…Find the Brownie

The objective of this blog is to find an important government job occupied by a person with no apparent qualifications other than strong personal, political, or business ties to a member of the administration.

Microsoft Windows Officially Broken

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program. But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

Meth addicts hack into identity theft

SAN FRANCISCO — Methamphetamine addicts are using the Internet to commit identity theft, law-enforcement officials and medical experts in the USA and Canada say.

Ex-FEMA chief blames locals for bad Katrina response

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The former head of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, who resigned under a hail of criticism about the slow response to Hurricane Katrina, on Tuesday blamed local officials and said his agency had done a good job.

“My biggest mistake was not recognizing, by Saturday (before the storm made landfall), that Louisiana was dysfunctional,” Michael Brown told a House of Representatives panel looking into the aftermath of the catastrophic storm.

OFLA : The First Open Source Flash Conference

When?

Right now the Conference is planned on October Friday 22nd 21st, starting 18:00 GMT. This should enable both Europeans and Americans to attend the conference.

Where?

The conference will be held online using Breeze. Breeze enables conference speakers to use both microphone and webcam and to share the display of their computer screen with everyone in order to run demonstrations. The attendees can use the chat to ask questions or discuss the topics.

Who?

The conference will feature Flash Open Source talks by the leaders of Flash Open Source Community. It will welcome all the people interested in OpenSource Flash, users of open source flash tools or newcomers that are interested in learning the opportunities offered by OSFlash tools.

Hat tip to John.

Today I got a call from Yahoo! Well, okay, at first I just got a voice mail then I called them back and talked to a very helpful customer-service type named “Janine”. Turns out they were calling people (yes, actually calling) who are part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program to see what they think about the service and how it’s going. In retrospect it seems I forgot to mention pretty much anything about it that bothers me, except for one thing. After getting a huge burst of traffic over that World of Warcraft epidemic post last week, I decided to try out their URL-blocking options for ads. Ideally, I wanted to take out the links to sites selling WoW gold. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Like, at all at the moment. I’ve checked and double-checked the URLs I wanted to block, but they still come through full force every time. Oh well, “Janine” said she’d mention it when submitting her report.

I should probably try calling back sometime to complain about the JS code they generate for you (standards compliance is not that hard).

Tags get no respect

No amount of AJAX and Ruby on Rails […] will solve the problem created by a suboptimal Tag data model, blocking users from using commas as separators AND preventing them from using multi-word tags.

Found via Tag Tuesday.

Pssst! Where the devil is the exorcist meeting?

VATICAN CITY - Orthodontists have national conventions, as do lawyers and computer salespeople. So why not exorcists?

At the end of his weekly general audience on Wednesday Pope Benedict greeted Italian exorcists who, he disclosed, are currently holding their national convention.

Daniel Vena has identified a couple little security issues in a couple of the default Vanilla input filtering plugins that allows for some cross-site scripting hacks. He was kind enough to patch a start for some fixes into my Textile formatting extension, so it’s time to make sure everyone is up to date with v0.4. You can download it from my Vanilla Extensions page.

‘Tagging’ Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet

Commentator David Weinberger says a growing trend allows us all to have a say on how to organize the Internet. Weinberger is a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

In the post Plaguelands over at Wonderland we learn that (by intention or accident) players of World of Warcraft are starting to be affected by an in-game disease that sounds like it’s apparently spreading out of control on some servers. Maybe I should have given the game more of a chance before cancelling my account after all.

Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarantine and infecting other players.

And yes, it’s even got it’s very own YTMND page already.

In case you were bored with just being able to add tags to your photos, videos, places you’ve been, bookmarks, and blogs (not to mention the ability to aggregate all of those tags to associate information with a single place).

Well with the open beta of Tagalag now you can (finally) apply tags to people. Well, to an email address anyway.

Maybe that should be Nerd-on-webservice action? Anyway, Nerd-on-Something action is available for anyone who wants to go crazy with their last.fm data using a whole stack of feeds and services and such.

Big nerdy hat-tip to Wevah.

They opened an Apple Store at the mall here in Annapolis! I’m gonna try to stop there tomorrow.

Computer characters mugged in virtual crime spree

A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software “bots” to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash.