Publishing

Kent Brownridge, general manager of Us Weekly parent company Wenner Media, on the breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston: For a celebrity weekly, this is our tsunami. It's a good thing he didn't describe it as "our 9/11." That would be in poor taste. ... (read more)

2005/01/12

I'm a big fan of Salon.Com, but I have to call out a tasteless metaphor by Publisher David Talbot in a story about the survival of his magazine and Slate: I think once the Internet bust got into full swing, it was like being survivors of a tsunami. Everybody was glad they were still there, no matter how they felt about each other before it hit. ... (read more)

2005/01/07

Legendary science fiction author Ursula Le Guin is doing everything she can to dissuade fans of her books from watching the Legend of Earthsea mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel. She's most offended by the decision to change the races of her characters, making most of them white: My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and ... (read more)

2004/12/22

Searching the Web for Copycats

Here's a useful application of the Google API: Copyscape, a free service that can find Web sites plagiarizing your content. The service takes any URL as input, looking for a suspicious number of matching words on other sites. Most hits for Workbench came from sites and aggregators making legitimate use of my RSS feed. Copyscape found several plagiarists of my book Sams Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 24 Hours, using the first chapter as input. The service might be too fast on the trigger: Another ... (read more)

2004/12/16

You May Already Be a Winner

I received around 25 entries in the Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition book giveaway. Chosen at random from received comments and trackback, the five winners are Elise Bauer, Richard MacManus, Harrison Brace, Christian Crumlish, and Judi Sohn. I'm also sending one to Hanna for the shameless heart-wrenching tale of hard luck in her contest entry: I could mention that I'm ridiculously poor, being disabled and a ward of the state. But that would be demeaning, wouldn't it? I'll be fighting the ... (read more)

2004/12/14

Deliver Us From Sean Hannity

Caught a minute of Sean Hannity's radio show last night, and it was enough time to break my brain. He claimed that this newspaper item on Jimmy Carter demonstrates that the former president is a limousine liberal: As one of the most prolific authors ever to sit in the Oval Office, former President Jimmy Carter knows how to sell books. As he hawks his 19th, Sharing Good Times, Carter reveals his secret to reaching the bestseller list: Pitch buyers at discount warehouses. "Sam's Club and Costco," ... (read more)

2004/12/14

You Can't Handle the Knuth

As an unabashedly liberal computer geek, I've grown accustomed to feeling outnumbered politically among the "cognitive elite," Eric S. Raymond's onanistic term for our tribe, since BBSing in the early '80s. You could find more libertarians among that crowd than liberals; I'm not surprised that the Libertarian Party presidential nominee this year is a programmer. For this reason, it's unpleasant but not unexpected to discover that a technologist I admire, most recently Jeremy Bowers, believes ... (read more)

2004/12/06

Are You Ready for Some Race Mixing?

Samuel Francis, a newspaper columnist distributed by Creators Syndicate, believes the Terrell Owens/Nicolette Sheridan skit on Monday Night Football was an insidious effort to promote interracial sex: If only morals and taste had been the targets, the producers could easily have found white actresses who are less obviously Nordic than the golden-locked Sheridan, but Nordic is what the ad's producers no doubt wanted. For that matter, if you only wanted to take a swipe at morals and taste, you ... (read more)

2004/12/04

Secure Linux Practically a State Secret

In my mailbox: a review copy of O'Reilly's SELinux: NSA's Open Source Security Enhanced Linux, a new book by Bill McCarty on a Linux enhancement developed for the National Security Agency. I wasn't familiar with this project, but the book makes it tempting to carve off a hard drive partition this afternoon and try it out. SELinux offers role-based access control and privilege escalation baked into the kernel, as described by the NSA: This work is not intended as a complete security solution for ... (read more)

2004/12/03

Hersh Bhasin: "If I could be so distressed just by reading the book, I can imagine what mental suffering the author must have gone through in writing it." ... (read more)

2004/11/16

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