Fast-Forward: April 3, 2006

Quickie link dumps make stray tabs disappear...

• It's almost too easy to slam Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security, for admitting in one short interview both that he's watched every episode of 24 (Bruce Schneier's "movie plot threats" analysis is clearly right on the money) and that he doesn't use email. But "too easy" has never stopped me before. "They can get me. They don't need to e-mail me. There's a thing called a telephone." Yes, there is. The sad part about the story, really, is that politicians are more afraid of the damage a stray email could cause to their reputations than they are of not using every available tool to fight "the terrorists."
• While we're at the New York Times web site, let's take a moment to make fun of the new design. Sure, that's too easy, too. Can you believe that they found a way to make it even less readable? That word, "streamlined," I do not think it means what you think it means. [UPDATE: Aha, it looks way better on a Mac. Macintitis strikes again! That would be a great sponsorship for Apple -- pay prominent publishers to make their sites look barely readable on Windows and lovely on Mac. Then again, why pay anyone to do it when designers do it for free already?] I do have to compliment them for finally pulling the stock tables out of the daily paper, though. Did the last person reading those in print finally die or something?
• I'm bummed that O'Reilly didn't print the new book on wxPython, wxPython in Action. It's a good book and a great topic. If you buy it direct from Manning, they give you a PDF version of it, to boot (which is great since that's all I want). It's amazing how many things the wxWidgets and wxPython teams have gotten right, that Java got so very wrong. It doesn't hurt anything that Robin Dunn, the lead developer of wxPython, sends an average of 12 (often lengthy) messages a day to the wxPython-users list (and he seems to rest on Sundays). Wow. One sign of a good restaurant is a head chef who will come out and meet the customers! Python really seems to be a good choice for cross-platform development, if you want apps that are relatively small and look like "real" desktop apps.
• Email sent to Amazon's customer feedback form (which they've buried very deep beneath the steam tunnels of their site -- go ahead, try and find it):

  Please, no more 'plog'.  Please?  
  I'll be good....I'll buy lots of things.  Expensive things!
  Just...please...make it go away.
  
  Please?
  
  Thanks,
  Marc

  Amazingly, they responded right away and the thing disappeared. Hooray!