This is one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read, the tale of how a well-meaning do-gooder corrupted an 86-year old great-grandmother. She went from innocent Web surfing to hacking the entire Senior Assisted Living Center to becoming an enthusiastic, unrepentant music pirate.

Now that BlueSecurity has been taken down, the BlueFrog client might be susceptible to remote compromise.

In his recent column for CRN, Steven Burke compared Dell's value to customers to the value that HP delivers today. He pointed out that Dell's stock is near a 52-week low, while HP's stock is near a 52-week high. Burke concludes that the reason for this disparity in stock performance "is a sign that Wall Street is finally catching up with the dramatic shift that has occurred in which customers are placing a higher value on solutions than on low-priced point products."

New report from the GAO: "GAO-06-385 - The Federal Government Needs to Establish Policies and Processes for Sharing Terrorism-Related and Sensitive but Unclassified Information," March 2006:

Over 200 people have registered and edited pages on the Alacra Wiki since it went live late last year.We get about 600 visitors a week, compared to about 300 a week in December.The most popular page is the Industry Spotlight...

In the world of DSLRs, black means business. Apple must have observed what’s going on in other areas of consumer electronics. The white iBook has always been a great machine, but its cute exterior may have deterred macho users. Now with Intel inside, the new MacBook comes in both black and white… but going macho will cost you an extra $200. Is it worth it?

I’m throwing this out there as I’m still not sure what to make of it:

There’s talk of, and work underway, for a datalibre movement called Structured Blogging. It includes a bunch of code, human intervention in coding, and seems a bit doomed in the doldrums of who’s going to care enough to bother coding all that.

Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Last week's launch included a major overhaul of our Data Manageability Software Family. I'd like to dig into our strategy there. (The launch also included a new high-end storage system, the FAS6000 series, but instead of covering that myself, I'll refer you to Tony Asaro's ComputerWorld blog. Summary: He likes it.)

A few days ago, we opened Radio Handi up for public testing. This new service enables people to create communities about any subject or affinity group, and to communicate asynchronously (via email, sms, etc) and real-time (via conference calls). We’re already up and running in some 40 countries, with both PSTN and VoIP dial in. Neat stuff, and this kind of international reach have been impossible even a couple years ago. We’re currently peering with Gizmo and SIP Broker, and unofficially, we hear that people can reach us via Google Talk.

Parallels renamed their virtualization software for Intel-based Macs (formerly Parallels Workstation) and went from a beta-release to a release candidate:

Parallels Desktop for Mac RC

This 30-day project explores the refactoring of a legacy system. The Everything Engine is an aging softwareproject that powers Perl Monks, Everything 2, and a few other websites.It suffers from poor design and maintainiability. Learn what it’s like to lookover the shoulder of an experienced developer as he refactors, redesigns, andupdates the code.

The free Mac version of Google Sketchup is not quite ready yet, but in the meantime the Sketchup team announced availability of the Sketchup Google plug in for Mac OS X, which provides owners of a a Sketchup license with direct integration with Google Earth.

Started by Victor Hugo:

Hugo turned away from social/political issues in his next novel, Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), published in 1866.

Thoughts on Thursday’s JavaOne events…

Well, thanks to missing the announced schedule change, I missed the VB in Java session. I will have to go back and check that one out online. The JAX-B session was good. It is really nice to see JAX-B finally not suck. Going back to my previous post on XML in Java, JAX-B 2 is a great half step there.

Looks like NZ is finally on the Google map... Here is one of the first mashups......