Nerdmonkey.com

Internet Pioneers warn about over-regulating the internet.

Washington Post: At the annual Internet Society conference this week in Arlington, the engineers who built the Internet and many of the policymakers who follow its development urged caution as governments try to exert control and businesses look to maximize profits. It's nice to see that many internet pioneers are as worried as I am.

Internet radio stations killed by new fees.

The Register reports that internet radio stations are shutting down due to new fees that they must pay the RIAA: Under the revised fees published by the Library of Congress yesterday, SomaFM says it would need to find $15,372 in additional RIAA royalties - or $7.69 per listener per month. That's on top of other royalties and overheads. Analog radio broadcasters don't need to pay this fee.

Microsoft's Switch Commercial.

My name is Bill Gates, and I own a software company. [Flash required, from More Like This]

Running Java in .NET

Sam Ruby: If all goes well, one should be able to simply put JAR files in a CLASSPATH and transparently call Java code from C#.

Sun's giving it away for free.

Is Sun giving away their app server? It seems like this could spell financial trouble for a lot of J2EE vendors.

Sparked by the Date My Sister Project.

It's been a while since I visited TheSpark.com, but me and my friends use to spend hours enjoying their intriguing and humorous online tests. For example, it's fun to find out that you were 100% compatible with a girl you used to date but don't get along with at all and with your old roommate, yet the two of them nearly hate each other.

But the fun doesn't end there. Now you can eavesdrop on someone else's dating woes at the Date-My-Sister Project. Watch as Christopher spies on his kid sister as he tries to set her up on dates with friends. Christopher and his sister really have a way with words. For example, this juice tidbit was gleaned from the beginning of the story: In her whole life, Melissa's had one boyfriend, and he turned out to be, in her words, "a drunk retard who will probably be a wife-beater once he gets better aim." Be sure to watch the videos.

Where the money flows.

Opensecrets.org, a Webby Award winning site by the Center for Responsive Politics, can tell you where your elected officials are getting their money. For example, I can see that in my metro area people gave over four times more money to George Bush than to Al Gore in the last presidential election. I can also see who in my neighborhood gave over $200 to a candidate in the 2002 election.

Turn your back on George W., get arrested.

At the bottom of this AP article on Yahoo: Bush was invited to speak at the Ohio State commencement by representatives of the graduating class. But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a "thunderous" ovation."

Here's some commentary around the web about this: Wil Wheaton, Morons.org, Cory Doctorow. I haven't found anywhere that suggests this is a good idea yet.

Interview with Archive.org's creator.

Ever wanted to know a little more about the internet wayback machine? If you're curious what it is, check it out. You can see versions of most webpages as they existed in the past. For example, here's this site over a year ago.

If you're curious about the details of archiving the entire internet, check out this interview with Brewster Kahle, the archive's creator. You also might want to check out archive.org's about page, or this Seattle Times article. [From AaronSw.]

Why companies support open source.

Joel has an excellent article on why companies support open source software. I had the same experience with economics classes in college that he did -- it never seemed like I could make much use of macroeconomic theory, but microeconomics comes in handy all the time. I guess if we did Greenspun's job things would be different.

Dad's day.

Happy father's day, dad!

I beat the burnside.

Today I ran in my first race ever, and probably ran 5 miles for the first time ever. It was a great time. Thanks for motivating me, Randy. We did it in 42m15s. Here's our hilarious start. It was a fun race, almost entirely downhill. For those that want to try it next year, check out www.beattheburnside.com.

One million books available online.

Proposal to make 1,000,000 books available online to anyone, anytime.

I never liked Cola, but...

Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.net (a usually very worthwhile blog) fame writes an interesting piece about Cory Docotorow and his project, OpenCola. OpenCola sounds a lot like Google's page ranking system to me, which leads me to believe it will work if enough people use OpenCola's product. What I'm not sure of is how well this will work if it forces users to go through another step in order to input what they like and don't like. Google relies on this happening automatically by using all the links that are on existing webpages as votes for quality content. It sounds like OpenCola requires input about sites to be fed to it solely by users of their software in a manual fashion. But it definitely sounds interesting -- I just signed up for their beta release program to see what it's all about.

Competing with Swing and NetBeans.

Here's a good article at InfoWorld about IBM's new open source Java IDE, Eclipse. It competes head to head with Sun's open source NetBeans. What was interesting, and what I did not know, is that IBM created a new Java windowing toolkit called SWT/JFace that gives a native Windows look and feel, even working seemlessly with Windows skins. It has always been difficult to create Swing applications that look good and are fast on Win32 machines -- maybe SWT/JFace is just what the doctor ordered.

Building Prisons Doesn't Prevent Crime.

New York Times: "A likely reason for the increase in recidivism, Professor Petersilia said, is that state governments, to save money and to be seen as tough on crime, cut back on rehabilitation programs, like drug treatment, vocational education and classes to prepare prisoners for life at home."

I heard a piece on NPR a while back that told how the biggest proponents of the three strikes law in California is the union for correction workers, one of the most powerful unions in the state. The prison guards don't want to loose their jobs and in fact want to become more powerful, so they want to put more people in prison!