Is your computer free of child porn?  Are you sure?  While trojans can silently plant child porn in your computer's disk drives, there are far easier paths.  For example, they can get there through RSS feeds, pulled by your favorite news aggregator.  Aggregation feeds are particularly risky.

Shocking?  Not really.  The danger has always been there.  Child porn images may be lurking within any of the web pages out there.  There is no easy way to detect unasked for resources being downloaded silently and invisibly while you are looking at a page.  They usually end up in your browser cache.  Even after the cache is deleted, bits of the images are likely to remain on your disk ready to be used as forensic evidence against you.

What else can they place on your disk drive that can get you into trouble?  Government or industrial secrets for sure.  File this thought under What You See Is Only Part Of What You Got (WYSIOPOWYG?).

Although my wife is a catholic and I have the attitude of a Zen Buddhist (all that remains after removing faith and practice from Zen Buddhism), we agreed on one thing: we don't like the new pope much.  I am sure he is a nice guy and all but I don't like his view that other religions are deficient.  Deficient?  In what ways are other religions deficient?

To me, religion is like a cane: you can either lean on it or beat others with it.  Vatican's Enforcer of Faith?  Well, as long as he doesn't swing his cane at me, he won't have to hear my one hand clapping.

Glenbrook is holding two payments–related seminars in May.  Also, BayPay will be holding it's first F2F meeting at Stanford on May 10th.

Adobe applications are built with a proprietary platform-independent application framework to support both Windows and Macintosh.  I've used it in the past to write plugins for various Adobe products and found them very cumbersome to use.

The situation at Macromedia is about the same since they also have to support both platforms.  Both companies' product lines are also littered with products acquired from other companies which are at various stages of integration.

With Adobe's buyout of Macromedia, Adobe ends up with quite a pile of mess to cleanup.  Now factor in Longhorn and .NET migration ahead and I think you get the picture Adobe's engineering executives are looking at.

Tim Oren, diligently and not so gently, steps on the Long Tail hype.

Linus of Linux fame knifes Tridgell of Samba fame and Perens the wolfherder tells Linus to stop talking nonsense and cool it.

A summary of what happened:

Tridgell saw a problem, hypocritical use of non-open source version control software BitKeeper to develop Linux, and moved to fix it by reverse engineering BitKeeper's proprietary protocol.

This upset McVoy, the keeper of BitKeeper and Linus's childhood friend.  Sharp exchanges between McVoy and Tridgell caused enough uproar for Linus to pull back on BitKeeper and then punch back at Tridgell for causing trouble where there was none from Linus' point of view.

Meanwhile, Perens who thinks inconsistency is a crime and everyone should sacrifice themselves for the wolfpack kicks Linus' ass.

I could use some buttered popcorn.

After an unusually busy Saturday morning, putting out a fire related to load balancing for a client and trying out an integration test for a milestone due Monday, I watched Samurai Fiction.  Boy, what a stupid boring movie.  It's only enjoyable spot was the aging ninja.

I can understand why some people might find presence of Dave wary because he can throw large rocks very accurately.  Well, if they are attending conferences to shake hands and smile knowingly, then they certainly wouldn't want Dave around.  But Dave's rocks are each like the Newton's apple IMHO.  You might get distracted by the blow or even get knocked out but, if you ignore all that and bite into the rock, you have a decent chance of tasting it's core which is rarely empty nor selfish and often very enlightening. At least that's the way it's been for me.

Open source wolves are shredding values out of server software market and chasing them up into bundling trees.  Eventually, they'll have to move to an even safer place: selling services instead of software.  While this means SUN's on-demand grid is on the money, the transition will take 10 years so they'll have to go hungry for 3-4 years still and they'll have only a couple of years of gravy before wolves are on their heels as well.

If you dance with wolves, you will get bitten.  You can't blame the wolves for their nature.  Looks like BitKeeper didn't like getting bitten and kicked back. Unfortunately, that's making the wolf pack very angry.  Meanwhile, Monotone is an interesting distributed version control software.

ActiveGrid, another capitalist pig startup attempting to dance with communists wolves, just announced an early-release.