AP:

LEESBURG, Fla. – Two weeks after telling police that her son had been snatched from his crib, Melinda Duckett found herself reeling in an interview with TV's famously prosecutorial Nancy Grace. Before it was over, Grace was pounding her desk and loudly demanding to know: "Where were you? Why aren't you telling us where you were that day?"

A day after the taping, Duckett, 21, shot herself to death, deepening the mystery of what happened to the boy.

Janine Iamunno, a spokeswoman for Grace, said in an e-mail that Duckett's death was "an extremely sad development," but that the program would continue covering the case.

"We feel a responsibility to bring attention to this case in the hopes of helping find Trenton Duckett, who remains missing," Iamunno said.

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p dir=”ltr”>Is this what drives some bloggers?

If the pen is mightier than the sword, verbal attack hurts more than a beat down.

The way I see it, this downside of free speech can only grow as technology empowers our voices to be heard anywhere anytime. Language barriers has an upside in this sense.

Update:

Irrelevant coincidence: Melinda Duckett was born in Korea and adopted by Ducketts when she was 4 months old. I didn't know this until I just read it in a korean newspaper.

I no longer actively track ongoings in the crypto-land but I ran into this bad boy when I visited Kim's blog for the Open Specification Promise news (superb news btw).

The vulnerability involves two parts: sloppy code (OpenSSL and possibly others) and weak certs issued by some CAs. Fixed code should detect forged signatures. Updating the certs should make it impractical to forge digital signatures to look as if they were signed by those certs.

If you use OpenSSL (very likely if you write cross-platform software that uses cryptography), read it. If you another libary to validate digital signature, check with library developers to see if you need to update. If you are a non-tech, lookout for updates of software you use (i.e. Firefox which maybe affected).

Needless to say, this is pretty bad.

This post is intended to be googled, not read. So just ignore if you are a subscriber.

If you are reading this because you are having problems with JK 1.2.18:

You have to define rewrite_rule_file registry entry and create an empty file to make up for a bug in JK 1.2.18.

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p dir=”ltr”>If you are reading this because of a mysterious 'The specified module could not be found' message:

• delete isapi_redirect.properties if you have one around.
• keep messing around til it works.

I don't know what the heck is going on in the Apache Tomcat team but Tomcat connectors project is in a rather chaotic (well, that's the polite way to put it) state so, unless you feel like paying New Atlanta's ridiculous fees for ServletExec, just dance and jiggle til it works. In my case, everything started working mysteriously after cycling through multiple versions of isapi_redirect.dll. I would have complained in earnest if it didn't feel like kick Open Source Santa between the legs.

On Destructive Attentions:

Opinions and demands is what separates journalists and activists.

An opinion is a statement of position.

A demand is a statement of intention to pursue until specific requirements are met.

An outcry is a syndication of demand.

A journalist reports unbiased news and opinions to inform others.

An activist uses biased selection, edition, and repetition of news and opinions to sway others.

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p dir=”ltr”>Update:

A good example of journalism: Suspicions and Spies in Silicon Valley

After reading above article, I think Dunn didn't know about pretexting and HP lawyers misinformed her. Investigators will likely get prosecuted for identity theft. HP will be fined various government agencies and face civil lawsuits but I don't think Dunn will be charged any crime. Given time, Dunn will either resign or be forced to resign.

It's interesting that Dunn focused on details and Perkins focused on strategies, outlining a common stereotypical difference between men and women.

Most bloggers, A-list or not, typically fires and forgets. Scoble is an exception and I am concerned that he might be going overboard with HP textmarking incident. If Ms. Dunn did something illegal and is now lying about it, someone is already investigating. If she is just incompetent, since when is it a moral crime to be stupid chairperson? Isn't that HP and its shareholder's business?

This brings up an interesting question though: at what point is it overdunn? If it is when Dunn resigns (frankly, I think everyone who told her not to resign should go), then are bloggers activists or journalists? What prevents us from abusing our attention-based power? When is it not an abuse to publically single out a person to be fired?

While I value transparency and feedback, I think there is a line that we should not be crossing, a line that separates opinions from demands. In the near future, instant feedback will be the norm in the business world. In such a world, the line I mentioned will be increasingly important.

Spring Framework's support for pretty (aka meaningful, restful) URLs was rather weak so I've been hacking together a HandlerMapping implementation and I thought others might find its design useful.

RestfulServletHandlerMapping class currently routes URLs to Controller implementations by configuring properties like this:

<property name="urlParameterPattern" value="\{([\w-_\.]+)\}" />

<property name="urlParameters">

  <map>

    <entry key="user.name" value="[a-zA-Z][\w-]*" />

    <entry key="post.year" value="20\d\d" />

    <entry key="post.month" value="[01]\d" />

    <entry key="post.name" value="[\w-]+" />

  </map>

</property>

<property name="urlMappings">

  <map>

    <entry

       key="/{user.name}/{post.year}/{post.month}/{post.name}"

       value="blogController" />

  </map>

</property>

Some explanation of the properties:

urlParameterPattern – regular expression used to identify named parameters in urlMappings URL patterns.

urlParameters – collection of named parameters and format specified using regular expression.

urlMappings – collection of URL patterns expressed as regular expressions with named parameters.

Currently, RestfulServletHandlerMapping builds a composite regular expression pattern for each urlMappings entry by replacing named parameters with the parameter's format regular expression. When a request comes in, request URL is compared against each pattern until a match is found. When a match is found, parameter values are stored as request parameters using the parameter name then control is passed to the controller mapped to the URL pattern.

While this design is pretty flexible, it has two shortcomings:

1. non-ASCII parameters is, while possible, tedious to define.
2. semantic parameter validation support (is 'donpark' a real user?)

Above shortcomings can be easily avoided by carefully arranging URLs and order of evaluation though.

Good thing I decided to hold off getting a MacBook because random shutdown problems are now common enough to be assigned an acronym: RSD. I'll probably hold off even if Core 2 Duo equiped MB/MBP becomes available until problems like RSD goes away. Besides, MacBooks are not allowed on at least two airlines.

What I would like is — I’d like the country I grew up in. It was a good country. I lived in Washington, D.C., 400,000 black folks, 400,000 white folks, in a country 89 or 90 percent white. I like that country. – Pat Buchanan

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p dir=”ltr”>What's he going to do when birthrate of non-white Americans threatens his precious idea of America? Demand a national vote to decide birthrate quotas based on race? What the hell is he smoking?

Well, I kinda like the idea of Asshole-Free America. I like that country.

I am expecting early adopter segment of phishers to soon seek easier angle of attack because a) increasing use and rapid advancement of anti-phishing technologies makes phishing harder, and b) each wave of phishing attacks educates their preys.

I think Ransom Phishing is one such angle. Instead of phishing for authentication devices (username/password), ransom phishing's goal is to rapidly increase customer support cost, using existing phishing tools to alarm customers and directing them like one would drive a massive herd of bulls, to a point where it makes more economic sense to pay off the phishers.

It's amazing how little stories like that of Hachiko moves you(found via Dave, Bernardo, then google). All it took was the first four paragraphs to bring tears to my eyes. When my wife returned from her workout, we talked about Hachiko and Kamji, my old dog. We both agreed that Kamji would have just stayed home and pooped all over the house to punish me if I didn't return. LOL.

Wikipedia has more details on Hachiko but was not moving at all, probably because the focus on presenting facts. I wonder if there is a wiki for stories, to archive them as well as share them, across cultures and languages.