Lots of rants and raves over the Smackdown at LesBlogs.
Mena Trott, cofounder of conference sponsor Six Apart, was opening the second day and calling for “civility in blogging.” While this was going on, in fact through the entire conference, there was an irc back channel which you can read here. Mena took exception to [...]

There is an occasional problem with Thunderbird and imap mailboxes that can destroy your user experience, especially if you tend to navigate using the keyboard, but even with the mouse it can interrupt your work.
The problem occurs only with unselectable mailboxes. These mailboxes don’t contain any mail, instead they contain other mailboxes that may [...]

A new category for Yesterday’s Thoughts, Famous Rays.
My experience of being named Ray has been curious. I never met a Ray my age until I was in my forties. I was born in 1958 and Ray was a name from an older era. It was the name of the assistant greenskeeper at the country club [...]

Dave Winer has an idea for Firefox:
Failing that how about a setting that tells the browser to ignore what the site says about font size and always display text in the font and size I tell it to. Basically the web is and has been broken forever. Maybe one of these decades we’ll get around [...]

Andrew Sullivan is impressed by the latest intelligence release from the Director of National Intelligence.
It purports to be a letter “between two senior al Qa’ida leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that was obtained during counterterrorism operations in Iraq, ” from July 9, 2005.
The letter paints a picture of a Jihad aimed at “the [...]

Justin at Right Side Redux ponders the similarities between the debate on Harriet Miers and the debate on Intelligent Design and asks his readers to draw parallels.
I don’t really see the parallels. It seems like the country is more united against Miers than for or against evolution. The only similarity that I can see is [...]

Robert Scoble wants search engines to pretend that the web is different than it is. I think this would be a bad idea.
Scoble’s objection is that search results don’t reflect his notions of what is important in the world.
“As long as I’m the #1 Robert and Robert Redford isn’t as high up as me then [...]

If you receive this error message, the answer to your question is here. Don’t go anywhere else.
After wading through substantial non-sense, Pat Hayzlett points out the answer here.
The problem in a nut shell is that mySQL 4.1 changed their password hashing and now store the passwords of database users in 40 chars instead of 16 [...]

Matthew Russell has some ideas for extending the battery life of your Apple Powerbook. Since I just switched back to Macs and I was having some problems with my previous laptop’s battery life, this was an issue of keen interest. I knew about all of Matthew’s common suggestions, turn off Bluetooth (actually I had [...]

In my previous rule of thumb for getting to your destination quickly, I recommended that you take the first available turn. Here is a rule for selecting when confronted with equivalent two turns,
Keep going the way you were going.
Since this situation may depend entirely on the boundary conditions, here is the example that [...]