A review: What is the Last Book You Bought? The Movable Type 3 Bible by Rogers Cadenhead -- singularly the most useless reference book I've ever bought. I've learned one thing. One measly thing. Put this on your "do not buy" list. Potential cover blurb for the next edition: "singularly the most ... I've learned." ... read more

I've been ending each day by reading a chapter of The Great Brain to my sons, the first book in a series by John D. Fitzgerald that I devoured as a child. The books, which detail life for three Catholic brothers in a Mormon town in 1890s Utah, describe a time when children weren't raised like bubble boys (my preferred technique). They explore caves, test their mettle with fistfights under rough and tumble lumberjack rules, and do demented things like this: "We are playing Jackass Leapfrog," Sammy said as he led ... read more

Internet pornographers got lucky with ICANN and will receive their own top-level domain. A Florida domain registry and the International Foundation for Internet Responsibility, the groups that requested the domain, will devote .xxx explicitly to sexual content, making it easier for Internet users to avoid such sites entirely or dive headfirst into the fleshy sea of sin: ICM and IFFOR selected .xxx as the sole string for this application based upon its high ranking in the aforementioned criteria. Although other ... read more

I bought a text ad on Google yesterday for the search term Mark Felt, wondering how many people would hit the search engine for more information on the deep-throated stool pigeon: Chasing Mark Felt How a 19-Year-Old College Student Unmasked Watergate Source in 1999 cadenhead.org/workbench The result: 525 clicks on 14,260 impressions, which cost me $26.22 (5 cents per click). Though at first my ad had no competition, by the end of the day, it was joined by ads from NPR, Kentucky Fried Cruelty, and the Washington ... read more

An e-mail from a reader of Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours: i really enjoyed reading what you wrote and especially the way you wrote it!! all i want to know now is how i can make a virus because some of my pals are bugging me and i'm really pissed! and like you i feel that i'd rather be georgia vs. mafiaboy !! thanks again and please send me a repley as soon as possible and please please make sure to include a virus making "formula in it". bye ... read more

FeedBurner has begun adding web bugs to syndicated feeds that enable the service to track use of individual items. I noticed them recently in RSS feeds for The Nation: Priscilla Owen's confirmation is the bitter fruit of the unprincipled "compromise" on judical nominations. The img tag at the end of this description loads the web bug, a transparent one-by-one pixel graphic. Niall Kennedy wrote earlier this month that they're part of a paid statistics package. Every time a bugged item is viewed in an aggregator, ... read more

Some podcasters and other publishers who serve large, high-traffic files have begun using the Coral service to keep from going offline or going broke. The iPodder client added support in March. Coral's a network of several hundred servers that can store and serve copies of any file on the web. To offer a file via Coral, all you have to do is add .nyud.net:8090 to the host name in its URL. Here's an example -- the trailer for the underappreciated Brat Pack thriller Bad Influence starring James Spader as a passive ... read more