Ok, this is not going to happen often, so all you left-wingers out there listen up! -) Rafe over at rc3.org is right. Er, left. Er, correct:

Democratic Senator Russ Feingold has won me over to his way of thinking. ... Feingold argued that Ashcroft should be confirmed because the President has the right to get the cabinet he wants. If we give the President free rein to choose his cabinet, then we're free to judge his administration on the actions undertaken by that cabinet.

A great resource for any web designer, Interaction Design Patterns.

[5:19]  <redmonk> for instruction of future generations:
[5:20]  <redmonk> always cd to the directory of the files
you are listing,
[5:20]  <redmonk> or you will delete the contents of your
 build scripts directory instead

I'm only one or two steps from being able to realize a dream I've had for the last 5 or 6 years. I've been developing web applications since 1996, and like all geeks I've longed for a server of my own. ;-)

As seen on[#swhack](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/swhack)](http://blogspace.com/swhack/chatlogs/):

[4:33]  * Morbus runs away.
[4:33]  * Morbus throws handfuls of ferrets in
redmonk's general direction.
[4:34]  * redmonk targets railgun on Morbus
[4:34]  * redmonk ducks ferrets
[4:34]  * redmonk pulls trigger
[4:34]  * Morbus starts pounding on the jump button
like a lamer.
[4:34]  <redmonk> *whang*!!
[4:34]  * Morbus respawns.
[4:34]  <redmonk> *splutch*
[4:34]  * Morbus respawns again.
[4:34]  <redmonk> now this is the way to play quake
[4:34]  <Morbus> heh.
[4:35]  <Morbus> ircuake.

My good buddy Nate got his LEGO motion-tracking robot working! The best quote: "the most important thing I've learned is that the physical world is still not perfect. Bummer."

I've started using Blosxom for a small local-to-my-desktop internal work-related blog. It's not a fancy blogtool, but it's not a fancy blog. I write up in BBEdit what i want to say, and save it to my blosxom directory. "Too easy drill sargeant!" Go Rael!

I was lucky. Jodi works at Mac retailer and Apple Specialist Re-Mac. So Charles the tech was kind enough to spend 4 hours completely disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling my beloved TiBook. Pictures coming.

I came into work today, checked my app's status, and found 3600+ deaths in the app monitor. I checked the logs files and found over 8000 (empty) log files. D'oh! I've got my work cut out for me today. :-(

Congrats to Dave and Userland on releasing Radio Community Server 1.0. In my alternate universe, I'm going to replicate RCS in Python. Next millenium.

So... lots going on lately, haven't blogged a bit if it. What's interesting? Userland and others have been building a new weblog API (xml-rpc and soap), and Userland released a new driver-based architecture for Radio Userland. Sounds interesting, but I don't have RU, and my organization is too invested in First Class to look at other information distribution solutions.

The Guardian reports on a possible EU reaction to the steel tariff Bush imposed. They're likely to impose tariffs only on states and districts that are key to the Republicans this next election.

via /. - Cory Doctorow at SXSW:

There's an amazing story about the day someone sent the first hotmail message with 'Get your free email account at hotmail.com' at the bottom to India. The traffic statistics the next morning, they quintupled overnight, on the strength of one email.

Andrew Grove responds to Hollywood:

"Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge?" [...] "Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?"

I posted yesterday a response to some comments by Doc Searls at SXSW. Jim responded, which prompted me to respond again. I think my response was one of my better explanations of my political leanings, so I've formalized it here. Seth also had some comments worth checking out.

Via Dan Brickley's RDFWeb (dev page), I found a link to this most-amazing tool for creating RDF files. RDFAuthor is a Mac OS X application that loads RDF vocabularies and lets you graphically create instances of those schema. I used it to create my new FOAF-enabled about page.

More from Cam at SXSW:

1:52 PM: Doc asks the audience how many have political opinions that are left of center. Most of the audience raises their hands. He then asks how many people are afraid to talk about it on their weblogs.

From SXSW, Cam reports:

1:38 PM: The weblogger community will route around hate speech and bigotry online. I wonder if that's true. We've seen the Google effect when webloggers start linking to something. Someone spouts some bile - can the weblog community resist linking it? That's my idea of routing around it. If we link it, it is soon rising in Google's ranks, the internet equivalent of a PR victory. So yes, maybe we can route around it, but I'm not certain.

NewForge is reporting that AOL is going to switch users from IE (or their own woefully behind browser) to a browser based on Gecko, the core browser engine in Mozilla. (Mozilla being the open source browser project quasi-funded by AOL/Netscape). From the article on the switch:

"With Gecko, we have control over the client software and don't have to worry about Microsoft screwing up our streaming [audio and video]," says one AOL sysadmin And later: A browser shift by AOL is going to leave an awful lot of companies that assume their Web sites only need to work with Explorer scrambling to rewrite their code so that they don't lose AOL's 30 million-plus subscribers...

Tinderbox is a Mac OS (Classic only for now) application that lets you manage information in a multiview graphical way; including an outline view and a very cool-looking map view. Tinderbox is also a sort of content-management system and can be used to generate HTML, XML, and syndication files (RSS feeds), as well as consume RSS feeds. As soon as the Mac OS X version comes out I'm gonna seriously check this out.