i’m inclined to wait for further proof before declaring it official, but it appears that bill maher has a blog. if it’s not him, someone is doing a fairly good impression of his “voice”:

“Jurors in a Los Angeles police brutality trial were unable to reach a decision. A hung jury and yet no riot. Did you see the tape? The cop punched the guy and threw his head against the hood of the car. Black people shame on you! Ten years ago you’d be setting fire to a Korean grocery store right now. You’ve gotten soft. You’ve lost the fire in the belly. No more edge. It’s like watching The Who without John Entwistle. You no longer have it. Hang it up. Go ahead and be like the Chinese and Mexicans and go gently into the night. You broke my heart!”

evidence that it is an actual celebrity blog and not a well-designed parody can be found in its glaring lack of permalinks and – less decisively – the lack of visitor comments. [ via dangerousmeta ]

prompted in part by a fantastic post by cameron “blogdex” marlow on weblog churn rates, maciej ceglowski does some calculations on a subset of the blogcensus data and finds that 1 in 3 blogs are likely, “…abandoned, unused, or very much out of date…” and that around 8 weeks since the last post seems to be a good arbitrary point for determining whether or not a blog is “active”.

although peter disclaims any specific intent to persecute jakob nielsen in the Report Review: Nielsen/Norman Group’s Usability Return on Investment, it’s still fun to look for evidence of mudslinging:

“Unfortunately, the NN/g report does not seem to follow this advice. Although it does make a reasonable anecdotal case for investing in usability, the report methodology is so fundamentally flawed that any financial analyst worth her salt would immediately question its findings.”

kellan has graciously provided me with a headstart on something i’ve been meaning to look into for quiet some time – text summarization. why do i have the summary itch? i’ve been hankering to provide full-text and abridged version rss feeds, but i’m too lazy to handcraft a summary for each post. there’s a web-based front end for for one of the most promising prospects, classifier4j.

could i ever get the time and motivation to whip together an xml-rpc interface so i could call it from my ugly xhtml2rss script?

so i’m reading the arstechnica story on the new riaa chief getting a chuckle out of their proclamation that “evil has a new face”. from there i wander over to news.google, and find that they quiet literally feel that it does have a new face, and it looks suspicously like ozzy osbourne.

ibm developerWorks has an easy to swallow overview on how to install pebble on a soekris 4521. a more detailed version, using openbsd, can be found on the soekris router project. but it needs to go outside, you say? make it so.

the mozilla thunderbird 0.1 release is available for your downloading pleasure. don’t be afraid on the low version number as it’s based on the mozilla 1.5b trunk, so things seem to be pretty solid. after a few more days of testing, i might just make it my full-time mail client.