Lots to agree with in “Unrestricted free access works and must continue“:

The policy on release of unpublished data from large genome centres has generated considerable discussion and some confusion, as your Editorial “Sacrifice for the greater good?” makes plain (Nature 421, 875; 2003). In our view, data sets from large, centralized, expensive genome data-collection projects should be freely available to the entire scientific community, immediately and with no restrictions or conditions.

Some friends were in town over the weekend (see the diary for more about that), and they were lamenting the lack of love Google has for “JosieKat“, their daughter’s site.

I told ‘em I’d look into fixing that. grin

ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies meeting.

ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo is the first business-oriented forum to address the recent emergence of Weblogs into the business world and their rising importance as a medium of communication. This conference will bring together Webloggers who are pioneers, experts, and technologists. Together, they will present the latest developments, strategies, and success stories behind what is now becoming known as the Business Blog, or B-Blog for short.

“B-Blog”? gag

Cool stuff from Dan Bricklin:

There has been a lot of talk lately about how computers are too hard to learn to use. There is a longing for devices you can just pick up and use without training. Microsoft’s Kai-fu Lee was quoted in The New York Times as saying, when discussing the more “natural and intelligent” user interfaces he hopes to create, “My dream is that the computer of the future is going to be an assistant to the user.”

This type of thinking strikes me as strange. We don’t ask for our automobiles to be more natural and intelligent, nor do we call for the next generation of cars to be like chauffeurs. With cars, we talk about responsiveness, comfort, power, cargo size, and safety. Tools are effective and appropriate to the task. Learning to use them is part of being human.

G’awn, read the whole thing, it’s great.

(I need to install a lawn-mowing module in my general purpose house…)

I need to set up a sigmonster on my work account, and I’m thinking “How to Write Maintainable Code” and “How to Write Unmaintainable Code” would be good things to use as seeds.

Also in the “going to need this at work” bin: Perl Beginners’ Site.

A couple for the “GRRRRR” column:

First, in “ Breast-feeding in a time of war“, we find the story of a Canadian mother who was (allegedly) threatened with detention and legal charges after she decided to breast-feed her child on a Continential flight. There’s a bit of “she said, they said” going on with the actual events; I care less about that than what Continential offers up as their official policy:

Continental Airlines spokesman Rahsaan Johnson told me that the airline does not have a policy that prohibits breast-feeding on board.

Which also means, of course, that they don’t have a policy that says you’re allowed to, either — which in all practical terms means that it’s up to the discretion of the flight attendants. Which brings us to this:

But Wolfe says a flight attendant told her that if someone - anyone - complains, the mothers are supposed to change diapers in the bathroom and nurse at the back of the plane. This has its own unpleasant connotations, never mind the fact that passengers must stay in their seats during takeoff, landing and turbulence.

Something to consider the next time you’re selecting an airline.

And also in the “naked boobies must be smutty” category, I should note last week’s story about a Dallas area woman whose children were removed from the home after an over-zealous PhotoHut employee decided that some snapshots of a breastfeeding child were child pornography.

Digital cameras, moms and dads, digital cameras. And be damn careful who you show the “baby’s first bath time” vidoe to…

I was thinking that the next major electronics purchase around here would be an upgrade of the audio part of the “home entertainment” stack, but maybe I should instead breed a mediabeast.

(For future reference, I’ve seen a number of people say nice things about Freevo as the software layer in projects like these.)

Most inappropriate Mother’s Day gift ever.

One for the “oh, so very wrong” category: USB Floppy Disk Drive RAID