It was an interesting experience watching our team argue before the U.S. District Court of Appeals that the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T for helping the NSA spy on conversations without warrants should be dismissed because it impinges on state secrets. While the judges probed both sides, I read some signs from their grilling of the U.S. Government's lawyer that they really have some concern over the important issues. They appear to realize that we can't leave such programs completely without judicial oversight just because an NSA official declares them to be state secrets.

I get forms to fill out and sign in electronic form all the time now. Often they come as PDFs or word documents, every so often by fax, and more and more rarely on paper. My handwriting is terrible and of course I no longer have a working typewriter. But none of the various tools I have seen for the job have had a nice easy workflow.

As workers search for trapped miners in Utah, having drilled a 9" hole down to what is hoped to be their area, they plan to use things like sound and detecting CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere to find the miners.

Twenty years ago Tuesday, I created the newsgroup rec.humor.funny as a moderated place for posting the funniest jokes on the net, as chosen by the editor. In light of that anniversary, I have written up a bit of history of the creation of RHF. From there you can also find links to pieces I wrote earlier about the attempt to ban RHF and how RHF led to my creation of ClariNet.

A few weeks ago, my site got hacked. The attacker inserted an iframe pointing to a malware site into most of my html pages. That of course is bad, but the story doesn't end there. (I should of course have upgraded my OS from the ancient one my hosting company gave years ago, but they don't really support that, and feel an upgrade consists of rebuilding from scratch.)

I'm a big fan of making money by selling services but a disturbing trend is the requirement that customers sign a one or two (or even three) year contract in order to sign up for a service. Such contracts will have a fat termination fee if you want to end the contract early.

A friend asked for advice on selling real estate. I'm no expert, but I thought I would write up some of my thoughts in a blog post for everybody:

At this point it seems only people in San Francisco want to see Barry Bonds break Aaron's all time home-run record of 755. He has 753 right now. In San Francisco, the crowds get on their feet every time he gets on deck, and that was even before he got on the cusp of the record. Outside SF, fans boo him, and it's commonly believed that should he tie or break the record in Los Angeles or many other cities, he will get booed for doing it. In SF there is a willing suspension of disbelief.

Something light hearted. I purchased, some time ago, a small Li-Ion battery for external power for my laptop and other devices. These batteries are great, getting down near $100, weighing very little and, with 110 watt-hours, able to keep a laptop going all day at a conference or over most of a transoceanic flight.

This particular battery, made in China, contains one of the more amusing bad-english warnings on the label, though, particularly item #3.

I'm quite impressed with Google's mobile maps application for smartphones. It works nicely on the iPhone but is great on other phones too.

Among other things, it will display live traffic on your map. And I recently saw, when asking it for directions, that it told me that there would be "7 minutes of traffic delay" along my route. That's great.

Ever since the first science fiction about cyberspace (First seen in Clarke's 1956 "The City and the Stars" and more fully in 1976's "Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin") people have wanted to build online 3-D virtual worlds. Snow Crash gelled it even further for people.

For the fun of it, we joined a line at a local independent bookstore last Friday night to get a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here I will first review the series without reference to the final book, and then make some remarks about things that are missing from the series that could be viewed as very minor spoilers, because they refer to things that might have taken place in the final book, but did not -- but for which knowing they did not will not spoil the book in any meaningful way. However, if you want absolutely no knowledge of this sort, stop reading.

Well, this site is at a crawl now because the panorama I assembled of San Francisco in 1971 is on the digg.com front page. If you haven't seen it before it's on the San Francisco page, the panorama of SF from the top of the Bay Bridge in 1971.

In 1978, after finally saving up enough money, I got myself a Commodore PET computer. I became immersed in it, and soon was programming all sorts of things, and learning assembler to make things go really fast. I soon discovered the Toronto Pet User's Group, which grew over time to be perhaps the most prominent Commodore group in the world.

Earlier I wrote about the ability to find you from a DNA sample by noting it's a near match with one of your relatives. This is a concern because it means that if relatives of yours enter the DNA databases, voluntarily or otherwise, it effectively means you're in them too.

For various reasons, a wide variety of otherwise free wifi hotspots require you to go through a login screen. (This is also common of course with for-pay hotspots where you must enter an account or room number.)

We all hate waiting on hold, and we shouldn't have to. But companies don't do a lot to make it easier, do they?

Most people, I presume, when at their desks, put the hold music on speakerphone, and turn it low. The worst hold musics are ones where a human voice breaks in every 30 seconds or so to remind us that "all agents are busy" or tries to convince us to go to the web site or buy something else. These are the worst because we have to perk up and listen to the human voice to make sure it's not the agent finally getting to us.

This idea came to me via Al Chang. I'm shopping for a new smartphone, and I have been dismayed at how hard it is to get just what I want and not pay a huge fee for it. Right now I'm leaning towards the new HTC Mogul, in part because the Sprint SERO offer is just too good to pass up.

However, in the GSM world, one thing that's frustrating is that carriers only provide a limited number of phones, and in some cases, such as the Nokia E62, they actually rip useful features out of the phones before offering them. (The E61 has Wifi, the E62 removes it!) But the subsidy, which can be $200 to $300 is also too rich to pass up if you're signing up for new service. If they are going to force you into a 2 year contract -- which they do for anything, even just a change of plan -- you are foolish not to take this subsidy.

So here's Al's plan. Go out and buy the phone you want, unlocked (or locked to the carrier you plan to use) from whatever source you like, including cell dealers, Amazon, Dell or eBay.

Next go to your carrier's web site and find the most subsidized phone they sell which works with the plan you intend to use. Find the most subsidized phone by looking at the subsidy price, and comparing it to the typical "completed auction" price on eBay for a no-contract (locked or unlocked) phone. It is often the case, by the way, that there are eBay sellers who will sell you phones that cost $200 after subsidy in the carrier's store for $1 because they kick back to you the kickback they get from the carrier for selling you a fancy phone on a fancy plan. (I have not tried these sellers but they generally have top reputations and lots of happy comments from phone buyers so I presume it works. It does not, however, work with SERO.)

It's way late, but I finally put captions on my gallery of regular-aspect photos from Burning Man 2006.

For much of history, we've used removable media for backup. We've used tapes of various types, floppy disks, disk cartridges, and burnable optical disks. We take the removable media and keep a copy offsite if we're good, but otherwise they sit for a few decades until they can't be read, either because they degraded or we can't find a reader for the medium any more.