people who were once so grateful then turn on you, and your self-esteem is sure to take a beating.  Many years ago, in a fit of generosity, Dave Winer offered to host all early-bird adopters of editthispage.com free hosting of their weblogs. This included php.weblogs.com. Well Dave Winer recently announced that he was closing down the weblogs.com and editthispage.com websites. He no longer runs a company that can support these sites and they are a personal and financial strain on him.   I was disappointed, but I had no expectations that Dave would do this in perpetuity.  My momma taught me to keep my expectations low when it comes to free things. After all, Dave and I have never met, and I've only exchanged a couple of emails with him.   I had a feeling that something like this was going to happen because the site has suffering from poor performance this past month. So my contingency plan was to ship the weblog to a commercial hosting service like weblogger if need be. During the weekend, just before the site was cut off, and before any announcement by Dave, I moved my most important open source project to sourceforge, to http://adodb.sourceforge.net/.  Today I got an email from Lawrence, Userland's webmaster:  Subject:   php.weblogs.com  From:      "Lawrence Lee" deleted#userland.com Date:      Wed, June 16, 2004 1:46 am  To:        jlim#natsoft.com Priority:  Normal  Mailer:    Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510   We'll be continuing to host php.weblogs.com, we made special arrangements with Dave to keep it running.  Lawrence   I didn't ask for special treatment, so this is a pleasant surprise. Apparently the people at Userland decided to host this weblog and Dave emailed me, saying he had nothing to do with this decision. Of course I don't expect this offer to be permanent either, and I will deal with that when the time comes. The website's performance is still terrible though, and I have no expectations about this either.  For those who ever wondered what the icon below each post means, it's a graphic emoticon of how i feel. I think the jazz singer Billie Holiday is an appropriate image for this post; her songs are always bitter-sweet. It sure feels like Stormy Weather or Come Rain or Shine.  I would also like to thank those of you who emailed me privately about this issue. RSS seems the best  way to access this web-site at the moment, as it continues to go down at random times.
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Fighting clutter? Here's how to clear it out.
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A newly identified malicious program not only messes up its victims' computers, it taunts them too.
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Here's one of those strange-but-true tales of irony that can elicit either humor or frustration - maybe both - depending on your perspective.
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By Joseph Szydlowski  If you took a look inside your trash can, what would you see?   Junk mail? Coffee grounds.
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Flaming skulls, cheesy acting, satanic motorcycles -- what's not to like? In Table of Malcontents.
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Sometimes, a regulatory bark is worse than its bite.
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Only 'folksonomy' inspires more fear and loathing It's official: "folksonomy", "blogosphere", "netiquette" and "blook" are among the net-spawned terms which should be cast down into the eternal fires of hell, AFP reports.â¦
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Letter: Whats needed is advice on how to be a suck-up without losing your soul.
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Wired News, with help from readers, compiles and ranks the internet's worst offenders.
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Please quote me on this Stob There's another of those lists of supposedly amusing/sage/cute adagesÂ going around, bouncing from blog to email, accumulating fresh contributions and occasional edits and doing all the meme-ish things that memes do. This one differs from all the others that you have deleted irritably from your email inbox in that it includes a contribution taken from this very column.â¦
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Here's some help for those between a rock and a hard place.
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An invitation to a conference on the politics of waste leads to thoughts on the relationship of dirt and technology -- thoughts that lead inexorably to the trash-can icon on personal computers. Commentary by Momus.
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There's more bad news for those pudgy couch potatoes, junk food junkies and TV devotees -- and this time it really hits them where it hurts.
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roundup Free-roaming source code breeds new Netsky pest. Also: From IE to Opera, browsers are a likely prey.
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Comment is free: Simon Jenkins: Anti-newspaper diatribes bewail falling standards. That's rubbish, and the glory days they hark back to were dreadful