Wednesday, January 23, 2002

Officer held in Internet sex sting. A veteran Cook County corrections officer is expected to be formally charged today by the Milwaukee County District Attorney for allegedly soliciting sex from an Internet user he thought to be a 15-year-old girl, Milwaukee police said. [Chicago Sun-Times] This adds to the previous post about corrections officers beating a prisoner to death.  Maybe we need to start testing these guys for the double-Y chromosome.  Or, better yet, keep them locked up alongside the prisoners.  3:14:16 PM

Single phone call would block all telemarketers. WASHINGTON--The government is proposing the creation of a national ''do not call'' registry that would allow consumers to ward off unwanted telemarketers with a single phone call. [Chicago Sun-Times] I'm always nice to tele-marketers.  I believe in karma.  However, I don't like the calls.  I'd shut them off if I could.  I'm all for stopping this kind of intrusive garbage. 3:12:23 PM

Witness: Inmate hit 100 times. Three sheriff's deputies standing trial for first-degree murder used their "knees, fists and feet" to beat a prisoner to death as he pleaded for mercy, a witness testified Tuesday. [Chicago Sun-Times] 3:05:51 PM

I just had to delete a Doc Searls post.  That guy uses so much formatting on his messages...tables and crap.  It looked terrible on my blogger site. So, to paraphrase, Doc had suggestions for the NYTimes website.  I liked the suggestions.  They included dropping the sign in, and dropping the pay for archives.  He wrote it much prettier. 2:52:54 PM

Mind bomb: The Blogger API in Radio.   [Scripting News] I'm not sure what to do with this...something...something. 2:22:57 PM

Medal of Honor Debriefing [Blue's News] I played the demo for this game, then played it again, and again, and again.  It is amazing.  I look forward to playing the full release. 11:11:01 AM

Suse Installation:  I didn't read this completely.  But it seems to be a good introduction to Linux installation. 9:32:37 AM

SOAP! I've been messing around with Perl since I got into the Unix game, but I'm seriously behind the curve.  It's only recently that I've made a serious effort to fill in the gaps of my Perl toolbelt. So, what's SOAP?  It's a lot like XML-RPC, in that it allows a server to provide a "service" to "clients", via XML.  So, let's say I want to provide a service that will report the temperature in my office.  Because the client-server chit-chat is XML based, my server could run Perl, or Java, or C, or whatever.  Likewise, the client could be anything.  What's the big deal?  There's tons of public services out there.  Here's a good starting place: SalCentral.  In short, expect to see some of these weird ass services incorporated into this page.  They even have an RSS Feed. Bottom line, this is some very cool shit. 9:17:11 AM

From Dave Winer, the creator of Radio: Tomorrow's mind-bomblet is the Blogger API running in Radio. Why not. It supports XML-RPC, and people like using tools to write for their weblog, even if it's on their desktop machine. We've got it all running, I want to start fresh with the docs tomorrow morning so if you're into Rube Goldberg software machines, check in early and we'll have a new toy for you to play with.  [Scripting News] I don't know what I'll do with this...but something.  Something.  All of this XML-RPC Blogger API stuff makes it tremendously easy for me to update my site through the firewall here at work.  Fantastic. I sent a message to my Hosting service, to see if they could install the DBI_File module that Moveable Type needs.  We'll see. 9:03:58 AM