"...it is wrong to blame today's culture of fear on the collapse of the World Trade Centre. Long before 11 September, public panics were widespread - on everything from GM crops to mobile phones, from global warming to foot-and-mouth.... Perceptions of risk... are shaped by cultural assumptions about human vulnerability."

I blame the news media. Not Hollywood so much, but the Daily Disaster Report that is your local and national news programs. First you hear about the murders and car accidents, then the weather, then next up, because we need to fill time and international news isn't interesting enough for Americans, a puff piece on a local emotional story ("My landlord won't fix my bathtub, and me with twenty-seven kids...") or a puff piece on the next potential terrorist attack. ("Tonight on News 8: Could terrorists be using excessive quantities of CFCs, creating holes in the ozone layer, and KILLING YOUR CHILDREN? Could Al Qaeda operatives infiltrated your car seat's manufacturing plant and compromised your child's car seat, potentially KILLING YOUR CHILD? A leading psychic claims bin Laden's hate aura could be affecting the country's psychic balance, potentially causing a rise in school shootings which will CAUSE YOUR CHILDREN TO DIE A GRISLY, NATIONALLY TELEVISED DEATH! Could terrorists infect your pet cat or dog with infleunza, KILLING YOUR CHILDREN, AND YOUR LITTLE DOG TOO? These reports and more on News 8 at 8!").

The title article is causing a brouhaha about MS licensing practices. Given my reading of the license, I'm wondering if it really means what people are interpreting it to mean. Looking forward to the MS correction, which is likely to come sometime this week.;-)

You might want to see what VNC is. It's a very useful tool to know about. Also, there's rdesktop for various UNIX flavors that allow connection to RDP servers, including the one in XP Pro. In fact, I'm using it to post this message.

I've definately decided to go with the Jabber stuff I described earlier. A few more advantages:

Threading issues are simpler. If the users are responsible for re-establishing connections, there's a nasty time while the system is logging in, but the server will reject any other messages, like I said. If I take control of the re-establishment, it's easy to block these messages. There are also a few misc. places where I could construct a multi-threaded scenario where something bad happened; this reduces, and I think eliminates, those. (I need to double-check the elimination claim, but even if it's false, the consequences of being incorrect are not that critical.)

I just filed my taxes. It took me and my wife half-an-hour, included no redundent steps, and was not at all stressful. (Except at one point where we had to go look up the meaning of "homestead".) The return was zapped off to Michigan and the IRS automatically, and the refunds will be direct deposited to our bank account. I didn't even go to the store to buy the tax software! I did it online with Turbo Tax for the Web, and I even did it all for free because I qualified for the Quicken Tax Freedom Project version.

A frequent correspondent, a man, writes: "Do you really believe those myths about men and women being different?" [Scripting News]

No, I believe in the truths that men and women are different.

Ask your local psychologist whether men and women are different. One of my psychology professors gave that as a benchmark to use about whether you should trust someone's psychology theories: If they claim that men and women aren't fundamentally different, then you can safely ignore their theories! This from a clinical practicioner. (And a women, normally not relevent, relevent in this sort of debate only.)

'Six months to the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Florida flight school where two of the suicide hijackers trained received letters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicating that the men had been approved for student visas.'

And people wonder why I'm not willing to turn control of things like, say, what websites out children can and can't see, over to the government. Everybody's winging it...

The Jabber framework approaches a critical turning point in its evolution: How the API for connecting other Radio/Frontier stuff works. Actually, we've stepped a bit past it, with the release of .7, which has a first cut at such an API. And I've learned a few things.

Right now, the whole API centers around the idea that you may possibly have multiple Jabber connections. Every call takes a "connection reference". That's not really a big deal. The problem comes when the connection is terminated, which has been happening on my at least once a day. (Not just my Radio client, either, but the various IM clients I'm using for testing, too, so it's not my code.) The problem with the current API is that when you register to receive events, you register on a per-connection basis. If the connection drops, boom, no more event notification.

In case this is your primary way of getting info about the Jabber stuff I'm doing, I've released a .7 release of the Jabber verbs, which can be obtained by downloading or updating your current copy. Big news is the introduction of an event system, which makes responding to things easy, now. You can write a bot.

Almost forgot, it's Pi Day!

This is a sample post from Jabber to make sure that what I sent to radio-dev works correctly.

The post was sent via Jabber, but the link, this paragraph, and the addition to the Jabber category was later done by hand.